Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.

The band took its name from the Popol Vuh a manuscript of Quiché Maya kingdom after watching Herzog's Fata Morgana in which Lotte Eisner reads parts of the Popol Vuh. He won Bavarian Film Award in 1988 for Cobra Verde and International Documentary Association Award for Little Dieter Needs to Fly in 1998. His treatment of subjects has been characterized as Wagnerian in its scope as Fitzcarraldo and his later film Invincible (2001) are directly inspired by opera or operatic themes.

French filmmaker François Truffaut once called Herzog "the most important film director alive" and American film critic Roger Ebert stated that Herzog "has never created a single film that is compromised shameful made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular. ".