It’s a truism that the right wing owns talk radio and TV, and the left wing has documentaries — those film essays designed to convince liberal audiences of what they already believe. Michael Moore is a doctrinaire Leftie, and his movies hammer home familiar points: Iraq war, bad; U.S. medical care, dangerous to your health; capitalism, the curse of the working class. But Moore’s propagandistic brio and his central place in his films’ limelight assure that many people who agree with his policies condemn his methods. That said, Fahrenheit 9/11, his screed against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is rare among documentaries for being crucial to a U.S. Presidential election. Not that it earned the Democrats any close states, or many votes. On the contrary: the film’s popularity — $119 million at the domestic box office, or more than three times the take of any documentaries not starring penguins — indicated that antiwar sentiment was broad and strong enough that year that John Kerry might have won if he’d articulated his opposition to the occupation as forcefully as Moore did. Then again, Kerry was never the passionate orator, showman-entertainer or, for that matter, savvy politician that Moore is.
Werner Herzog would make a great subject for a Werner Herzog documentary; the director is an adventurer of outsize ambitions and eccentric appetites. For four decades, he has examined and embodied one grand theme: a charismatic man is seized by some magnificent idea, and his pursuit often drives himself toward madness and those around him near despair. The protagonists of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo are two such obsessives. In this decade Herzog found two other suitable subjects, who inspired two extraordinary films. One is Grizzly Man‘s Timothy Treadwell, who lived among wild bears in southern Alaska, recording their strange behavior, and his. The other is The White Diamond‘s Graham Dorrington, a London University aeronautical engineer who has built an airship he wants to pilot over the rainforest canopy in Guyana. “We can realize our dreams!” he exclaims. “Let’s go fly!” When Dorrington finally gets up in the air, the feeling is not only contagious, it is sacramental. Like James Cameron’s Avatar, Herzog’s hallucinatory docs prove that the most thrilling adventures are those that illuminate the beauty and the peril in man’s quest both to tame nature and become one with it.
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
