ABSTRACT
At first glance eclectic, obsessive and renegade, the documentaries of Werner Herzog do, finally and inevitably, fit into the elaborate intertex-tual fabric of his fiction films. Even as Herzog was gaining notoriety outside of Germany for feature films like Signs of Life, Even Dwarfs Started Small and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he was simultaneously submitting short films to major film festivals like Oberhausen. These documentaries are not considered “lesser” works by Herzog himself, and, in fact, they are crucial to understanding the creative trajectory of this most important of the filmmakers to have emerged from the so-called New German Cinema.
