What do you think?
Rate this book
Scenarios #1
Scenarios: Aguirre, the Wrath of God / Every Man for Himself and God Against All / Land of Silence and Darkness / Fitzcarraldo
The first in a series: Urtexts of the quintessential early films of Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog doesn’t write traditional screenplays; he writes fever dreams brimming with madness, greed, humor, and dark isolation that can shift dramatically during production—and have materialized into extraordinary masterpieces unlike anything in film today. Harnessing his vision and transcendent reality, these four pieces of long-form prose earmark a renowned filmmaker at the dawn of his career.
Werner Herzog doesn’t write traditional screenplays; he writes fever dreams brimming with madness, greed, humor, and dark isolation that can shift dramatically during production—and have materialized into extraordinary masterpieces unlike anything in film today. Harnessing his vision and transcendent reality, these four pieces of long-form prose earmark a renowned filmmaker at the dawn of his career.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
10 people are currently reading
584 people want to read
About the author
Werner Herzog
63 books899 followersWerner Herzog (born Werner Stipetić) is a German film director, screenwriter, actor, and opera director.
He is often associated with the German New Wave movement (also called New German Cinema), along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders and others. His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, or people with unique talents in obscure fields.
He is often associated with the German New Wave movement (also called New German Cinema), along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders and others. His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, or people with unique talents in obscure fields.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 27, 2018
Werner Herzog screenplays have the same relation to orthodox screenplays as Werner Herzog movies have to orthodox movie-making, which is to say, it's about as far as you can get and still be in the same genre.
Herzog is an acquired taste. It's a rare bright moment in these gloomy times that more and more people seem to be acquiring the taste. His voice has become so familiar that he can lend it (for a handsome sum, I hope) to a good-natured parody in a big budget Hollywood movie, and can be played for laughs by stand-up comics.
I have acquired the taste for Herzog. I am an extreme case. The Long-Suffering Wife (also a fan) and I own a special collector's edition of “Fitzcarraldo”, which came packaged in a biscuit tin with a beautiful photograph on the cover of the white-suited Klaus Kinski beaming happily in front of a steamship wedged half-way up a mountain. It's a prize possession.
I would pay good money to listen to an unabridged audio version of this book, read by the author. Until the happy day when such a product is made available, I had to content myself with reading this book silently to myself in his voice, which turned out to be an adequate substitute.
I repeat: not like the type of practical and successful screenplay sold, for example, on the streets of mid-town Manhattan to television writers looking for a fast crib. This is like the fevered outpourings of the Herzog mind, written as if time, space, and budget were not considerations, and as if you could somehow telegraph, directly brain-to-brain from character to moviegoer in real time, the nuance of madness that his characters are experiencing. Sometimes Herzog seems to suddenly remember that he's in the mundane real-life movie business and throws in a “the camera shows...” or “we see...”, but more often there are long narrations of what the characters are thinking as they are staring vacantly off into space, as they often do in Herzog movies. Maybe some film scholar can interpolate these interior monologues as subtitles during the scenes of prolonged space-staring-off as they actually appeared in his movies – I know I'd pay good money to see that.
Herzog's cinema is long and life is fleeting, so I confess that it's been several long, sad, empty decades since I've last seen, for example, “Aguirre, Wrath of God” or “Every Man for Himself And God against All”. It was good to be reminded of them. When, for example, I read, at the beginning of the screenplay for “Aguirre”, that the inexplicably German-speaking Spanish conquistadors and their captives were trudging knee-deep in the snow across a mountain pass, I said to myself, “Hmm, I don't remember any snow in Aguirre”. Whatever the other drawbacks of our times, such things can be dependably checked on YouTube. Sure enough, there are a few snow-dusted mountain at the beginning, but not the trudging nearly naked through mountain passes knee-deep in snow, as the original vision issued from Werner's febrile mind.
The third of the book's four parts, “Land of Silence and Darkness”, is not, strictly speaking, a Herzog screenplay but a transcript of the spoken dialogue, titles, and narration of a Herzog documentary about a deaf and blind person. It is very serious, not as much fun as the rest of the book, but still interesting. Although the titles and narration have the distinctive Herzog voice, the subject successfully resists fitting into the Herzog box, to her credit.
The last scenario, “Fitzcarraldo”, was just a great read and a very pleasant surprise. You might just start with it if you are the type who eats dessert first.
It made me reassess my opinion of the original. I doubt many Herzog neophytes will make it this far into the review, but in case you are one, here's what happened: The first try at making this film (seemingly closer in detail to this screenplay than the final product) in the Amazon was reportedly 40% completed when its star, Jason Robards, came down with dysentery and was forbidden to return by his doctor. Co-star Mick Jagger had to depart due to other commitments. Eventually long-time Herzog frenemy Klaus Kinski agreed to star, Jagger's part was eliminated, and the film was made.
Some of the scenes that Robards and Jagger made have survived, and I always felt that perhaps the Kinski-only version might be better, especially because Jagger always seems too project his larger-than-life Mick Jagger persona even when he is nominally playing someone else. But after reading the screenplay, I think I see what Herzog had in mind for the Jagger role and I understand why Herzog cast Jagger. Further, I understand what a potentially great movie never got made. But, as a consolation, you can read this treatment and make a great movie in your mind. In my movie, I usually ended up with Kinski starring with Jagger, but: your mind, your movie.
The screenplay is also just plain old gripping in an old-fashioned way and fun to read, especially if you can never get enough Herzog.
Final comment: Lest I be accused of treating Herzog with insufficient gravity, I want to note that Herzog himself has said that his movies are actually funnier than Eddie Murphy's.
I received an egalley copy of this book free of charge to review. Thanks to Netgalley and University of Minnesota Press for their generosity.
Herzog is an acquired taste. It's a rare bright moment in these gloomy times that more and more people seem to be acquiring the taste. His voice has become so familiar that he can lend it (for a handsome sum, I hope) to a good-natured parody in a big budget Hollywood movie, and can be played for laughs by stand-up comics.
I have acquired the taste for Herzog. I am an extreme case. The Long-Suffering Wife (also a fan) and I own a special collector's edition of “Fitzcarraldo”, which came packaged in a biscuit tin with a beautiful photograph on the cover of the white-suited Klaus Kinski beaming happily in front of a steamship wedged half-way up a mountain. It's a prize possession.
I would pay good money to listen to an unabridged audio version of this book, read by the author. Until the happy day when such a product is made available, I had to content myself with reading this book silently to myself in his voice, which turned out to be an adequate substitute.
I repeat: not like the type of practical and successful screenplay sold, for example, on the streets of mid-town Manhattan to television writers looking for a fast crib. This is like the fevered outpourings of the Herzog mind, written as if time, space, and budget were not considerations, and as if you could somehow telegraph, directly brain-to-brain from character to moviegoer in real time, the nuance of madness that his characters are experiencing. Sometimes Herzog seems to suddenly remember that he's in the mundane real-life movie business and throws in a “the camera shows...” or “we see...”, but more often there are long narrations of what the characters are thinking as they are staring vacantly off into space, as they often do in Herzog movies. Maybe some film scholar can interpolate these interior monologues as subtitles during the scenes of prolonged space-staring-off as they actually appeared in his movies – I know I'd pay good money to see that.
Herzog's cinema is long and life is fleeting, so I confess that it's been several long, sad, empty decades since I've last seen, for example, “Aguirre, Wrath of God” or “Every Man for Himself And God against All”. It was good to be reminded of them. When, for example, I read, at the beginning of the screenplay for “Aguirre”, that the inexplicably German-speaking Spanish conquistadors and their captives were trudging knee-deep in the snow across a mountain pass, I said to myself, “Hmm, I don't remember any snow in Aguirre”. Whatever the other drawbacks of our times, such things can be dependably checked on YouTube. Sure enough, there are a few snow-dusted mountain at the beginning, but not the trudging nearly naked through mountain passes knee-deep in snow, as the original vision issued from Werner's febrile mind.
The third of the book's four parts, “Land of Silence and Darkness”, is not, strictly speaking, a Herzog screenplay but a transcript of the spoken dialogue, titles, and narration of a Herzog documentary about a deaf and blind person. It is very serious, not as much fun as the rest of the book, but still interesting. Although the titles and narration have the distinctive Herzog voice, the subject successfully resists fitting into the Herzog box, to her credit.
The last scenario, “Fitzcarraldo”, was just a great read and a very pleasant surprise. You might just start with it if you are the type who eats dessert first.
It made me reassess my opinion of the original. I doubt many Herzog neophytes will make it this far into the review, but in case you are one, here's what happened: The first try at making this film (seemingly closer in detail to this screenplay than the final product) in the Amazon was reportedly 40% completed when its star, Jason Robards, came down with dysentery and was forbidden to return by his doctor. Co-star Mick Jagger had to depart due to other commitments. Eventually long-time Herzog frenemy Klaus Kinski agreed to star, Jagger's part was eliminated, and the film was made.
Some of the scenes that Robards and Jagger made have survived, and I always felt that perhaps the Kinski-only version might be better, especially because Jagger always seems too project his larger-than-life Mick Jagger persona even when he is nominally playing someone else. But after reading the screenplay, I think I see what Herzog had in mind for the Jagger role and I understand why Herzog cast Jagger. Further, I understand what a potentially great movie never got made. But, as a consolation, you can read this treatment and make a great movie in your mind. In my movie, I usually ended up with Kinski starring with Jagger, but: your mind, your movie.
