Werner Herzog at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

This immersive and multi-layered new work by filmmaker Werner Herzog was created for the 2012 Whitney Biennal and is his first video art installation. As with Mr. Herzog’s other work, this has a strong musical component —as he himself has said, music serves to “pull in” the movement in front of the camera. Here, the music is by his longtime collaborator, the cellist and composer Ernst Reiseger, whose compositions create a dissonant, melancholy, yet serene mood. The installation combines this music with selected landscape etchings by 16th-century Dutch printer and artist Hercules Segers, as well as video clips of Mr. Reiseger and organist Harmen Fraanje. In combining these elements, Mr. Herzog has created a moving, layered work whose pieces alternately complement and collide in a musical fashion, and diminish the distance between the Renaissance past and the present.

Werner Herzog: Hearsay of the Soul, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, through 19 January 2014.

All images courtesy of Rebecca Vera-Martinez, The J. Paul Getty Museum.