“Jewel, you must never listen to this.”

Anyone who has seen Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary “Grizzly Man” will recognize these cautionary words, spoken on screen by the director in his unmistakable flat German-accented English to “grizzly man” Timothy Treadwell’s ex-girlfriend, who has in her possession the audio tape of Treadwell being mauled to death by a bear. It’s the same accent that coaxed Joachim Phoenix from an off-screen car wreck in 2006 and the same English that pointed out to a journalist on the publicity trail for “Grizzly Man” that “someone is shooting at us,” then dismissing a projectile that struck Herzog as “not a significant bullet.”

“Everybody thinks I’m in ‘Grizzly Man’ a lot,” the 64-year-old director said, safe from air guns and Oscar-winning actors, on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I think I’m visible not more than 25 seconds and only from behind. My presence is mostly there through my voice.”

Beginning today, Mr. Herzog’s singular narrative voice on screen, and behind the camera, will be celebrated in “Herzog [Non]Fiction,” Film Forum’s three-week retrospective of documentary films made by the director of such canonical fiction features as “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Stroszec,” and “Heart of Glass.”

In documentary circles, choosing to appear in one’s own film is a significant and deliberate step. Mr. Herzog points to his 1974 portrait of Swiss ski jumper (or “ski flier,” as he says in the film and in conversation) Walter Steiner, “The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner,” as his initial leap forward. Made for German television, “The Great Ecstasy” was part of a nonfiction omnibus series with a specific format. “One of the signatures of this series was that they were not anonymous documentaries,” Mr. Herzog said. “The person who made the individual films had to be there [on screen] doing a chronicle of things.” In order to get the green light, Mr. Herzog said, “I had to be in the film myself.”

From its opening — a grainy shot of a pair of ski tips drifting in slow motion into a mid-air frame accompanied by a haunting, nearly tuneless series of notes by the rock band Popol Vuh — “The Great Ecstasy” is a sublimely beautiful film that turns physics, fatalism, and fiberglass into something ephemerally but powerfully spiritual. It’s as if Carl Dreyer were behind the camera for a segment of ABC’s old “Wide World of Sports” show.

“‘The Great Ecstasy of the Wood Carver Steiner’ remains very close to my heart,” Mr. Herzog said, “because that was my dream. Steiner was the person who lived the life and lived the dream that I always had.”

As a teenager, the director “was in very, very serious training,” he explained, en route to tryouts for the German national ski team. “All my friends at the time wanted to become the world champion of sky flying,” he said. It took only the sight of a friend’s career ending with an accident on a ski ramp. The spectacle “was so horrifying,” Mr. Herzog said, “that I never, never stepped up on a ramp again.”

Narrating and, to some degree, appearing in his own nonfiction films suited the director’s documentary agenda. After Steiner, he said, “I had the feeling that the films were more credible if I spoke my own commentary, if my presence was physically there in a way.” Being “physically there,” in one’s own film is, of course, the antithesis of the third-person documentary filmmaking championed by such cinema verité pioneers as the Maysles Brothers and Frederick Wiseman.

“I always battled against socalled cinema verité,” Mr. Herzog said. “Cinema verité has always been fact-oriented. That’s a superficial stratum of truth — what I call the accountant’s truth. I’ve always been after a much deeper stratum of truth, something that illuminates us, something that I’ve labeled ecstatic truth. Not only in the documentaries but also in my fiction films.”

Film Forum’s retrospective also includes Werner’s Picks, nine documentary films made by other filmmakers that Mr. Herzog personally selected to run alongside his own. Does he see his work and the work of Les Blank, Errol Morris, Ulrich Seidl, Chris Marker, and the others artists he acknowledges in the retrospective as belonging to a documentary tradition? “No, no, not at all,” he said. “There’s no tradition. The films are from all sorts of angles and from a variety of very distinct filmmakers, like Jean Rouch’s ‘La Maitres Fous’ and Errol Morris’s ‘Vernon Florida.'” Then he quickly added, “None of them are cinema verité.”

“I love people who are opening new venues into looking at the world,” Mr. Herzog said. “Our reality is very severely challenged by an onslaught of virtual realties on the Internet, on computer games, in Photoshop, in Wrestlemania, in digital effects in feature films, in socalled reality TV.”

Wait, Wrestlemania? “Yes,” Mr. Herzog said. “It pretends to be a new form of reality, a new form of fighting, but of course everything is staged and choreographed. The interesting side of it is that it’s a very crude new form of mythology. The fights themselves are interrupted by commercials but never the parts when the manager comes out and his allegedly blinded paraplegic wife is wheeled onstage,” Mr. Herzog said, describing one of the WWE’s particularly bizarre narrative caprices. “It’s just too good. I even convinced Roger Ebert to take it seriously.”

And reality TV? “I’ve watched Anna Nicole Smith’s show,” Mr. Herzog said, his voice so persuasive that I felt like a philistine for not having asked him about it first thing, let alone actually seen it. “The poet must not avert his eyes,” he said without a whiff of guilty-pleasure defensiveness. “It’s not whether she was good, bad, mediocre, or vulgar; I don’t want to argue that way. It has to do with a collective psyche and the self-definition of a whole civilization, in a way. We would need two, three hours to talk about her,” he said.” I wish I could have made a film with her.”

The evolving way in which civilizations perceive themselves, and their counterparts, is a recurrent theme for the director.

“For hundreds and hundreds of years warfare used to be the same,” Mr. Herzog said. “Man against man with a sword and a shield. All of a sudden the medieval knight found himself confronted by cannons and firearms. Warfare was never the same again.”

To Mr. Herzog, filmmaking, story-telling, popular culture, shared information, and consciousness in all its myriad, geometrically multiplying contemporary manifestations and delivery systems “are a massive onslaught on our understanding of reality, and in filmmaking we better find an answer to it.” He has been plowing into those front lines for nearly 40 years. “I have been into that for a very long time,” he said with the chivalrous understatement of the knight errant. “That’s what you can see in this retrospective.”

Through June 7 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).