Werner Herzog
(Translated by Moira Weigel)
[This
text was originally delivered by Werner Herzog as a speech in Milano,
Italy, following a screening of his film “Lessons of Darkness” on the
fires in Kuwait. He was asked to speak about the Absolute, but he
spontaneously changed the subject to the Sublime. Because of that, a
good part of what follows was improvised in the moment.]
*
The collapse of the stellar universe will occur - like creation - in grandiose splendor.
Blaise Pascal
The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better.
This falsified and yet, as I will later demonstrate, not
falsified quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to
deal with in this discourse. Anyway, to acknowledge a fake as fake
contributes only to the triumph of accountants.
Why am I doing this, you might ask? The reason is simple and comes
not from theoretical, but rather from practical, considerations. With
this quotation as a prefix I elevate [erheben] the spectator,
before he has even seen the first frame, to a high level, from which to
enter the film. And I, the author of the film, do not let him descend
from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it.
After the first war in Iraq, as the oil fields burned in Kuwait, the
media—and here I mean television in particular—was in no position to
show what was, beyond being a war crime, an event of cosmic dimensions, a
crime against creation itself. There is not a single frame in Lessons of Darkness
in which you can recognize our planet; for this reason the film is
labeled “science fiction,” as if it could only have been shot in a
distant galaxy, hostile to life. At its premiere at the Berlin Film
Festival, the film met with an orgy of hate. From the raging cries of
the public I could make out only “aestheticization of horror.” And when I
found myself being threatened and spat at on the podium, I hit upon
only a single, banal response. “You cretins,” I said, “that’s what Dante
did in his Inferno, it’s what Goya did, and Hieronymus Bosch too.” In
my moment of need, without thinking about it, I had called upon the
guardian angels who familiarize us with the Absolute and the Sublime.
The Absolute, the Sublime, the Truth . . . What do these words mean?
This is, I must confess, the first time in my life that I have sought to
settle such questions outside of my work, which I understand, first and
foremost, in practical terms.
By way of qualification, I should add at once that I am not going to
venture a definition of the Absolute, even if that concept casts its
shadow over everything that I say here. The Absolute poses a
never-ending quandary for philosophy, religion, and mathematics.
Mathematics will probably come closest to getting it when someone
finally proves Riemann’s hypothesis. That question concerns the
distribution of prime numbers; unanswered since the nineteenth century,
it reaches into the depths of mathematical thinking. A prize of a
million dollars has been set aside for whoever solves it, and a
mathematical institute in Boston has allotted a thousand years for
someone to come up with a proof. The money is waiting for you, as is
your immortality. For two and a half thousand years, ever since Euclid,
this question has preoccupied mathematicians; if it turned out Riemann
and his brilliant hypothesis were not right, it would send unimaginable
shockwaves through the disciplines of mathematics and natural science. I
can only very vaguely begin to fathom the Absolute; I am in no position
to define the concept.
The Truth Of The Ocean
For now, I’ll stay on the trusted ground of praxis. Even if we cannot
really grasp it, I would like to tell you about an unforgettable
encounter I had with Truth while shooting Fitzcarraldo. We were
shooting in the Peruvian jungles east of the Andes between the Camisea
and Urubamba rivers, where I would later haul a huge steamship over a
mountain. The indigenous people who lived there, the Machiguengas, made
up a majority of the extras and had given us the permit to film on their
land. In addition to being paid, the Machiguengas wanted further
benefits: they wanted training for their local doctor and a boat, so
that they could bring their crops to market a few hundred kilometers
downriver themselves, instead of having to sell them through middlemen.
Finally, they wanted support in their fight for a legal title to the
area between the two rivers. One company after another had seized it in
order to plunder local stocks of wood; recently, oil firms had also been
casting a greedy eye on their land.
Every petition we entered for a deed vanished at once in the
labyrinthine provincial bureaucracy. Our attempts at bribery failed,
too. Finally, having traveled to the ministry responsible for such
things, in the capital city of Lima, I was told that, even if we could
argue for a legal title on historical and cultural grounds, there were
two stumbling blocks. First, the title was not contained in any legally
verifiable document, but supported only by hearsay, which was
irrelevant. Second, no one had ever surveyed the land in order to
provide a recognizable border.
To the latter end, I hired a surveyor, who furnished the Machiguengas
with a precise map of their homeland. That was my part in their truth:
it took the form of a delineation, a definition. I’ll admit, I quarreled
with the surveyor. The topographic map that he furnished was, he
explained, in certain ways incorrect. It did not correspond to the truth
because it did not take into account the curvature of the earth. In such a little piece of land? I asked, losing patience. Of course, he said angrily, and pushed his water glass toward me. Even
with a glass of water, you have to be clear about it, what we’re
dealing with is not an even surface. You should see the curvature of the
earth as you would see it on an ocean or a lake. If you were really
able to perceive it exactly as it is—but you are too simple-minded—you
would see the earth curve. I will never forget this harsh lesson.
