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Werner Herzog names the greatest performer in cinema history: “There was a certain beauty”
Scott Campbell
Tue 3 December 2024 16:45, UK
Based on his reputation for being one of the most eccentric figures in cinema, which he’s earned by doing absolutely nothing other than being himself at all times, it’s not ridiculous to think that Werner Herzog would think outside of the box when it came to naming the greatest performer in cinema history.
After all, this is a prolific filmmaker equally adept and comfortable at narrative drama as they are a documentarian who used the money they made from appearing in Star Wars to fund a Japanese-language drama on a shoestring budget and has a habit of making even the most mundane of musings sound like poetry with his unmistakable intonations.
Herzog also has a bizarre obsession with chickens, ate a shoe on camera after losing a bet, got shot during a live television interview, and was embroiled in the industry’s ultimate love/hate relationship with Klaus Kinski, who was either his best friend or worst enemy depending entirely on what day of the week it was and whether or not they’d recently threatened – or attempted, as tended to happen – to kill each other.
His favourite Marlon Brando performance wasn’t in On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, or The Godfather but Viva Zapata! he singled out character actor extraordinaire Michael Shannon as the finest talent of his generation and has a deep-seated affinity for Winnie the Pooh that transcends the barriers of pop culture, so it could realistically be anyone that Herzog could point to as the benchmark that every on-camera performer before or after has failed to reach.
On the other hand, it’s fitting that his candidate came to prominence a century ago when cinema was a much simpler and less technically driven place. Speaking to The New Yorker, Herzog lamented that “very young people not only watch a movie on their cellular phone” but “they also speed it up to twice the speed if it’s too slow for them.” Admittedly, that should be made illegal, but the filmmaker’s favoured star already looked like they moved much faster than the average person.
“There was a certain beauty,” he reminisced of the days when film was captured and conveyed at 18 frames per second, with the nostalgia almost palpable. “My favourite character in movies has been, and still is, Buster Keaton.” Comedy, or at least intentional comedy, has never been Herzog’s strongest suit, but nobody outside of Charlie Chaplin has ever come remotely close to perfecting the balance between slapstick, physicality, and humour better than the inimitable Keaton.
Even when he was putting his life on the line to perform increasingly dangerous stunts like a proto-Tom Cruise, Keaton would never break character. They called him ‘The Great Stone Face’ for a reason, and as a notoriously stoic and deadpan fellow himself, maybe that’s another reason why Herzog has never wavered from the groundbreaking actor being his definitive ideal of what a movie star should be.
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BUSTER KEATONWERNER HERZOG
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