El gran éxtasis del escultor de madera Steiner

This starts out looking like a more or less standard TV documentary about a ski-jumper. Over time, however, it somehow gets stranger and stranger, until the ending, that somehow, incomprehensibly, left me totally out of breath.

The film works on so many levels: It's a fascinating portrayal of the celebrated ski-jumper Steiner, but it's also an amazing look at the plain aesthetics of ski-jumping, with extreme slow-motion pictures showing the jumpers' fears and ecstasy at a very profound level. In addition, there is also something in this film that's simply very hard or impossible to define, something about man itself, something about longing and - perhaps the most advanced of human emotions - pity.

How much of this portrayal that actually reflects Steiner's personality, and how much of it that reflects Herzog's, is hard to tell. But that's the only catch. Those looking for Herzog classics should not think that this movie can be missed because it's a 45-minute TV documentary. Apart from pictures of some nasty ski-jumping falls, it's not really disturbing to the extent that put me slightly off when watching for example Aguirre and Even Dwarfs Started Small - so it could from my point of view overall be the best of the many Herzog movies I've seen so far.