SMART NEWS

Werner Herzog Doesn’t Want You to Text And Drive

Texting and driving kills more teenagers than driving and driving

August 9, 2013

Werner Herzog is a powerhouse of film. In a career that has extended past half a century, says the Guardian, Herzog has produced films and documentaries about a vast array of subjects: “ecstatically devout pilgrims; prehistoric cave paintings; fast-talking American auctioneers; ski-jumpers; TV evangelists; Siberian trappers; the blind, deaf and dumb.”

He has made more than 60 films, both fiction and documentaries, and, in total, they look like the life’s work of several directors, yet all maintain the spirit of one man’s view of this disparate planet. With their eye for the strangeness in the world, the unaccountable in human beings, these films can haunt you.

Now, Herzog has set his sights on a much-overlooked plight, one that seems simple or even silly on the surface, but becomes haunting and real through the eye of his lens. In his documentary, From One Second to the Next, Herzog takes on texting and driving. The new film, says the Atlantic, is “part of a campaign by AT&T to raise awareness” about texting and driving, a problem that now kills more teenagers than drinking and driving. The movie, says the Verge, is being sent to tens of thousands of high schools.

Though much different from some of his earlier work, such as On Death Row, a look a prisoners awaiting their deaths, Herzog’s style carries through. The Guardian: “In the most disturbing Herzog films, human life is a beleaguered property, a flicker of consciousness sustained within an equally flimsy civilisation. The experience of being a child of the ruins in Germany after the second world war perhaps injected him with this sense, living as he did in the moral and physical collapse of a culture.”