Like Gustav Mahler, Werner Herzog emerged as an almost fully-formed artist early on, perhaps to his detriment. Just as Mahler’s First Symphony presages the orchestral colors, invocations of nature, and contorted folks songs varied and developed in later symphonies, so do Herzog’s earliest films, especially Fata Morgana (1971), augur the surreal landscapes and deceptive confrontations between man and nature that mark his auteurism. I’d stress the “deceptiveness” of these confrontations not merely because Herzog’s relationship with romanticism is ambiguous, but because we know the man-nature binary, whether applied literarily or bio-evolutionarily, is empirically false. Though conditioned and corrupted, man stills embodies nature in his pulse and perceptions, in his arteries and neurons, and whether Herzog’s heroes are hubristic (as represented by Klaus Kinski) or innocent (as represented by Bruno S.), they all succumb to unsparing entropies at once naturally predestined and socially derived.