Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog

Introduction: Werner Herzog, Documentary Outsider

1 INTRODUCTION: WERNER HERZOG, DOCUMENTARY OUTSIDER On April 30, 1999, Werner Herzog visited the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis , Minnesota, for a public dialogue with film critic Roger Ebert. After they had both been introduced, Herzog walked alone to center stage of the museum’s theater and addressed the audience of more than three hundred people. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a German accent, before we start this dialogue, I would like to make a statement. It is something that I have reflected upon for many years in the frustration of seeing so many documentary films. When you look at television, you probably have experienced a similar frustration. There’s something ultimately and deeply wrong about the concept of what constitutes fact and what constitutes truth in documentaries in particular. And very recently, traveling around a lot, I was jetlagged, woke up a couple of times during the night, tried to switch on television, and it was all bad. Between 3:00 and 3:15 in the morning in Sicily, I wrote down quickly a manifesto, which I would like to read to you. I would like to call it the Minnesota Declaration. The audience responded with laughter and applause, effectively setting the tone for Herzog, who went on to declaim the twelve-point manifesto, subtitled “Lessons of Darkness.”1 The performance, which the filmmaker later called a “rant,” was more than just another occasion to rehearse his well-known diatribe against cinema verité.2 It was also a way of promoting his own contribution to documentary in terms that he uses to describe all his films. Here is the key point (number 5) of the manifesto: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as 2 INTRODUCTION poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”3 Whereas Herzog introduced the manifesto with a mix of narrative (one sleepless night in Sicily), exposition (generalizations about documentary), and humor (emphatic seriousness), he concluded by dramatically claiming a minority position for himself, involving the audience in his performance and soliciting their assent. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve never had a majority on my side throughout my life. I wish you to adopt this as the Minnesota Declaration by acclamation.” Cheers followed applause when, on Herzog’s cue, theater ushers handed out signed copies of the manifesto “as a souvenir of this evening,” which had only just begun. Since then, the Minnesota Declaration has had an extraordinary afterlife, one that tells us something unique about Herzog’s approach to documentary filmmaking. Like other notable manifestos, it has been printed, circulated, and anthologized. In an interesting twist, however, part of this declaration, which is based on Herzog’s previous work, would later be converted back into a film. In Encounters at the End of the World (2007), his feature-length documentary filmed in Antarctica, an aging scientist named Sam Bowser contemplates the thought of making his final plunge into the subarctic sea before “passing the ball off to the next generation,” a moment that also reflects Herzog’s situation as a grizzled veteran filmmaker. The biologist proceeds to describe an undersea world of “horribly violent” conditions. Speaking with Herzog, whose voice can be heard off camera, Bowser rehearses almost verbatim the final point of the Minnesota Declaration, which reads, “Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species— including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.” Herzog thus takes a point of the manifesto, encapsulating his characteristically grim vision of the natural world, reframes it as a point of biological fact, and puts it in the mouth of an expert witness. More than just a humorous scene parodying the conventional use of scientific authority, it rehearses and restages a part of Herzog’s manifesto, now in the form of a documentary film. The turn of the twenty-first century marked a period when the German-born director, long known for his “visionary masterpieces” INTRODUCTION 3 such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, 1974), had been working intensively in the documentary mode. This surge of activity, resulting in such...