Reinventing the Real

Werner Herzog defends the ecstatic truth.

by Shaun Brady

REALITY BITES: "Cinema verit� looks to me like a river that has gone foul." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In order to steer Werner Herzog toward a discussion of his theory of "ecstatic truth," it's first necessary to wade through quite a bit of his semantic truth.

Initially he's reluctant to even pursue the matter that far. On the phone from his Los Angeles home, Herzog refuses to offer any explanation of ecstatic truth, referring me instead to his Web site (www.wernerherzog.com), which hosts his Minnesota Declaration, a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek manifesto on the subject — alongside video from The Henry Rollins Show, where the director cheerfully offers a concise definition. Guess my punk credentials just aren't well-established enough.

In any case, I try to approach an illustration of the concept by way of Herzog's most recently released film, Rescue Dawn, itself a revisiting of his earlier documentary on the same subject, Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

Herzog stops me there. "It's the other way around," he insists. "Rescue Dawn was always first, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly is the second film."

Point taken (and actual chronology be damned). But why make one version of the film as a documentary? "Technically, it's not a documentary," Herzog corrects me. "It only appears to be a documentary. It looks like a documentary, but it is not."

Fair enough. But why examine the same story from both sides, narrative and documentary? "It's not two sides of a coin," Herzog says. "It's not either/or. It's more like a round shape, like a globe. It doesn't have an upside or a downside. A basketball doesn't have a head and tail."

It's obvious we're not getting anywhere taking this approach, and Herzog soon sums up the whole matter by simply stating, "I think the films complement each other very well. Each one has its own right to exist and I'm very pleased that I did both."

Presumably Herzog will be a tad more forthcoming when he visits Penn next week, as part of a four-day seminar on the director/writer/theorist/philosopher and his work. The event kicks off Monday with a discussion between four Philly-area film scholars titled "Walking on Ice: Werner Herzog's Metaphysics of Filmmaking" and continues with a screening of his latest "documentary" (he insists on the quotes), Encounters at the End of the World. Another of Herzog's explorations of human beings squaring off against nature's extremes, Encounters finds the director in perhaps his most extreme locale, Antarctica, invited by the National Science Foundation to observe scientists working in the icy expanse.

The colloquium will culminate with two conversations involving Herzog himself, one with Paul Holdengräber, director of public programs at the New York Public Library, and a second with Karen Beckman, director of cinema studies at Penn. In conjunction with the program, Slought Foundation is featuring a three-week exhibit of work by Herzog and images of the director by photographer Beat Presser.

According to Nicola Gentili, Penn's associate director of cinema studies, Herzog's visit was prompted by a suggestion from My Architect director Nathaniel Kahn. "Herzog is certainly very well-known among people working in film," Gentili explains, "but the purpose of having the lecture here at the University of Pennsylvania, which is a place filled with young people, basically is to make Herzog known among the younger generation."

Herzog's talk with Holdengräber reprises a similar discussion the two held at the New York Public Library in February. Both are provocatively dubbed "Was the 20th Century a Mistake?" though Herzog shrugs off the title, saying that the discussion may venture much farther afield.

"Paul Holdengräber is very intellectually exuberant," he says. "I have no idea where we'll go on this discourse. Maybe we won't speak about the 20th century at all. We might go on a rampage and speak about the migration of European peoples in the fifth century."

The conversation with Beckman explicitly promises to be an exploration of ecstatic truth. To offer a skeletal definition (which Herzog would surely find some fault with), the idea involves moving beyond mere facts, which merely offer what the Minnesota Declaration refers to as "the truth of accountants," to a deeper, more emotional truth. As a "documentarian" (again, his quotes), Herzog has never shied away from staging scenes or framing events in ways not accepted by fundamentalist views of so-called nonfiction cinema. In that sense, it's a direct rebuke to cinema verité, a subject on which Herzog is more willing to expound.

"There's botched philosophy behind it," he says. "Cinema verité looks to me like a river that has gone foul and the fish come belly up, floating on the surface."

That accountant's truth abounds these days, readily available via reality TV, the Internet and other modern outlets. "It's evident that we have to find new answers in cinema if our sense of reality is so dramatically challenged by all these new technologies," Herzog offers. "Cinema verité was the answer of the '60s, but that was well before all these new developments, virtual realities and digital effects and Photoshop and reality TV. Just name it — it's the biggest onslaught on our sense of reality that historically man has ever had."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Cinema Studies presents Werner Herzog, Mon.-Thu., Oct. 22-25, free, various times and venues, 215-898-8782, www.cinemastudies.upenn.edu.