ABSTRACT
Werner Herzog has often said that his films have their origin in images; repeatedly — and with justification — he has asserted the supremacy of the visual over the verbal in his films (Cott, 1976, 54; O'Toole, 1979, 42; Bachmann, 1977, 7–8). The dominance of the image, Herzog claims, begins with the moment of the film's conception: one central image will generate a cluster of visual moments, until Herzog, like Hitchcock in this respect, is able to “see” the entire film before him. Herzog also acknowledges music as a source of inspiration in his filmmaking; Baudelaire's Correspondances between the musical and the visual hold true for Herzog as well. When he speaks of film as the “art of illiterates,” Herzog implies that the visual code, inspired as it may be by music or by an image, should predominate over the narrative code in cinema ( Kent, 1977 , 19 and 30). Herzog's assertion that film is the “art of illiterates” also has certain implications for the role of the movie audience; it affirms the necessity of “seeing” a film, an act which for Herzog is defined by its immediacy, its capacity to evoke an emotional or spiritual response, as opposed to “reading” a film, or responding in an analytic, and hence mediated, way. More importantly, in claiming “illiteracy” for himself as a filmmaker, Herzog denies the significance of reading and of writing for his art of the film, thus in effect denying the relevance of literary sources and models to his work.