The screenplay is also just plain old gripping in an old-fashioned way and fun to read, especially if you can never get enough Herzog.
Final comment: Lest I be accused of treating Herzog with insufficient gravity, I want to note that Herzog himself has said that his movies are actually funnier than Eddie Murphy's.
I received an egalley copy of this book free of charge to review. Thanks to Netgalley and University of Minnesota Press for their generosity.
May 18, 2018
This review originally published in Looking For a Good Book. Rated 4.0 of 5
If you don't know Werner Herzog's films you should correct that right away. You'll be in for a treat, but don't expect to see your average blockbuster type movie. Herzog is an artist and his films tend to be powerful stories of ordinary people attempting something extraordinary.
This book contains the texts for four of Herzog's films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Every Man for Himself and God Against All; Land of Silence and Darkness; Fitzcarraldo. In his introduction, written in 1977, Herzog writes, "The texts in this volume have remained completely unchanged, in the same shape they were before shooting started." But the student of film studies will note that these screenplays don't read anything like what you might expect when you're reading a screenplay by William Goldman or any modern screenplay.
These screenplays read like stories, and in a very confounded sort of way, they are quite visual and it's easy to see the film as you read through this. It's an interesting way to write a film script, but it clearly works for Herzog and it gives us two opportunities to enjoy his work - as films and as stories (or 'scenarios').
I faintly remember seeing Fitzcarraldo in the mid-to-late 1980's, but now, having enjoyed these works as stories, I really want to see all four films and see how they compare to these narratives. In his introduction Herzog notes that the films "followed a very different evolution."
It is a real treat that the University of Minnesota Press has published this collection. Herzog shows here that he is a creative dreamer and that his dreams take shape in various art forms. The films are most obvious, but these scenarios show that I wouldn't mind sitting down and reading Herzog's writing as he tells a story with words better than most.
Looking for a good book? Scenarios by Werner Herzog is a unique collection of four film stories by Herzog, written in a narrative, novella format, but every bit as wonderful as the films.
I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.
If you don't know Werner Herzog's films you should correct that right away. You'll be in for a treat, but don't expect to see your average blockbuster type movie. Herzog is an artist and his films tend to be powerful stories of ordinary people attempting something extraordinary.
This book contains the texts for four of Herzog's films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Every Man for Himself and God Against All; Land of Silence and Darkness; Fitzcarraldo. In his introduction, written in 1977, Herzog writes, "The texts in this volume have remained completely unchanged, in the same shape they were before shooting started." But the student of film studies will note that these screenplays don't read anything like what you might expect when you're reading a screenplay by William Goldman or any modern screenplay.
These screenplays read like stories, and in a very confounded sort of way, they are quite visual and it's easy to see the film as you read through this. It's an interesting way to write a film script, but it clearly works for Herzog and it gives us two opportunities to enjoy his work - as films and as stories (or 'scenarios').
I faintly remember seeing Fitzcarraldo in the mid-to-late 1980's, but now, having enjoyed these works as stories, I really want to see all four films and see how they compare to these narratives. In his introduction Herzog notes that the films "followed a very different evolution."
It is a real treat that the University of Minnesota Press has published this collection. Herzog shows here that he is a creative dreamer and that his dreams take shape in various art forms. The films are most obvious, but these scenarios show that I wouldn't mind sitting down and reading Herzog's writing as he tells a story with words better than most.
Looking for a good book? Scenarios by Werner Herzog is a unique collection of four film stories by Herzog, written in a narrative, novella format, but every bit as wonderful as the films.
I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.
