Frame by Frame

I’ve watched all of Werner Herzog’s documentary films. And I like most of them — just not well enough for any of them to make my list of “best” documentary films. As I explained here, it should be easy for you to discern why: I prefer direct cinema and (to a lesser extent) its cousin cinéma vérité. Herzog is a bit, shall we say, hostile toward these forms 🙂

Let’s take a look at his Minnesota Declaration (including his recent addendum) with my glosses:

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

Huh? I would think that an accountant’s truth had better damned well have a high degree of non-superficial correspondence to reality, otherwise their client is in big trouble. Is this poetry?

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law; the bad guys should go to jail.” Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

This is incomprehensible in part because the analogy is tortured. Perhaps if Herzog had more fully quoted the source. I can’t make anything out of either of them. But of this I am sure: No one should think that simply pointing a camera at something can lead to an easily-found truth. I get it why Herzog would be put off by such a naïve “understanding” of cinematic rhetoric.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

Perhaps one should define their terms.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

And your argument for this would be…

5. 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.

This is the stuff of doctorial dissertations in which you’d spend 250 pages worth of words proving this assertion. As it is, this is hardly useful in understanding much of anything about documentary film. This is the 30-second elevator speech you give your doctorial advisor before they tell you to think a little harder about it 🙂

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures of ancient ruins of facts.

This is a simile. Not sure how ancient ruins of facts corresponds to filming life as it happens (i.e. not ancient).

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

Apparently the one on foot isn’t a tourist. I’ll remember this the next time I’m walking around Barcelona.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.”

Agreed.

9. The gauntlet is herby thrown down.

But why? 😉

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.

Dude. Are you OK?

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

Glad you capitalized Universe because otherwise… never mind.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Um, OK.

The 6-point addendum:

1. With the arrival of the new term “alternative facts” in the political arena, the question of facts and the question of truth have acquired an unexpected urgency.

Yes.

2. Facts cannot be underestimated as they have normative power. But they do not give us insight into the truth, or the illumination of poetry. Yes, accepted, the phone directory of Manhattan contains four million entries, all of them factually verifiable. But do we know why Jonathan Smith, correctly listed, cries into his pillow every night?

This, finally, gets at, in my opinion, what Herzog is on about — at least as I am interpreting it. But I wonder whose method of documentary storytelling actually gets at the truth of the man crying in his pillow — Herzog pointing a camera at him and asking “but why?” or the direct cinema method where we might actually inquire while spending enough time to really get to know Jonathan Smith.

3. The argument of rearranging facts constituting a lie points only to shallow thinking and the fetish of self-reference.

Agreed.

4. Patron Saints of the Minnesota Declaration: William Shakespeare: “The most truthful poetry is the most feigning.”

Still needing some discussion of the role of (presumably) cinematic poetry in documentary filmmaking. Check out my (ongoing) discussion of visual style where I am trying to come to an understanding of this for my own work. BTW, this is a point where I diverge a bit from the direct cinema thing — the fly on the wall where the audience doesn’t notice (ha!) the camera. Oh, I want them to notice 🙂

5. André Gide: “I modify facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.”

Need more context for this quote. Looks like something ripped from a much deeper discussion, making this less than useful for understanding much of anything.

6. Michelangelo: Taking a good look at his statue of the Pietà, we notice that Jesus taken from the cross is a man of 33, but his mother is only 17.

You lost me.