The question of hearsay had a deeper dimension and required research
of an entirely different kind. [Arguing for their title to the land] the
Indians could only claim that they’d always been there; this they had
learned from their grandparents. When, finally, the case appeared
hopeless, I managed to get an audience with the President, [Fernando]
Belaúnde. The Machiguengas of Shivankoreni elected two representatives
to accompany me. [In the President’s office in Lima] when our
conversation threatened to come to a standstill, I presented Belaúnde
with the following argument: in Anglo-Saxon law, although hearsay is
generally inadmissible as evidence, it is not absolutely inadmissible. As early as 1916, in the case of Angu vs. Atta, a colonial court in the Gold Coast (today Ghana) ruled that hearsay could serve as a valid form of evidence.
That case was completely different. It had to do with the use of a
local governor’s palace; then, too, there were no documents, nothing
official that would have been relevant. But, the court ruled, the
overwhelming consensus in hearsay that countless tribesmen had repeated
and repeated, had come to constitute so manifest a truth that the court
could accept it without further restrictions. At this, Belaunde, who had
lived for many years in the jungle, fell quiet. He asked for a glass of
orange juice, then said only Good god, and I knew that we had
won him over. Today the Machiguengas have a title to their land; even
the consortium of oil firms that discovered one of the largest sources
of natural gas [in the world] directly in their vicinity respects it.
The audience with the President granted yet another odd glimpse into
the essence of truth. The inhabitants of the village of Shivakoreni were
not sure whether it was true that on the other side of the Andes there
was a monstrously large body of water, an ocean. In addition, there was
the fact that this monstrous water, the Pacific, was supposedly salty.
We drove to a restaurant on the beach a little south of Lima to eat.
But our two Indian delegates didn’t order anything. They went silent and
looked out over the breakers. They didn’t approach the water, just
stared at it. Then one asked for a bottle. I gave him my empty beer
bottle. No, that wasn’t right, it had to be a bottle that you could seal
well. So I bought a bottle of cheap Chilean red, had it uncorked, and
poured the wine out into the sand. We sent the bottle to the kitchen to
be cleaned as carefully as possible. Then the men took the bottle and
went, without a word, to the shoreline. Still wearing the new blue
jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts that we had bought for them at the market,
they waded in to the waves. They waded, looking over the expanse of the
Pacific Ocean, until the water reached their underarms. Then, they took
a taste of the water, filled the bottle and sealed it carefully with a
cork.
This bottle filled with water was their proof for the village that
there really was an ocean. I asked cautiously whether it wasn’t just a part of the truth. No, they said, if there is a bottle of seawater, then the whole ocean must be true as well.
The Assault of Virtual Reality
From then on, what constitutes truth—or, to put it in much simpler form, what constitutes reality—became
a greater mystery to me than it had been. The two intervening decades
have posed unprecedented challenges to our concept of reality.
When I speak of assaults on our understanding of reality, I am
referring to new technologies that, in the past twenty years, have
become general articles of everyday use: the digital special effects
that create new and imaginary realities in the cinema. It’s not that I
want to demonize these technologies; they have allowed the human
imagination to accomplish great things—for instance, reanimating
dinosaurs convincingly on screen. But, when we consider all the possible
forms of virtual reality that have become part of everyday life—in the
Internet, in video games, and on reality TV; sometimes also in strange
mixed forms—the question of what “real” reality is poses itself
constantly afresh.
What is really going on in the reality TV show Survivor?
Can we ever really trust a photograph, now that we know how easily
everything can be faked with Photoshop? Will we ever be able to
completely trust an email, when our twelve-year-old children can show us
that what we’re seeing is probably an attempt to steal our identity, or
perhaps a virus, a worm, or a “Trojan” that has wandered into our midst
and adopted every one of our characteristics? Do I already exist
somewhere, cloned, as many Doppelgänger, without knowing anything about it?
History offers one analogy to the extent of [change brought about by] the virtual, other
world that we are now being confronted with. For centuries and
centuries, warfare was essentially the same thing, clashing armies of
knights, who fought with swords and shields. Then, one day, these
warriors found themselves staring at each other across canons and
weapons. Warfare was never the same. We also know that innovations in
the development of military technology are irreversible. Here’s some
evidence that may be of interest: in parts of Japan in the early
seventeenth century, there was an attempt to do away with firearms, so
that samurai could fight one another hand to hand, with swords again.