March 22, 2021
Herzog’s films feel much like adaptations of their own scripts. The prose of these scenarios – I cannot rightly say screenplays – is so ornate and specific that any attempt to make them cinematic demands compromise. They are very almost pieces of companion literature. If it wasn’t for the (very infrequent) indication of camera location and audience presence, these would stand alone perfectly well as short stories. ‘Fitzcarraldo’, with perhaps two or three exceptions, features absolutely no reference to the art of cinema. It is, in itself, complete. And Herzog possess an excellent written style: in written form more than cinematic, his scenarios resemble Kafka (the side of Kafka least discussed; not ‘Kafkaesque’ as the term is understood), drifting always between questions of perception and the strangeness of distant realms. The differences between the films and the scenarios tend to be practical before artistic. Aguirre’s middle-act differs quite significantly from its written equivalent due to acts of God – the rafts required for the story were (as becomes narrative in the film version) swept away by a nighttime flood. The film up to this point – including the astounding and utterly beguiling opening shots – is very much in accordance to Herzog’s writing. The latter half generally tracks according to the scenario (including the scene in which a chopped-off head speaks – an indulgence too far), though one especially good scene is transplanted in an inferior form. In the scenario, Aguirre’s raft passes another, one from an earlier and presumed-lost expedition. But on closer inspection, this other raft is peopled by skeletons, all of whom beheaded. A ghostly, uncanny incident. Not unlike passing of the Jeroboam in Moby Dick. In the film this scene is – presumably for reasons of ease – moved to an onshore village, and sapped a little of its strength. Kaspar Hauser is likely the closest to its final form in nature: Herzog’s film is a little more expressive, and features an additional scene with a haughty logician, but only diverges significantly in the inclusion of a bureaucratic subplot. A government man tasked with writing up a report on the Kaspar Hauser incident: him concluding the report marks the film’s new end (improving on the written ending). Fitzcarrado differs most significantly: where the text surrounds a mostly-level Fitz with two insane followers, the film instead combines the three men together. The result is an intriguingly multifaceted character, more liable to madness, and a streamlined narrative. Given the greatly expanded sequence in which the boat is lugged over the mountain, this truncation is welcome. Another noted change is the music toward the film’s end, switching Wagner for Bellini. An enormous tonal shift (I do wonder the reasoning), which improves the film magnificently. Though it is praise enough, and an unusual praise at that, to suggest these stories remark themselves well enough without the presence of their filmed descendants.
November 6, 2023
Herzog doesn’t write traditional scripts. Herzog writes scenarios. It’s as if he sees the whole thing playing out before him prior to filming. There were four, but I only read the ones I had seen as movies. ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ was uncannily so close to the movie that it was hard to believe it could have been written before filming, but ‘The Enigma of Kasper Hauser’ ( Every man…), and Fitzcarraldo. had major differences if I remember the films rightly . Surprisingly the experience of reading the scenarios was significantly different from watching the films. It was as if I was being made aware of what the director was focusing on rather than what I was noticing. Merits a read even if you have never seen the films.
March 21, 2020
Not my cup of tea. Boring.
February 8, 2012
Herzog takes a very different approach to script writing, a complete opposite to frame by frame planning of Alfred Hitchcock. Both Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Everyman for Himself and God against All are included in this book, as well as one of his early documentaries, Land of Silence and Darkness. I would describe these as prose scripts, prose poetry to be filmed. That is they are made to evoke the setting, atmosphere, history when necessary and emotion of a given scene as opposed to telling us exactly what is happening, what angle and what is said. Imagine a cook book that gives you the ingredients, but not amounts,and the place you will be having dinner, you will use these and eat them here. Herzog's style gives much more room for the actors and cinematographer to work with the material as opposed to working from the script. Working on one of these films must have been an experience of a life time. I plan on re-watching both soon. On a side note the utter despair and doom of the Conquistadors experience in the Amazon jungle can be related to the American Empires adventures over sea's.
A small sampling from Land of Silence and Darkness, a documentary about the life of deaf and blind Fini Straubinger, is also included. This section includes transcribed dialog from the final film. A film of breathtaking humanity, uncomfortable and beautiful. Worth another viewing.
Fini Straubinger "One thinks of deafness, that it is complete stillness. But oh no that is wrong. It is never-ending noise in the head, ranging down to the lowest ringing, perhaps the way sand sounds,trickling, then knocking, but worse of all it pounds in the head so that one never knows where to turn one's head. That is great torture for us."
Fini lost her sight and hearing as a teenager after a fall down the stairs.
Werner dedicates the book to her.
A small sampling from Land of Silence and Darkness, a documentary about the life of deaf and blind Fini Straubinger, is also included. This section includes transcribed dialog from the final film. A film of breathtaking humanity, uncomfortable and beautiful. Worth another viewing.
Fini Straubinger "One thinks of deafness, that it is complete stillness. But oh no that is wrong. It is never-ending noise in the head, ranging down to the lowest ringing, perhaps the way sand sounds,trickling, then knocking, but worse of all it pounds in the head so that one never knows where to turn one's head. That is great torture for us."
Fini lost her sight and hearing as a teenager after a fall down the stairs.
Werner dedicates the book to her.
October 6, 2021
Werner Herzog's Scenarios is an intense collection of narratives with Aguirre being particularly disturbing. Mr. Herzog never fails to deliver something that is heart-wrenching, disturbing, informative and thought-provoking. I enjoyed each scenario especially the Land of Silence and Darkness and the female subject Fini. Sometimes I thought Werner was pushing the envelope a bit and heading straight into madness with the lengthy prose, but in the end reading through to each scenario's end was very rewarding as a reader.
December 3, 2007
His screeplays are really short, just a few pages each and sometimes just a paragraph detailing a goal. He leaves a lot of room open for things to happen during the shoot; still interesting to read these while knowing what resulted. This was in Kristens milkcrate shelf, had a sonogram picture on the front.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews