tieman64
"Cinema Verité merely reaches a superficial truth; the truth of accountants. It confounds fact and truth, and thus ploughs only stones." – Werner Herzog"The White Diamond" finds director Werner Herzog following yet another character into the jungles. Our hero's name? Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical engineer tasked with flying a custom built airship over the leafy canopies of Guyana. From this mobile, airborne platform, Dorrington hopes future researchers will be able to photograph, up close, previously unseen and undocumented ecosystems. But what can Dorrington's camera, Herzog asks, really see?Herzog's adventurers typically suffer very specific existential breakdowns. They find their beliefs in various Master Signifiers (religion, capitalism, the ego, civilisation itself etc) collapsing, and so can no longer define themselves in relation to the various fixed points - what are essentially Gods - which humans, in their delusions, rabidly construct. Thrown into a tailspin, and freed from the psychoses inherent to humanity, Herzog's heroes then undergo subjective destitution and so find themselves confronting a horrific, lawless "Nature". Some collapse when confronted with Nature, others become empowered and try to take the universe on. All become unanchored, unthether themselves from society, and become "crazy", though in a sense their pathologies are not ungrounded but a perfectly "correct" and "rational" reaction.With "Diamond", though, Herzog gives us one of his sanest adventurers. Dorrington's been traumatically scarred by jungles in the past, and has both a burning desire and a very clear quest, but he never loses himself completely in his "eccentricities". Cacooned in high tech gear and modern safety equipment, Dorrington's an adventurer typical of Herzog's later documentaries, which tend to focus on humble inventors, scientists and modern explorers, rather than madcap madmen.Perhaps bored by Dorrington, Herzog quickly runs off in other directions. He eventually meets Marc Anthony Yhap, a local man who adores his pet rooster. From Yhap's personal story Herzog then fashions "Diamond's" meta-story. So here you have the tale of a simple man (Yhap) trapped in a jungle, with a flightless bird as a pet and a lost family living far away whom he can never meet unless he harnesses flight and so escapes the jungle's "gravity". Mirrored to this is Dorrington's oppositional journey, his desire to fly so that his cameras can penetrate the canopies and peer down into the jungles. These contrasting, oppositional motions crystallise during the film's second half, where Dorrington's camera desires to stare into a mysterious cave behind the Kaiteur Falls, a sacrilegious act which the local men feel should not be executed. To see into the caves is to demythologise the caves, they believe, shattering the legends that have sprung from these cavernous depths. Dorrington's camera peers into the caves, of course, but Herzog denies us this footage. The implication is that Dorrington's air ship demythologises the forest, ruptures a mystery that should be preserved, drearily observing all with its ubiquitous cameras. At the same time, his airship is itself an almost divine object, as sublime as the jungles, a machine-God which Marc Yhap romanticises and exalts as his (impossible) salvation. Maybe one day it will lift him out of the jungles. Maybe one day...Herzog admits he makes films to get only at their transcendent final shots. Here his last sequence crystallises his film's twin, conflicting motions, with white tipped swifts flying upwards as the Kaieteur Falls tumble, loudly, downwards; gravity and flight, man's drive to soar dwarfed by beautiful Lucifer himself. Unsurprisingly, one of the film's subplots involves the inability of man's balloons to overcome the powerful suction of the waterfall. Nature's pull always wins in the end.So like many of Herzog's later films, "Diamond" is implicitly concerned about technology's abilities and inabilities to dethrone God (where Herzog's "God" is not a literal deity but a wholly, malevolent, Schopenhaueren Nature), and, ironically, the necessity of technology and madcap star children like Dorringer to lift us out of the jungles. In this way, Herzog's trio of recent science fiction films play like messy, German rifts on Kubrick's own operatic "Space Odyssey".Like most of Herzog's supposed "documentaries", "Diamond" is also mostly fictional. Many of its scenes and conversations are staged, Dorrington's "dramas" are cooked up by Dorrington and Herzog, and the Marc Yhap character received heavy instructions. Though most see him as a chilled, somewhat romanticised native, Marc is perhaps just another shifty Guyanese local who knows how to sell himself to foreigners.Thankfully Herzog's whims are frequently hilarious. Unlike