Focus Features

Herzog during the filming of Encounters at
the End of the World.

This year’s Academy Award nominations have brought Werner Herzog his first Oscar nomination, in the category of Best Documentary Feature, for Encounters at the End of the World. Having already made one reputation for himself in the 1970s heyday of the “New German Cinema” – as one of world cinema’s most bold and brilliant feature directors –since the 1990s Herzog has brought forth a sequence of films loosely related to fact that have seen him hailed as the world’s foremost documentary-maker. Except Herzog himself has queried the very label “documentary,” most conspicuously in his “Minnesota Declaration” of 1999, which he has conceded was “somewhat tongue in cheek and designed to provoke,” but nonetheless born of his strongest feelings about “fact and truth in filmmaking, and ecstatic truth.” In the followed extract from Paul Cronin’s Herzog on Herzog – published by Faber and Faber, and described at www.wernerherzog.com as “the only authentic and authorized [Herzog] interview-book” – Herzog elaborates on these theories.

PAUL CRONIN: Your conclusion about so-called cinéma vérité documentaries is that they don’t penetrate into the reality of the situations that they portray. This form of cinema is, in your words, merely ‘the accountant’s truth’.

WERNER HERZOG: Cinema is inherently able to present a number of dimensions much deeper than the level of truth that we find in cinéma vérité and even reality itself, and it is these dimensions that are the most fertile areas for filmmakers. I truly hope to be one of those to finally bury cinéma vérité for good… Cinéma vérité is the accountant’s truth, it merely skirts the surface of what constitutes a deeper form of truth in cinema.

When you have an idea for a story, do you immediately know whether it’s going to be a feature or a ‘documentary’?

I don’t sit and ponder whether I should articulate the story in one way or another… I just do the things that are urgent to me. So for me the boundary between fiction and ‘documentary’ simply does not exist, they are all just films. Both take “facts,” characters, stories and play with them in the same kind of way. I actually consider Fitzcarraldo my best “documentary”…

I know that by making a clear distinction between “fact” and “truth” in my films, I’m able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth that most films never attain. This deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically, and mathematically correct. In other words, I start to invent and play with the “facts” as we know them. Through invention, through imagination, through fabrication, I become more truthful than the little bureaucrats…

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Herzog during the filming of Encounters at
the End of the World.

This year’s Academy Award nominations have brought Werner Herzog his first Oscar nomination, in the category of Best Documentary Feature, for Encounters at the End of the World. Having already made one reputation for himself in the 1970s heyday of the “New German Cinema” – as one of world cinema’s most bold and brilliant feature directors –since the 1990s Herzog has brought forth a sequence of films loosely related to fact that have seen him hailed as the world’s foremost documentary-maker. Except Herzog himself has queried the very label “documentary,” most conspicuously in his “Minnesota Declaration” of 1999, which he has conceded was “somewhat tongue in cheek and designed to provoke,” but nonetheless born of his strongest feelings about “fact and truth in filmmaking, and ecstatic truth.” In the followed extract from Paul Cronin’s Herzog on Herzog – published by Faber and Faber, and described at www.wernerherzog.com as “the only authentic and authorized [Herzog] interview-book” – Herzog elaborates on these theories.

PAUL CRONIN: Your conclusion about so-called cinéma vérité documentaries is that they don’t penetrate into the reality of the situations that they portray. This form of cinema is, in your words, merely ‘the accountant’s truth’.

WERNER HERZOG: Cinema is inherently able to present a number of dimensions much deeper than the level of truth that we find in cinéma vérité and even reality itself, and it is these dimensions that are the most fertile areas for filmmakers. I truly hope to be one of those to finally bury cinéma vérité for good… Cinéma vérité is the accountant’s truth, it merely skirts the surface of what constitutes a deeper form of truth in cinema.

When you have an idea for a story, do you immediately know whether it’s going to be a feature or a ‘documentary’?