This attempt was only very short-lived; it was impossible to sustain.
A couple of years ago, I came to grasp how confusing the concept of
reality has become, in a strange way, through an incident that took
place on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. A friend was having a little party
in his backyard—barbecued steak—it was already dark, when, not far
away, we heard a few gunshots that nobody took seriously until the
police helicopters showed up with searchlights on and commanded us, over
loudspeakers, to get inside the house. We sorted out the facts of the
case only in retrospect: a boy, described by witnesses as around
thirteen or fourteen years of age, had been loitering, hanging around a
restaurant about a block away from us. As a couple exited, the boy
yelled, This is for real, shot both with a semi-automatic, then fled on his skateboard. He was never caught. But the message [Botschaft] of the madman was clear: this here isn’t a videogame, these shots are for real, this is reality.
Axioms of Feeling
We must ask of reality: how important is it, really? And: how
important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the
factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of
illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the
factual, upon which the so-called cinéma vérité fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that the vérité—the
truth—at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book—in its
hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and,
so, correspond to reality. If we were to call everyone listed in the
phone book under the name “Schmidt,” hundreds of those we called would
confirm that they are called Schmidt; yes, their name is Schmidt.
In my film Fitzcarraldo, there is an exchange that raises
this question. Setting off into the unknown with his ship, Fitzcarraldo
stops over at one of the last outposts of civilization, a missionary
station:
Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say?
Missionary: We simply cannot cure them of their idea that ordinary life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.
The film is about an opera being staged in the rainforest; as you’ll
know, I set about actually producing opera. As I did, one maxim was
crucial for me: an entire world must undergo a transformation into
music, must become music; only then would we have produced
opera. What’s beautiful about opera is that reality doesn’t play any
role in it at all; and that what takes place in opera is the overcoming
of nature. When one looks at the libretti from operas (and here Verdi’s Force of Destiny
is a good example), one sees very quickly that the story itself is so
implausible, so removed from anything that we might actually experience
that the mathematical laws of probability are suspended. What happens in
the plot is impossible, but the power of music enables the spectator to
experience it as true.
It’s the same thing with the emotional world [Gefühlswelt]
of opera. The feelings are so abstracted; they cannot really be
subordinated to everyday human nature any longer, because they have been
concentrated and elevated to the most extreme degree and appear in
their purest form; and despite all that we perceive them, in opera, as
natural. Feelings in opera are, ultimately, like axioms in mathematics,
which cannot be concentrated and cannot be explained any further. The
axioms of feeling in the opera lead us, however, in the most secret
ways, on a direct path to the sublime. Here we could cite “Casta Diva”
in Bellini’s opera Norma as an example.
You might ask: why do I say that the sublime becomes accessible to us [lit. “experience-able”; erfahrbar]
in opera, of all forms, considering that opera did not innovate in any
essential way in the twentieth century, as other forms took its place?
This only seems to be a paradox: the direct experience of the
sublime in opera is not dependent on further development or new
developments. Its sublimity has enabled opera to survive.
Ecstatic Truth
Our entire sense of reality has been called into question. But I do
not want to dwell on this fact any longer, since what moves me has never
been reality, but a question that lies behind it [beyond; dahinter]: the question of truth. Sometimes facts so exceed our expectations—have such an unusual, bizarre power—that they seem unbelievable.
But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is
possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth,
which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it
through vision, style, and craft. In this context I see the quotation
from Blaise Bascal about the collapse of the stellar universe not as a
fake [“counterfeit”; Fälschung], but as a means of making
possible an ecstatic experience of inner, deeper truth. Just as it’s not
fakery when Michelangelo’s Pietà portrays Jesus as a 33-year-old man,
and his mother, the mother of God, as a 17-year-old.
However, we also gain our ability to have ecstatic experiences of
truth through the Sublime, through which we are able to elevate
ourselves over nature. Kant says: The irresistibility of the power
of nature forces us to recognize our physical impotence as natural
beings, but at the same time discloses our capacity to judge ourselves
independent of nature as well as superior to nature . . . I am leaving out some things here, for simplicity’s sake. Kant continues: In
this way nature is not estimated in our aesthetic judgment as sublime
because it excites fear, but because it summons up our power (which is
not of nature) . . .
I should treat Kant with the necessary caution, because his
explanations concerning the sublime are so very abstract that they have
always remained alien to me in my practical work. However, Dionysus
Longinus, whom I first came to know while exploring these subjects, is
much closer to my heart, because he always speaks in practical terms and
uses examples. We don’t know anything about Longinus. Experts aren’t
even sure that that’s really his name, and we can only guess that he
lived in the first century after Christ. Unfortunately, his essay On the Sublime
is also rather fragmentary. In the earliest writings that we have from
the tenth century, the Codex Parisinus 2036, there are pages missing
everywhere, sometimes entire bundles of pages.
