Culture / Books & the Arts / Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction The German auteur’s recent book presents a strange, idiosyncratic vision of the concept of “truth,” one that defines how he sees the world and his art.
Werner Herzog, 1984. (Frederic Garcia / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
In 1970 or ’71, Werner Herzog accompanied a pair of deaf-blind women on their first flight in an airplane. The outing was Herzog’s idea, a joyride in a little four-seat Cessna to celebrate one of the women’s birthdays but also to capture their reactions for a film he was making called The Land of Silence and Darkness. The footage from that afternoon displays many of what would become the hallmarks of Herzog’s style over the coming half-century: the daring gambit on the border of exploitation, the obsession with vision and existential loneliness, and the search for poetry at the extremes of human experience. It is an astonishing piece of filmmaking. No matter how many times I have seen it, it never fails to evoke an overwhelming complex of thought and feeling that is hard to put into words. As with the flight itself, one has to experience it to know what it is about, and even then it is hard not to come away with the sense of having encountered something powerfully human that nevertheless lies beyond our capacity to articulate it in speech. As if to confirm this impression, Herzog, whose unmistakable voice and philosophical commentary have become the most recognizable part of both the man and his work, is silent. He doesn’t even ask afterward what it was like.
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This, too, would become a characteristic of Herzog’s oeuvre: the search for an elusive transcendence over the edge of the ordinary that he calls “ecstatic truth.” Herzog is obsessed with the idea of truth and has insisted for decades that it is the central concern of all his films. This might seem rich from one of the great self-mythologizers of our time, who has never hidden the fact that he punches up his documentaries with fabrication, scripted scenes, and misattributed quotes, and who once described Fitzcarraldo as his greatest documentary. Yet the truth that Herzog has in mind is more like the truth of poetry than the mere facts and shared understanding that he mocks as “the truth of accountants.” As he put it in a 1999 manifesto, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”
The idea that an artist, even a documentarian, would mix fact with fiction is not quite so radical today as it might have been at the peak of cinema verité. Yet questions of truth and its relation to reality are more pressing and vexed than ever. Getting at deep truths by means of artful lies may seem less appealing or daring in the era of the deepfake. Herzog’s oft-repeated provocation that only the “conman, the liar who knew what he was talking about, would speak the truth” loses some of its countercultural appeal when the conmen move from the margins of society to the centers of power and bullshit becomes de rigueur.
What separates the auteur who resolutely clings to a personal, unempirical vision of the truth, and who has few scruples about lying if it convinces his audience of that vision’s reality, from the conspiracy theorists and propagandists who seek to deceive the public by similar means? How to distinguish what Herzog describes as his films’ exploitation of the “collective willingness to be transported into the realm of poetry, of madness, and of the pure joy of storytelling” from darker, more dangerous attempts to channel that willingness into political projects and collective madness?
The answer seems obvious. Herzog makes idiosyncratic films about the sorts of truth that can be found in cave paintings and the flight of ski-jumpers and men devoured by bears, while today’s AI-powered propagandists seek to manipulate viewers into a political stance via the banal aesthetics of cable news and social media. But that’s a little too easy; we’d like to be able to say more about how to distinguish between visionaries and what makes one deep truth truer than another. Herzog seems to appreciate the predicament. He has written a book, The Future of Truth (translated by the great Michael Hoffmann), to explain himself, or at least to put some distance between his life’s work and what is widely agreed to be one of the most pressing social and democratic dangers of our time. It is a book that he has been promising to write for years to expand upon his guiding ideal of ecstatic truth, which he has previously only been able to gesture at and move past by saying he’d need a whole book to explain. And now we have that book.
The Future of Truth is divided into 11 chapters with titles like “What is Truth?,” “Philosophical Efforts,” “Fake News: A Brief History,” “Ecstatic Truth,” “The Post-Truth Era,” and “The Future of Truth” that promise insight into Herzog’s vision of ecstatic truth and, by pressing it up against contemporary concerns, perhaps also to shed some off-kilter illumination onto our shared predicament. Alas, what we get in these chapters is a profound deflation of the excitement portended by their titles, not because ecstatic truth is the sort of thing that fundamentally cannot be put into words—as may be—but because the author hardly bothers trying.
It would be unreasonable to demand an exhaustive treatise on the nature of truth from an artist who has spent his life making intuitive magic with images and who has been known to explain himself with Hölderlin’s line that “man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he reflects.” But since he has decided to write a book of reflections on the subject, we would at least like to see him give it a try. A little mischief at a minimum. What we mostly get, instead, are passages repurposed from earlier books and interviews stitched together and repackaged in such a slight and slapdash form—with neither the coherence of argument nor the constellation of collage and aphorism—that one gets the sense that the book was completed either to satisfy a contractual obligation or to finance an upcoming film.
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