Werner Herzog’s Burgeoning Voice in The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner

Abstract At forty-three minutes long, The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974) narrowly fulfills the forty-minute requirement of feature length. This duration places the film as Werner Herzog’s third feature-length documentary out of the current total of twenty-eight. The film was initially aired on television in West Germany as part of an hour-long episodic sports series. It follows Walter Steiner, the world champion ski jumper, as he practices for and then participates in a competition in Yugoslavia. Visually, the film unfolds on the steep, snowy slopes. The narrative, however, is created from three voices: Steiner himself, Herzog’s voice-over, and finally, at the mandate of the West German Television Station, Herzog as an on-camera reporter (Cronin 117). In the film, he waits at the slope of the mountain to see how Steiner’s jump unfolds, but the Herzog in the studio already knows the result. The shift of forcing an additional voice has pushed the comparably omniscient voice-over further into the subjective mode so there can be a differentiation between the two different voices.