Science Fiction Fever Dreams - Or - A Chimp Rides a Goat into the Sunset
Werner Herzog is no fan of cinema verite. He calls it “the accountant’s truth,” mere layers of fact that must be avoided by “tools of sheer fantasy.” Herzog is interested in searching for a deeper stratum of truth, the thing that illuminates us, the “ecstatic truth.” At a talk at the Goethe Institut on Saturday, as part of the MAGNUM Festival celebrating 60 years of documentary, Herzog presented clips from his latest film, Encounters at the End of the World. Encounters is a documentary about the people who live and work at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, people who have “fallen off the margins of the map.” Encounters is truly a Herzog film, with stylized sequences - “I stage them” he says gleefully - fascinating characters, and strange epiphanies. Herzog loves those moments where “you don’t have the capacity to explain it and you don’t need to explain it” - like the dancing chicken at the end of his 1976 film Stroszek. As he elucidates: “The image is of no consequence but the sequence becomes important and meaningful.” Herzog also declares that he doesn’t treat the subjects in his documentaries any differently from actors he works with. His search for ecstatic truth is not an isolated thing but part of a broader human desire to tell stories. It is part of the human condition to “want to be more than just part of consumer society and then perish.”
Herzog is a fan of celluloid and still shoots on film sometimes. His latest narrative pic Rescue Dawn (out in cinemas this Summer) was shot on Super 35. He likes the “mysterious life of film” and how you make discoveries when you develop film. Digital creates files, not images, and doesn’t have “the breathing life of film.” However, he embraces digital too - Encounters was shot digitally although largely for financial reasons - and he doesn’t want to be like the people who objected to the coming of sound to cinema in the 1930s. “Digital is not the end of filmmaking and has given us phenomenal new films. . . I see a glorious age but with certain hesitations.”
There were some classic Herzog declarations during the presentation:
“Mass Tourism has caused more suffering than many wars. Tourism is a sin and traveling on foot is a virtue.”
“The New Age philosophical ambiguity of “good vibes” makes me very angry. I lower my head and
charge. . . A housewife in California doing meditation and yoga is an abomination.”
Asked by someone in the audience if he is a professional dreamer, Herzog answered “I have no dreams. Perhaps that is why I do what I do.”
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There was a very interesting article in Harper’s Magazine in December 2006 about Herzog that delved further into this idea of ecstatic truth. Read it online here.
Also don’t forget to check out Herzog’s favourite documentary picks as well as his own films currently showing as part of Herzog (Non) Fiction at the Film Forum.