Looking back on nearly 40 years of fevered globetrotting in a quest to document the curiosities of mankind, Werner Herzog exhibits no misgivings when considering the recent spate of mainstream documentaries. “I don’t like them,” he says.

Despite the morbid qualities of his finest cinematic accomplishments, the 64-year-old contributor to the late 1970s German New Wave of filmmaking isn’t exclusively pessimistic. “There are exceptions, of course,” he adds. “Michael Moore is very entertaining.” It’s an impressively humble aside: Herzog was scrambling through the Sahara Desert filming mirages for a hallucinogenic record of heat called Fata Morgana decades before Fahrenheit 9/11.

Herzog’s fictional storytelling, which ranges in subject matter from rebellious little people (Even Dwarfs Started Small) to Amazonian operas (Fitzcarraldo), tends to dominate mainstream perceptions of his work. But his prolific nonfiction excursions illustrate the potential of a restless imagination. A self-professed slave to inspiration, Herzog has dragged cameras to oilfields in Kuwait (Lessons of Darkness) and auctioneer competitions in the Midwest (How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?). And his antagonism towards contemporary documentaries makes sense; the director’s calculated filtration of reality carries unhindered lyricism that makes the chic political diatribes that often fill theaters look like infantile tantrums.

“Documentaries today are dated,” Herzog explains. “I compare it to a medieval knight who would go to battle for centuries, and all of a sudden gets confronted with cannons and firearms. We have to ask questions about reality in a different way. We have to answer. I’ve been one of those who has come up with answers.”

A stunning encapsulation of that response begins May 18 at Film Forum, when a nearly comprehensive retrospective of Herzog’s documentaries unfurls over the course of three weeks. Arranged to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Magnum Photos, the program contains an enormous combination of Herzog’s lengthy and short films alike, culled from every stage of his career. Many of the titles haven’t been screened in years, and several are only available through Herzog’s website (wernerherzog.com) for a hefty price. “The beautiful thing is that after some initial investment, I did make some money out of it,” Herzog admits while discussing the box set. But he believes the retrospective provides an ideal setting for the selections. “I have always preferred to have the documentaries—which are very close to feature films—in theaters,” he says. “That’s why I enjoy events like this one at Film Forum where you have the films on a screen.”

Herzog’s insistence on marginalizing the distinction between documentary and fictional storytelling dictates his technique. Rather than bowing to the limitations of sporadic events, Herzog manipulates the elements at his disposal, crafting mystery and awe with a magician’s touch. Breaking the standard round up of talking heads that’s grown into a documentary staple, Herzog frequently coaches his subjects into becoming intimate with his camera. Revealing the insular world of Russian superstition in Bells From the Deep (1993), Herzog captures the recollection of a wondrous old woman, standing on a desolate snowy plane, who claims to hear the distant chimes of a mythical buried city. Behind her, other locals squirm on their stomachs like trapped fish, scanning a frozen lake for similarly ethereal auditory encounters.

Herzog’s obsession with otherworldly enigmas doesn’t negate his interrogative approach. He considers the powerful indictment of oil waste, Lessons of Darkness (1992), to be science fiction, since the sweeping aerial shots of desolate Middle Eastern oil fields that populate the film hardly resemble anything on Earth. Yet Herzog studies all his subjects through a fantastical lens, elevating them to poetic scrutiny. He uses keenly observed visual comparisons to inspect the lifestyle of deaf-blind individuals in Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), and blends invented anecdotes and ghostly encounters with sensational musical performances to absorb the myth surrounding famed composer Carlo Gesualdo in Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices (1995). The series concludes on June 7 with Herzog’s recent combination of staged interviews and breathtaking narrative, Grizzly Man (2005), the story of ill-fated adventurer Timothy Treadwell, whose affinity for bears eventually led to his being devoured by one—but not before leaving behind revealing video diaries that form the backbone of the film.

Herzog’s employment of scripted sequences and other devices around authentic events result from his conviction about the nature of the form. For years, he has referred to his panache as “ecstatic truth,” which he posits as an appealing alternative to the cinema verité offerings of the 1960s. Complaining about the school of filmmaking led by the Maysles Brothers and their contemporaries, Herzog says, “They are too fact-oriented. Facts do not convey truth. That’s a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.”

The exactness of his philosophy doesn’t prevent him from enjoying other documentarians’ achievements. “Werner’s Picks” run concurrently with the retrospective, featuring work by other directors that Herzog selected upon request. Although titles like Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven and Darwin’s Nightmare directed by Hubert Sauper haven’t been plucked from obscurity, Herzog has also chosen some rare treasures, including acclaimed ethnographer Jean Rouch’s critique of French colonialism, Les Maitres Fous. Rouch’s appeal never made it far beyond academia, so it’s often forgotten that his semi-fictional 1958 film Moi, un Noir inspired the career of famed cinematic experimenter Jean Luc-Godard. Herzog ruffles at that trivia tidbit. “Let’s not discuss Godard,” he says. “Godard is counterfeit money. Rouch is rock solid.”

Dictated by staunch opinions and unpredictable whimsy, Herzog’s unique taste in media is uncanny for its specificity. He boasts of a longstanding affinity for “The Anna Nicole Show” and its late star. “Years ago, when everybody dismissed it as vulgar and cheap, I kept saying, ‘Watch it closely. This is big. This is important,’” he says. “It depicted something in our civilization that is very important. Now that she has died, all of a sudden it dawns on everyone how important this phenomenon has been. I wish I could’ve made a film with Anna Nicole Smith.”

Despite his familiarity with mainstream television programming, Herzog is not a fan of the tube, where many of his documentaries were first broadcast. “I have such reservations about television, which interrupts stories with commercial breaks,” he says. “Such a great achievement of communal life is the ability to tell stories. We have created it since Neanderthal times, and all of a sudden we are fragmenting it, fracturing it and destroying it for the sake of commerciality of product.”

Ironically, the retrospective itself carries a minor commercial aspect of its own—but, to be fair, it’s certainly a soft sell. On May 18, when Herzog attends the 7 p.m. screening of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, his marvelous reconstruction of German immigrant Dieter Dentler’s experiences in a Vietnamese prison camp, MGM will provide an excerpt from Rescue Dawn, Herzog’s upcoming feature, which stars Christian Bale as Dentler in a standard narrative version of the story.

“The feature film was always the film that I wanted to do,” Herzog says. “But since it took quite some time to get the finances, we did a documentary. The documentary is rather the remake of the feature film.” He’ll take questions, but don’t expect Herzog to sit through his retroactive remake. “I don’t go back into my own films,” he says. “When my films are playing, I’m going to go have a steak.”