I don’t sit and ponder whether I should articulate the story in one way or another… I just do the things that are urgent to me. So for me the boundary between fiction and ‘documentary’ simply does not exist, they are all just films. Both take “facts,” characters, stories and play with them in the same kind of way. I actually consider Fitzcarraldo my best “documentary”…

I know that by making a clear distinction between “fact” and “truth” in my films, I’m able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth that most films never attain. This deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically, and mathematically correct. In other words, I start to invent and play with the “facts” as we know them. Through invention, through imagination, through fabrication, I become more truthful than the little bureaucrats…

Land of Silence and Darkness

Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) seems an important film in this respect because it seems to mark the start of your experimentation with ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ in cinema.

Yes, though I suspect at the time it was probably not so conscious but more a kind of instinctive attitude I had. The line that is quoted at the end of that film – “If a world war were to break out now, I would not even notice it” – is not something that Fini [Straubringer, the film’s subject, a deaf and blind woman] ever said. It’s something I wrote that I felt encapsulated in only a few words how someone like her might experience the world. And the lines at the start of the film when Fini speaks about the ecstatic faces of the ski-flyers which she says she used to watch as a child are also written by me. It’s all pure invention. She’d actually never even seen a ski-jumper and I just asked her to say the lines that I wrote. Why? Because I wanted to somehow describe her solitude cinematically and felt that the solitude and ecstasy of the ski-jumpers as they flew through the air was a great image to represent her inner state of mind and her own solitude. Of course when making the film no scenes were shot contrary to Fini’s wishes and she didn’t mind speaking the lines that I had written for her...

Even in a film like Ballad of the Little Soldier, perhaps my most political film, you can see signs of these ideas. I could have made a straightforward study of the political situation down there and called it The Children’s War Against the Sandinistas. But I gave it that title for a reason: for a long time I’ve wanted to make a musical. I have hours of footage of the villagers and the soldiers singing and maybe one day will edit it together to produce a real oratorio. The existing film is my compromise, as I very much wanted to tell the story of the child soldiers who were dying in Nicaragua every day.

Ballad of the Little Soldier

But the stylizations of truth in the “documentary” films are generally very subtle indeed. You probably wouldn’t know about most of them unless you were paying very close attention to the films, and even then you might need to have some background of the film’s subject matter. A good example is the last scene of Echoes from a Sombre Empire. In the decrepit zoo we found one of the saddest things I have ever seen, a monkey addicted to cigarettes thanks to the drunken soldiers who had taught it to smoke. Michael Goldsmith looks at the ape and says something like “I can’t take this any longer” and tells me I should turn the camera off, and I answer back from behind the camera, “Michael, I think this is one of the shots I should hold.” He replies, “Only if you promise this will be the last shot in the film.” While this dialogue and my use of the animal was a completely scripted invention, the nicotine-addicted monkey itself wasn’t. There was something momentous and mysterious about the creature and filming it in the way I did brought the film to a deeper level of truth, even if I didn’t stick entirely to the facts. To call Echoes from a Sombre Empire a “documentary” is like saying that Warhol’s painting of Campbell’s soup cans is a documentary about tomato soup.

And remember the opening quote from Blaise Pascal at the start of Lessons of Darkness? “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendour.” Well, it may sound like Pascal, but actually it’s all invented. I enjoy doing things like that because I am storyteller, plain and simple, not a traditional “documentary” filmmaker…

What the Pascalian pseudo-quote does is lift you from the first minute of these films to a level which prepares you for something quite momentous. We are immediately in the realm of poetry – whether or not the audience knows the quote is a fake – which inevitably strikes a more profound chord than mere reportage…
After the quote the film continues with the voice-over talking of “Wide mountain ranges, the valleys enshrouded in mist.” What I actually filmed were little heaps of dust and soil created by the tires of trucks. These “mountain ranges” weren’t more than a foot high.

I keep telling young people who always ask with hesitation in their voice about history and concoction and invention that this is what the cinema is about. Do it, I say!