Though director Werner Herzog is best known for his five films starring Klaus Kinski (contained in Box Set #1), his other films, straddling documentary and fiction features, are equally impressive. This box set provides a sampling of the director's work without Kinski, a selection of representative films as one starting point for a trip into his large body of work.

The set's weirdest film, in a close contest, is undoubtedly "Even Dwarves Started Small," boasting an all-midget cast and skirting with offensiveness and exploitation even as it achieves a strange kind of grace. The casting may seem like a stunt, but it's not without purpose: the film is a parable about the breakdown of social order in a world which does not seem to be designed for the people who inhabit it. With its loose narrative about psych-ward inmates overthrowing the hospital staff, the film is horrifying, hilarious, ridiculous, and weirdly affecting all at once.

All these adjectives can be equally applied to "Stroszek," which takes a more realist approach to similar themes. The title character, a hopeless loser, seeks to improve his life by heading to America along with his friends, a prostitute and an old man. But the American dream turns out to be a sham, and these sad characters deal with their many disappointments in quietly absurd ways. The shot of a dancing chicken, which Herzog inserts as a non-sequitur, is emblematic of the film's skewed approach to tragedy.

Herzog's narrative sense is also tweaked in "Heart of Glass," in which Herzog asked all the actors to perform while under hypnosis, suggesting the numbed responses of the townspeople in a remote village as they give in to a manipulative outsider. The film's languid, hazy rhythms and the subtle beauty of its images create a visual and narrative counterpart to this perfomative hypnosis.

Of the fiction features in this box, only "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" is more straightforward in its narrative, recounting the story of a strange young man who was raised in complete isolation from society. The title character simply wanders into a town one day, with no language, no knowledge of society, and only vague memories of a past spent chained up in a room from birth. Herzog tells this story with simplicity and a complete lack of gimmicks or pretension, but it's clear that the film's themes of outsiders and civilization resonate with the director's usual concerns.

The box set is rounded out by a pair of very poetic documentaries, "Fata Morgana" and "Lessons Of Darkness." The former film is only debatably a documentary at all, since it weaves its footage of deserts and the optical illusions created by the sun (mirages of water) into a loose sci-fi story about aliens discovering a strange world. Herzog has always been interested in the weirdness of our world, and to this end he contrasts his surreally beautiful images with the equally weird people he encounters there, like a lizard handler and a bizarre lounge band playing to no audience. "Lessons of Darkness" crafts a similar sci-fi story, casting the Earth as an alien world, this time using images captured in the immediate aftermath of the first Persian Gulf War. These are some of the most stunning and tragically beautiful pictures Herzog has captured, as he gets intimately close to towering geysers of burning oil and wanders among black lakes of oil and muck, between giant bomb craters. This apocalyptic landscape becomes for Herzog the perfect represntation of his signature themes: the end of the world and humanity's uncertain place in the world it inhabits.