Werner Herzog should be thought of as a kind of seer, perhaps even something of a mystic. Only then does the nonsense begin to make sense in his films. Those films are a peculiar combination of an impulse both to comprehend all of life and at the same time to respect its incomprehensibility. The result is films that are like parables. The only way Herzog can embrace life fully enough is to deal with it in a symbolic and anagogical way instead of a literal one. Rather than the explanation of a particular situation, his films are revelations of the general. The colony of dwarfs in Even Dwarfs Started Small or the African desert in Fata Morgana are microcosms of all creation. They suggest everything while specifying little. In almost all of Herzog's films to date, in fact, the characters behave, like figures of myth, by the laws...