Pmore than ever present in theaters, the documentary owes this resurgence on the big screen to the incredible flexibility of its current forms, to the freedom of those who make it and to the curiosity of those who watch and show it. The cinema of reality now extends as far as the eye can see. From the depths of the intimate to the digital waters of the installation, it is no longer time to put aside this or that documentary gesture and declare it obsolete. Only, perhaps, the expression “cinema verite” was definitively abandoned, as it was very early on by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, who had imported it to France. “Cinéma-vérité” immediately put off Werner Herzog, who denounced its claim to “a superficial truth, a truth of accountants”. For him, cinema is above all a place of secrets: a secret locked in the body of a former wild child (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser1974) or the incomprehensible chatter of Pennsylvanian cattle sellers as they sing their auctions (How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck1976). Maintaining this secret means refusing to force the throat of the person he is filming at all costs. So, in Grizzly Man2005, Herzog enters the frame, exposes himself to our eyes to listen through headphones to the death recorded by bear lover Tim Treadwell, at the exact moment the beast killed him. But Herzog does not make the viewer hear this ultimate and obscene reality.
“Cinéma-vérité” immediately put off Werner Herzog, who denounced its claim to “a superficial truth, a truth of accountants”.
From the legacy of the 1960s – synchronous sound, light camera and lasting shot – today’s documentary has made its honey. The technique of synchronous sound is now definitively established and “live” is taken as a model by the top of the television basket. What to expect, then, from real cinema in 2009? What does he have to gain by dabbling more with fiction, by not camping on his border like a warden? “Isn’t our notion of reality – today – as poor, inanimate, reduced, as a stuffed boar? », recently asked Claudio Pazienza, the director of Wild boar hunting scenes. Remains or fresh flesh? Picking from wherever you want, the documentary can save your skin, on the only condition… of risking it.
Traveler like no other, at the end of the world (Encounters at the End of the World2007) and even on its periphery (Beyond infinity2005), Werner Herzog risks it every time and has circulated freely since 1970 between documentary and fiction. Sometimes by extending one into the other, when he draws the acuity of his gaze on Kaspar Hauser from Future disabled et In the land of silence and darkness1971, or that he writes Rescue Dawn2006, from Little Dieter must fly1997, his documentary about a pilot taken prisoner in Vietnam. Now returning to the acting in Intimate enemies1999, the tribute to his friend Klaus Kinski, whom he directed in Aguirre, the wrath of God1972, Woyzeck1979, Fitzcarraldo1982, Nosferatu1979, et Green Snake1987. Sometimes finally by bringing to incandescence the fictional possibilities of science in the “documentary fantasies” that are Lessons of Darkness1992, et Beyond infinity.
Herzog’s most baroque, most expensive fictions and his most modest documentaries converge around an obsession: his fascination with exploits.
Charlotte Garson
Herzog’s most baroque, most expensive fictions (Fitzcarraldohis four hundred extras and his 360-ton boat to hoist over the Peruvian mountains), and his most modest documentaries converge around an obsession: his fascination with the exploit. Surviving in extreme conditions, as he himself did while walking from Paris to Munich in the winter of 1974, is what a disabled person and an athlete, a scientist and a conquistador, share. Ordeal or ecstasy, the filmed exploit allows us to reach an inner truth of the subject. This could be the definition of any documentary enterprise, except that Herzog chooses beings whose “inside” is already projected outside of themselves: the deaf and blind Fini Straubinger of Land of silence and darkness1971, who transfers hearing and speech to the palm of his hand by communicating using a tactile alphabet, or the carpenter and ski jumper of The Great Ecstasy of the wood sculptor Steiner1974, who literally gets laid, never sure that his enjoyment will not end in his death.
Ski jumping, this extreme Bavarian sport, metaphorizes the challenge of the act of filming according to Herzog. Each shoot combines insane faith with impeccable technical mastery.
Charlotte Garson
Ski jumping, this extreme Bavarian sport, metaphorizes the challenge of the act of filming according to Herzog. Each shoot combines insane faith with impeccable technical mastery. Like Steiner whose performance forces the organizers of jumping competitions to move the safety barriers, Herzog pushes the border between documentary and fiction but also between the film and its remake (Nosferatu takes up certain shots from Murnau’s eponymous film) and between the filmable and the invisible (the hypnosis of the actors, which gives an atmosphere of trance to Heart of Glass1976).
It is under the sign of a double journey, horizontal (he filmed on five continents) and vertical (mountains and skies, volcanic, oceanic and bodily depths), that the new territories of the documentary are inscribed. Herzog titled one of his essays The Morgana girl1970, based on the mirages which, in snowy regions, make one lose the sense of distances and demarcations. ◼
