It’s worth remembering that director Werner Herzog was in town a few months ago as a guest of the New York Public Library for a public conversation not so subtly dubbed: “Was the 20th Century a Mistake?” (If you don’t already know how Herzog would answer this question, it might be a good idea to avoid Film Form for the next few weeks.)

It’s a conversation that informs the way Mr. Herzog went about counter-programming his own film series at Film Forum, which begins today. Between selected Herzog documentaries both faux and real, Film Forum has asked the director to choose documentaries by other filmmakers that he deems worthwhile. And given that recent library lecture, in which he discussed the deterioration of the human species, some of the titles he has chosen, which will begin their run on Monday, are not very surprising.

A week from Monday, Mr. Herzog has paired perhaps the last great documentary to reach the city, Hubert Sauper’s “Darwin’s Nightmare” (2004) with Ulrich Seidl’s “Animal Love” (1995), a film about which he has said, “I have never looked so directly into hell in the cinema.” “Animal Love” depicts an Austrian population’s abject despair through their unfettered obsession with their pets, while “Darwin’s Nightmare” documents how unchecked capitalism destroyed an economy, an ecosystem, and an entire population in Africa.

Kazuo Hara’s 1987 film “The Emporer’s Naked Army Marches On,” set to show June 4, is as bold, aggressive, and provocative a film as one would expect from Mr. Herzog. The story of a convicted murderer in Japan who insists after his release that murders occurred within his own regiment during World War II — a charge so controversial in its home country that no distributor was willing to bring it to the masses — Mr. Herzog has selected it to be the finale of his personal picks.

The “Werner’s Picks” series begins with an in-person appearance by Mr. Herzog, who will introduce Jean Rouch’s classic 1995 short film “Les Maitres Fous,” an ethnographic study that begins as an examination of West African tribes and their rituals mocking British colonialism before evolving into a questioning of how the very presence of a documentary team influences those being observed. The director will also introduce Chris Marker’s 1983 avant-garde work “Sans Soleil.” Much as Mr. Herzog does in his own documentaries, both of these films ask us to step beyond our traditional role of observer to question the nature of what is being observed, and what part we play in our relationship with the image on the screen. “Sans Soleil” is the most challenging of Mr. Herzog’s picks, a meditation on time and memory, on the observed and on the viewer, which jumps between Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco in what has been dubbed by some an “artificial documentary.”

For those Herzog fans who have only one day to check out this subseries at Film Forum, it must be Tuesday, when two of the finest, most enigmatic documentaries ever made will be shown back-toback (and for the cost of a single admission).

Both are Errol Morris projects made within the span of three years. The first, 1978’s “Gates of Heaven,” examines a California pet cemetery and the unlikely family that manages it, the strange assortment of clients who prefer to pay sizable sums to bury their departed companions properly, and the indescribably quirky range of emotions that make the film simultaneously depressing and hilarious, introspective and repugnant. It’s an unlikely triumph, so unlikely that Mr. Herzog once bet a young Mr. Morris that if he ever finished the film, he would eat his own shoe (not long after, Mr. Herzog made a film called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.” You can guess what happens).

Paired with “Gates of Heaven” is the work that Mr. Herzog has hailed as “the greatest film ever made.” Mr. Morris’s “Vernon, Florida,” which is far less known than “Gates of Heaven,” is about the peculiar residents of a small Florida swamp town. One by one, they have their say about their lives in this unknown corner of the world: The preacher and the obsessed turkey hunter, the worm farmer and the couple that returned recently from a vacation with a jar of what they insist is “growing” sand from the White Sands desert.

It’s at once mocking and appreciative, soft-hearted and mean-spirited. In short, a film that’s a little bit of everything — a mishmash of emotions and stories that most of us recognize as the real world in all its flawed glory. That’s what makes so many of Mr. Morris’s documentaries riveting, and so many of Mr. Herzog’s films, documentary and otherwise, haunting and unforgettable. “Gates of Heaven” and “Vernon, Florida” are perfect compliments for a Werner Herzog festival, because they have the same aura of the passionate and the macabre that underscore Mr. Herzog’s visions.

Monday through June 4 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).