This is Werner Herzog’s 25th film, made in 1986. From the 9 comments on YouTube, it’s clear that this film is grossly overlooked and is essential viewing for every Herzog enthusiast.

This film contains the basis for the philosophical throughlines of his work and life:

• On walking/nomadism: He says that he used to say “I make films on foot” because of how much he has spent much of his life on foot. This film contains his philosophies on foot, echoed later in Pilgrimage, Wheel of Time, the Dark Side of the Mountain, and Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin.

• On Germanic themes: Watching Herzog’s films these past few months has inspired me to try to learn some German history. Woyzeck, for instance, is a work reproduced throughout Germany but doesn’t often find an international audience. Here in Selfportrait, he speaks to Lotte Eisner and calls his generation fatherless, due to the Barbarism of the third reich. There is no legitimacy to German culture anymore, and Eisner imbued the new contemporary generation with legitimacy.

• On ski-jumping, his childhood dream.

• On building a kingdom out of ruins, as his childhood was marked by ruins. As a two-week year old baby, his home was destroyed by a bomb. In his childhood, gangs of children established their own little castles and fiefdoms in the bombed out towns, and they played with machineguns found in the forest.

• On thriving through difficulty and near-defeats.

Free on YouTube: