04 May 2009

I'm reading "Herzog on Herzog"

While waiting for my flight I just kind of opened up the book and noticed this toward the back:

The Minnesota Declaration
Truth and fact in documentary cinema


LESSONS OF DARKNESS
by Werner Herzog

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinéma Vérité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. he resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. 'For me,' he says, 'there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.' Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinéma Vérité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows on ly stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: 'You can't legislate stupidity.'
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walder Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 30, 1999)


5 comments:

la_sale_bete said...

love it, love it, love it.
hope you are having fun in Italia!

bella utahan said...

will you be in the south for the whole month??? looking forward to hearing more! happy traveling!

w. leavitt said...

we're here in puglia now trying to figure out our travel plans, but a trip up north should be in order.

Steve and Hailey said...

I'll be honest, your post doesn't mean very much to me. Of course I don't sleep very much lately and that could be just a part of it. I do want to comment on your profile picture...I really like it! It's a good shot of you. We hope you are having fun! It sounds like you are getting some amazing airfare.

la_sale_bete said...

more posting about what you've been up to lately, please.