Werner Herzog's Internet Visionaries

Werner Herzog's films have a common theme: they're about visionaries and dreamers. Sometimes his dreamers accomplish the impossible: he's made two films, for example--"Little Dieter Needs to Fly" and "Rescue Dawn"--about the American pilot Dieter Dengler, who escaped from a Laotian P.O.W. camp and, for twenty-three days, hiked barefoot through the jungle until he reached freedom. But Herzog is also fascinated by delusional dreamers. At the end of his 1972 film "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," the conquistador Aguirre stands on a raft in the Amazon. He's been searching, fruitlessly, for El Dorado; now all his men are dead, and he's speaking only to their corpses and some monkeys.