Longinus proceeds systematically; here, at this time, I cannot even
start in on the structure of his text. But he always quotes very lively
examples from literature. And here I will, again, without following a
schematic order, seize upon what seems most important to me.
What’s fascinating is that, right at the beginning of his text,
[Longinus] invokes the concept of Ecstasy, even if he does so in a
different context than what I have identified as “ecstatic truth.” With
reference to rhetoric, Longinus says: Whatever is sublime does not
lead the listeners to persuasion but to a state of ecstasy; at every
time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us,
prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our
persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime
bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every
hearer . . . Here he uses the concept of ekstasis, a
person’s stepping out of himself into an elevated state—where we can
raise ourselves over our own nature—which the sublime reveals “at once,
like a thunder bolt.”1 No one before Longinus had spoken so
clearly of the experience of illumination; here, I am taking the liberty
to apply that notion to rare and fleeting moments in film.
He quotes Homer in order to demonstrate the sublimity of images and
their illuminating effect. Here is his example from the battle of the
gods:
Aidoneus, lord of the shades, in fear leapt he from his throne
and cried aloud, lest above him the earth be cloven by Poseidon, the
Shaker of Earth, and his abode be made plain to view for mortals and
immortals—the dread and dank abode, wherefor the very gods have
loathing: so great was the din that arose when the gods clashed in
strife.
Longinus was an extraordinarily well-read man, one who quotes
exactly. What is striking here is that he takes the liberty of welding
together two different passages from the Iliad. It is
impossible that this is a mistake. However, Longinus is not faking but,
rather, conceiving a new, deeper truth. He asserts that without truth [Wahrhaftigkeit]
and greatness of soul the sublime cannot come into being. And he quotes
a statement that researchers today ascribe either to Pythagoras or to
Demosthenes:
For truly beautiful is the statement of the man who, in response
to the question of what we have in common with the gods, answered: the
ability to do good [Wohltun] and truth.
We should not translate his euergesia simply with “charity,” imprinted as that notion is by Christian culture. Nor is the Greek word for truth, alêtheia, simple to grasp. Etymologically speaking, it comes from the verb lanthanein, “to hide,” and the related word lêthos, “the hidden,” “the concealed.” A-lêtheia
is, therefore, a form of negation, a negative definition: it is the
“not-hidden,” the revealed, the truth. Thinking through language [im sprachlichen Denken],
the Greeks meant, therefore, to define truth as an act of disclosure—a
gesture related to the cinema, where an object is set into the light and
then a latent, not yet visible image is conjured onto celluloid, where
it first must be developed, then disclosed.
The soul of the listener or the spectator completes this act itself;
the soul actualizes truth through the experience of sublimity: that is,
it completes an independent act of creation. Longinus says: For our
soul is raised out of nature through the truly sublime, sways with high
spirits, and is filled with proud joy, as it itself had created what it
hears.
But I don’t want to lose myself in Longinus, whom I always think of
as a good friend. I stand before you as someone who works with film. I
would like to point out some scenes from another film of mine as
evidence. A good example would be The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner where the concept of ecstasy already shows up in the title.
Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor and repeat world champion in
ski-flying, raises himself as if in religious ecstasy into the air. He
flies so frightfully far, he enters the region of death itself: only a
little farther, and he would not land on the steep slope, but rather
crash beyond it. Steiner speaks at the end of a young raven, which he
raised and which, in his loneliness as a child, was his only friend. The
raven lost more and more feathers, which probably had to do with the
feed that Steiner gave him. Other ravens attacked his raven and, in the
end, tortured him so frightfully that young Steiner had only one choice:
Unfortunately, I had to shoot him, says Steiner, because it was torture to watch how he was tortured by his own brothers because he could not fly any more.
And then, in a fast cut, we see Steiner—in place of his raven—flying,
in a terribly aesthetic frame, in extreme slow motion, slowed to
eternity. This is the majestic flight of a man whose face is contorted
by fear of death as if deranged by religious ecstasy. And then, shortly
before the death zone—beyond the slope, on the flat, where he would be
crushed on impact, as if he had jumped from the Empire State Building to
the pavement below—he lands softly, safely, and a written text is
superimposed upon the image. The text is drawn from the Swiss writer
Robert Walser and it reads:
I should be all alone in this world
Me, Steiner and no other living being.
No sun, no culture; I, naked on a high rock
No storm, no snow, no banks, no money
No time and no breath.
Then, finally, I would not be afraid any more.
Note
1. “Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt” (1.4).
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