Comments on: Vice Interviews Werner Herzog http://www.thedocumentaryblog.com/index.php/2007/11/22/vice-interviews-werner-herzog/ Documentary Film News and Reviews Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:39:36 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 By: mike rot http://www.thedocumentaryblog.com/index.php/2007/11/22/vice-interviews-werner-herzog/comment-page-1/#comment-56365 mike rot Thu, 22 Nov 2007 15:51:52 +0000 http://www.thedocumentaryblog.com/index.php/2007/11/22/vice-interviews-werner-herzog/#comment-56365 I love Herzog but his criticisms of cinema verite ring false with me. Yes there is some manipulation of events in the very act of editing and imposing even a sparse narrative arc but taking something like 'Dont Look Back', the long passages while the camera is rolling you get to see the real people engage in front of the camera... so what if part of it is 'performance' that is merely one more layer to their reality. I feel that there is so little respect for the tacit dimension of the aesthetic experience by people like Herzog who want to conflate all documentaries to artifice. Tacitly we know more than we can articulate in any given scene, we can, if we are very good at it, recognize the politics of performance unfolding in real-time and appreciate that as part of the reality being captured. I had a long debate with someone about this same thing on my blog regarding 'When the Levees Broke'... I was told I could never understand what the individual victims of Katrina 'felt' because Spike Lee had intervened and showed only what he wanted you to see. Again, this short-changes our abilities to discern... to work on multiple levels in the appreciation of a work of art. I merely factor in Spike Lee as part of the product, factor in the influence of a camera, the staging, the prompting, but in the end the survivor will communicate something, and that something will be a give and take of his/her own feelings with the politics of the moment... that does not degrade the reality of that experience. To return this to Little Dieter Learns to Fly, the Eugene that is being discussed is like the version of a person any one of us holds in our memory... if the emphasis of a story is on Dieter and his recollection (after all Eugene cannot speak for himself) than of course there is going to be artistic license, by both Dieter and Herzog. Here the aspects are fictionalized out of neccessity, out of the promptings of Dieter's spontaneous recollection. In Rescue Dawn Herzog has greater artistic license because that is a fictional representation that can build upon themes over the minutae of unfiltered recollection. I love Herzog but his criticisms of cinema verite ring false with me. Yes there is some manipulation of events in the very act of editing and imposing even a sparse narrative arc but taking something like ‘Dont Look Back’, the long passages while the camera is rolling you get to see the real people engage in front of the camera… so what if part of it is ‘performance’ that is merely one more layer to their reality. I feel that there is so little respect for the tacit dimension of the aesthetic experience by people like Herzog who want to conflate all documentaries to artifice. Tacitly we know more than we can articulate in any given scene, we can, if we are very good at it, recognize the politics of performance unfolding in real-time and appreciate that as part of the reality being captured.

I had a long debate with someone about this same thing on my blog regarding ‘When the Levees Broke’… I was told I could never understand what the individual victims of Katrina ‘felt’ because Spike Lee had intervened and showed only what he wanted you to see. Again, this short-changes our abilities to discern… to work on multiple levels in the appreciation of a work of art. I merely factor in Spike Lee as part of the product, factor in the influence of a camera, the staging, the prompting, but in the end the survivor will communicate something, and that something will be a give and take of his/her own feelings with the politics of the moment… that does not degrade the reality of that experience.

To return this to Little Dieter Learns to Fly, the Eugene that is being discussed is like the version of a person any one of us holds in our memory… if the emphasis of a story is on Dieter and his recollection (after all Eugene cannot speak for himself) than of course there is going to be artistic license, by both Dieter and Herzog. Here the aspects are fictionalized out of neccessity, out of the promptings of Dieter’s spontaneous recollection. In Rescue Dawn Herzog has greater artistic license because that is a fictional representation that can build upon themes over the minutae of unfiltered recollection.

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