Lessons of Darkness

LESSONS OF DARKNESS

by Werner Herzog

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoide 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 easily be 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." Unfortunatly, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinéma Vérité 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. 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. Presure 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 continentsof solid land, where Lessons of Darkness continue.


Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, Minnesota
April 30 1999

* * * In the book Herzog On Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin, the following question was put forward regarding the conception and reasoning behind the Minnesota Declaration:


What was the starting point of your Minnesota Declaration?

The Minnesota Declaration is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and designed to provoke, but the ideas it deals with are those that my mind has been engaged with over many years, from my earliest 'documentaries' onwards. After wrestling with these issues - certainly since Land of Silence and Darkness - the question has become much more intense than ever in the last ten years with films like Bells from the deep, Death for Five Voices and little Dieter Needs to Fly. The word 'documentary' should be handled with care because we seem to have a very precise definition of what the word means. Yet this is only due to our need to easily catagorize films and the lack of a more appropriate concept for a whole range of cinema. Even though they are usually lablled as such, I would say that it is misleading to call films like Bells from the Deep and Death for Five Voices 'documentaries'. They merely come under the guise of 'documentaries'.

The background to the 'Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Filmaking' is a very simple one. I had flown from Europe to San Francisco and back again in a very short space of time and had ended up in Italy, where I was directing an opera. Jet-lagged as I was, I could not sleep and turned on the television at midnight to be confronted by a very stupid, uninspiring documentary, something excruciatingly boring about animals somewhere out there in the Serengeti, all very cute and fluffy. At 2 a.m. I turned on the television again and watched something equally bad, the same kind of crap you find on television whereever you go. But then at 4 a.m. I found some hard-core porno, and I sat up and said to myself, "My God, finally something straightforward, something real, even if its purely physical." For me the porno had real naked truth. For some time I had wanted to write some kind of manifesto, my thoughts about fact and truth in filmaking - and ecstatic truth - a rant against cinéma vérité. They contain, in a very condensed from, everything that has angered and moved me over the years.


Herzog on Herzog
Edited by Paul Cronin
Faber and Faber
2002