Ecstatic Truth.

Speaking of Werner Herzog (we were), a few years back he issued a set of principles for documentary film which laid out his theory of “ecstatic truth.” He called this his Minnesota Declaration:

1) By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2) One well-known representative of Cinema Verité 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) Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only 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) Filmmakers of Cinema Verité 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 a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

(For those who are unaware or unsure, “cinema verité”– in this context, at least– is a style of documentary filmmaking wherein the filmmaker just sets up the camera and shoots what happens. No interaction with the subject, no fabrication, nothing contrived. No interviews. The idea is that truth or “reality” can be reached through “pure” observation.)

Herzog concedes that this Declaration is designed to be provocative. So consider The Agenda provoked. Roll this around in your head for a while and come back. We’ll break it down and tell you what we think about what Herzog says.



By the way, congrats to the Tampa Bay Rays for continuing to scoff at my curse and moving on to the World Series. As I said a little while back, you should have put all of your money on Tampa winning it all as soon as they became the only team I picked to make it out of the first round. It was as obvious then as it is now that they’re going to win it all.