Werner Herzog was honored with an Outstanding Achievement Award at this year’s HotDocs in Toronto. In addition to a retrospective of his work and his brief acceptance speech at the Awards Ceremony, Herzog also had a sit-down discussion with Director of Programming Sean Farnel near the close of the festival (see previous whine re: tickets). Sean coyly set up the evening by saying “The structure is…that there is no structure.” And while the Q&A had the obligatory what-advice-do-you-have-for-new-filmmakers and you-are-so-awesome, Werner actually did slip in a few Herzog-ian moments worth mentioning.

I don’t want to delve too far into philsophy or ideology in a blog but at some point, any discussion with Herzog starts to slide in that direction. He is a man of superior intellect and he sees the world with great clarity; whether or not you agree with his vision is another story. He has great powers of observation. He sees poetry in motion such as a beetle twirling at the end of a string; the strength and weakness of the human experience like in Klaus Kinski (Fitzcaraldo; My Best Fiend) and Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man); and he is motivated by landscape and the interaction between the animate and inanimate. Along with his acute observations, he has the precious talent of being able to transform story and image into a rendering that helps his audience see/feel/hear Truth. “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao” so it’s impossible to define Truth - divine understanding comes in fits and starts, and to a greater and lesser degree to each individual, but everyone is in search of it and has the power to connect if they choose.

The awful fact is that most of us are walking around numb. We are so disconnected from the basic essence of the human experience that we can’t feel the power we have within ourselves - to heal ourselves and others, to make ourselves and others ill, to honor those who have come before and after us. Herzog says that Nature is vile and base, but I suggest that he is acutely aware of the delicate balance of good and evil, and perhaps has felt the real wrath of evil that few others experience because they aren’t open or sensative. I say all of this because Herzog describes his lifetime of work as the search for the “ecstasy of Truth.” He made this reference several times at HotDocs but I got the feeling that many didn’t really understand what he was saying.

God, or the Creator, or the Higher Power - whatever you want to call that force in the universe that is stronger than us - is present at all times, and this power that I point out as being within us is really the power to tap into that spirit, the Great Spirit. It is that Great Spirit and our connection to it that connects us to one another, makes us One. It takes a truly gifted artist, musician, theologian, filmmaker, speaker, whatever, but at times, the Great Spirit can be revealed to us through the “voice” of others. Herzog was saying that he believes he has this power, which I agree with, and that whether or not he has been successful at each crank of the film camera is debatable, but it is always his goal.

He mentioned his Minnesota Declaration as a further exposing of his ideas, so I went to his website to find it. The Declaration is critical of the idea of cinema verite, which he seems to equate with the documentary form. He doesn’t believe that by simply observing we can reach Truth. His experience and abilities tell him that he must manipulate the raw material, to run it through his filter, to achieve the desired result. Herzog, Agnes Varda, Lars von Trier, Godfrey Reggio and Alain Renais are a few filmmakers who I believe have talents of filmmaking to achieve Truth. What he doesn’t acknowledge is that cinema verite was never really about pure observation - it’s about the appearance of pure observation, satisfying an audience that lacks critical thinking ability and is wary of subjectivity. All the while, verite filmmakers were selecting from the choicest moments out of hundreds of hours to deliver their messages, and in that regard, verite is as crafted as any other documentary form. Dont Look Back (Pennebaker) or Titicut Follies (Weisman) definitely achieve Truth in my book. They might appear more straightforeward but they are as highly filtered as any Herzog movie.

I say all of this to explain what I got out of Herzog’s talk to myself as much as to anyone else who might read this post. Herzog made a couple of jabs at academia for its constant sifting thru which I guess ruins the magic of it all to his mind. For others, like myself, we use logic to knock down the building and put it back together again, not because we necessarily enjoy the work (although there are those) but because we think it might allow us to understand better how we might find a more consistant connection to the divine. When he advocates getting out and walking, Werner is really saying that occasionally we must set aside thinking and try to connect to the divine in a physical way aided by being exposed directly to energies of Nature. Thinking isn’t always the path.

I remember once being in a college math class. I had avoided taking it because though I’m a quite logical thinker, math has never come naturally to me. But I was blessed with a math teacher that actually showed me, for a few brief moments, Truth, right there in the numbers and symbols. I could never have achieved it on my own in that discipline. I needed the guide, but there it was. Herzog is also a guide. If you can’t find Truth in any of his films, just get out and walk: put your thoughts aside, allow air to fill your lungs and the heat of the sun to warm you. It’s right there.