text: Werner Herzog's five greatest films - Telegraph
  Werner Herzog's five greatest films
  The prolific director, documentary-maker, and cinematic genius of the German New Wave has been making eccentric and original cinema for more than 40 years.
  Even Dwarfs Started Small, 1970
  6:44PM GMT 25 Mar 2011
  Aguirre, Wrath of God, 1972 | Watch the trailer on YouTube
  The filming of this movie was almost as treacherous and ill-advised as the adventure it sets out to portray. An insane Aguirre leads a Spanish expedition down the Amazon River in search of El Dorado. In Herzog's repertoire of films Aguirre is unmatched in its portrayal of his dominant theme: man pitted against the hostile natural world.
  Fitzkarraldo, 1982 | Watch the trailer on YouTube
  Undeterred by round one, Herzog returned to the Amazon a decade later, again with a film crew and his notoriously unhinged lead actor Klaus Kinski in tow, but this time with an absurd script about a man who is determined to build an opera house in the middle of the jungle. The film is long; 158 minutes of eccentric meanderings held together by Herzog's stunning documentary-like sequences, most memorably the scene in which the 30 tonne ship is dragged over a steep hill from one river to another, filmed entirely without the aid of visual effects.
  The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, 1974 | Watch a clip on YouTube
  Herzog: 'A perfect time capsule'
  This early satirical period film is based on the true story of a boy who has spent his life in a dungeon before turning up in Nuremberg in 1828. A profoundly affecting portrait of a man who, it gradually dawns on you, becomes a mirror for all the evils of civilised society.
  Grizzly Man, 2005 | Watch the trailer on YouTube
  An extraordinary example of found footage, this documentary tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, an endearing and adventurous eco-activist who spent 13 summers in the wilds of Alaska with only his girlfriend and his video camera.
  Even Dwarfs Started Small, 1970 | Watch a clip on YouTube
  This, his second ever feature film, would be a shoe in for the top spot on the bizarre-ometer of Herzog films. There is little or no plot. Herzog creates an improbable, yet somehow convincing surreal landscape: an institution that is gradually overrun with increasingly uncivilised behaviour of its cast of dwarfs.