I was thinking about my blog post while listening to Werner
Herzog’s NPR interview, hoping to find something I could use to jumpstart this
post. Not much stood out to me and I thought I was going to just write
something about the first half of Grizzly
Man. At the very end Herzog talked for a while about feature films versus
documentaries and how the differences between the two are not as clear as we
might think.
He said, “But sometimes I try to dig into something much deeper than
the superficial truth of the so-called cinema variety, which somehow is
confused about fact and truth. And I’ve always looked for something much
deeper, an ecstatic truth—the ecstasy of truth—some illumination in my feature
films and in my documentaries. So it’s always the same quest, and sometimes I
keep saying—half-serious, half-joking—‘“Fitzcarraldo,”’ which is a big epic
feature film, ‘is my best documentary.’ I’m pulling a huge ship over a
mountain, and the fact itself has so much quality for—well, you can really
trust your eyes again. It’s not that I used a model or digital tricks or
anything like this. It’s a really huge ships over a mountain, dragged by about
a thousand native Indians from the rain forest.”
Here, Herzog gets at one of Tim O’Brien’s points in The Things They Carried about the
difference between happening truth and story truth. For me, when he calls
“Fitzcarraldo” his best documentary because the huge ship was actually pulled
over mountain by a thousand people, he drives home O’Brien’s point. Although I
have never seen it, I suspect that in many ways that fictional film is more
real and exposes more truth than a film that claims to be based on a true
story. There is a difference between being truthful and being honest to the
truth. I contest that O’Brien and Herzog both value the latter much more than the
former.
I really like the analysis of Herzog's feature film. When you think about it, for Grizzly Man, all Herzog did was go through clips of footage and interviews and decide which clips best helped his argument. In this way, he was just crafting an argument as strongly as possible with the evidence that he had at his disposal. In Fitzcarraldo, he actually did something. Along with his team, he pulled a large ship over a mountain. That is an incredible feat, and although the story may not be true, that feat is incredibly real.
ReplyDeleteBefore this class, I always assumed documentaries to be completely true. Now, I realize that directors of documentaries are much like authors in the sense that they can easily manipulate the viewer. But looking even deeper, shouldn't the documentary be about Timothy's life with the bears? We observed in the documentary that Timothy has 2 sides; one that is really happy and loves the bears, and another that despised human life and says "fuck" a lot. Herzog has so much power, in the fact that not only does he get to construct a film using friends and family of Timothy, but he gets to choose what side of Timothy the audience sees. In the second half of Grizzly Man, Herzog begins to insert his opinions into the film. As soon as this happens, the "documentary" transforms into a feature film. He chooses what we see, and forms our opinions for us.
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