Werner Herzog against Cinema Verite

Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema

"LESSONS OF DARKNESS"
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid ofverité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publiclythat truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to behonest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court whoresents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," hesays, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go toj
ail."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 makestheir inherent truth seem unbelievable.4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such athing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and canbe reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take picturesamid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crashthrough the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressureis mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, theformer wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "Youcan´t legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

Werner Herzog

from D-word