most film-makers, Herzog's more interested in a guy's pet rooster ("His name is Red. He has five wives. Yeah, my rooster's good"), and has no qualms nonchalantly interrupting his film to show a guy moon-walking before the Kaieteur Falls, an absurd moment which recalls the moon men in Kubrick's "2001", mockingly posing for photos before the divine.Herzog's distrust of both "realism" and the documentary format is itself a stance adopted by many film-makers. In Godard's "La Chinoise", for example, a character argues that Lumiere was a stylised, fictional filmmaker because he tried to pass off his "actualities" and "documentarian style" as "reality", and that George Melies was the realist of the two because he made it obvious that his films were fictional. Director's like Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Wajda, Jancso, Kieslowski etc, all of whom adopt a more metaphysical tone, have all made similar comments. In Herzog's case, the desire is to reach some invisible essence, what he calls "the ecstatic truth"; the reality beyond our visible, quotidian world, which is of course the opposite of what Dorrington seeks.As far as "documentaries" go, "Diamond" isn't particularly well shot, but Herzog's lines of enquiry are always interesting, his yearnings achingly human and his voice over narrations always funny in a droll, faux-serious way. Watching Herzog drift off into unplanned territory - little, sublime, stumbled-upon moments which pepper all his films - is also always fascinating, if not profound.8.5/10 – Interesting.
tedg
Watching a Herzog documentary is first a mystery about why it was made. About halfway through you understand why: an obsessed man made a flying balloon, mostly by making stuff up and killed his cinematographer. Now he wants to do it again, in a more dangerous location and Herzog wants to be the replacement cinematographer. Once in the jungle, we watch Herzog wangle to be on the maiden flight, clearly hoping for a disaster to film. He gets one: not fatal. It is hardly interesting, and the tortured scientist who supposedly is the center of thing is bore.Herzog's beautiful cinematography annotated by his profound gift of matching dreamy music to images turns even this mundane adventure into a spectacle, a thing of beauty. It is clearly not enough for him, so the man goes off in search of other beauty, and finds it in the face of a local man, "Red Beard." He's a Rastafarian, who we first see completely wasted; in that state he names the airship "the white diamond." We meet him, his medicinal plants, his beloved rooster and his dancing buddy. But the main character is an amazing waterfall, one in scope beyond my imagination for such a thing. We see this thing, this thing of wonder. It may be that no one but a practiced German can see mountains this way and convey majesty so powerfully. He sends a colleague down on a rope to examine the never-before-seen caves behind the falls. They are filmed, buy Herzog refuses to show it to us, because Red Beard, in his first appearance in the thing tells us that the caves are a holy mystery and showing them would ruin the nature of the place.From that moment on, Herzog complies and enters the simple world of amazed appreciation of this man. It is something he has done many times before. The result is that the images build and accrete. The crackpot guy gets to fly; his thing works, sorta. But that hardly matters by the end because we have the two men: Herzog and flyboy, belly down looking over a sharp cliff down the throat of the waterfall. They talk about the million swifts that live in the caves behind the falls. Then we get the payoff: we see those birds returning to their roost.Everything builds to this image. We have the camera at its perch, stationary, looking down. There is a quarter mile difference between groundlevels because one side of the earth is flowing skyward. In geological time, it remains for only an instant to allow us to place an eye, but for us, we cannot see the movement. There is the flow of the water, just as powerful, fighting the flow of the earth. They really did a good job on this, including a few earlier segments which showed its power. In one, a barechested German adventurer is lowered to make the film-never-to-be-shown, and we see the scale of things.And now we have the swifts. First we see them peppering the sky breathing in waves, but soon we look again down the waterfall and watch a million birds return to their still-secret roosts. They flow for ever so long, a stream of life woven into the two other streams. This image will stick to you for as long as you live, and I say that as someone who has seen something like this in life. The way Herzog has set up for this, and how he has established the flows is pure genius.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
