Vice Interviews Werner Herzog
Posted by Jay C on November 22nd, 2007
Filed under: News
Just recently I was given the heads about a recent Vice magazine interview with Werner Herzog. I guess he’s doing a press tour for his documentary film ‘Encounters at the End of the World’, however this interview seems to focus mostly on Rescue Dawn. More specifically, the controversy surrounding his re-telling of Dieter Dengler’s amazing story, and the certain liberties he may have taken to bring it to the big screen. Herzog addresses the fact that certain members of Dengler’s family have spoken out against his film:
“I understand that the family of Eugene DeBruin see him differently to the way I see him. That’s their right. It’s absolutely legitimate that they raise their voices and explain that they see him differently. But I think they didn’t get the details that I got from Dieter Dengler (expanded upon in the 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly). Yes, someone may be unhappy about a character is portrayed…”
I guess it would be tough to sit back as a relative of Dengler’s and watch his story go through some changes, but this is a movie we’re talking about! Herzog has always been very vocal about his ‘ecstatic truth’, in which certain elements of his films (even his documentaries) are fictionalized to represent what a character may have been feeling or experiencing. What do you think? Is Herzog unfairly exploiting Dengler’s story? Or is he simply telling the tale the best way he sees fit?
Related Link: Vice - Werner Herzog Interview
Jay C on 
November 22nd, 2007 11:51
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.