I had a whole post ready to go about Werner Herzog and his connections to our views on history and what insights he has to offer us, when I realized--damn!-- Steve beat me to it. That's what I get for not reading my own blog carefully enough.
Still, I want to post a excerpt from an interview I heard with him this morning (I'm that nerd who listens to NPR podcasts on the subway), on "Fresh Air." It's a 10-year old interview, from when he released Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a documentary about a German-American pilot who escaped a war prison during the Vietnam War. It's the basis for his new feature, Rescue Dawn, which is a fictionalized version of Dieter's story. As Steve discussed earlier and Herzog himself says here, though, the line between documentary and fiction isn't necessarily clear.
"When you read Robert Frost and you have some very deep feeling about it, and all of a sudden you have this sensation there is this deep, inexplicable, mysterious truth in it. The same thing happens in movies, and it does not happen, strangely enough in most of the documentaries you would see on television. You do not see it in the so-called cinema verite, which can only scratch the surface of what is truth; it's an accountant's truth, it's a bookkeeper's truth. I have been for years after the questions of how you can dig into a very deep stratum of truth, into something inexplicable, something mysterious. You can reach it and you can find it, but normally through invention, through imagination, through fabrication. Sometimes even contorting and stylizing events right out there and then all of a sudden you will find something strange, deep and elusive...Much of [Little Dieter Needs to Fly] has been invented. There's a scene where he tries to explain how death looks for him, and he's standig in front of a tank with jellyfish. He simply treid to explain it to me what death was looking like for him, and he had no image. He described it in a way that i immediately figured it was jellyfish. He couldn't express it, but I had the image for it."
What I like so much about that quote is how it reaches out to me as an audience member, in a way that's different from how Steve was dealing with "ecstatic truth" as a writer. In plays like We Can't Reach You, Hartford and Daguerretoype, the "truth," the actual historical record, comes at you from so many angles, mixed in with other things that are extrapolations or outright fiction. Hearing the story of Little Miss 1565, maybe it was the detail about the detective who stayed with her in the morgue that broke your heart, or maybe it was her own-- in the Edinburgh version of the play, at least-- assertion that she has forgotten who she used to be. One of those details is true, and one is fiction, but the line between them no longer matters; they're part of the same truth, the same uniting emotion.
At the end of Daguerreotype (spoiler alert!) there are two deaths, one meticulously steeped in fact and one entirely imagined. For me, at least, it's the fictionalized death that always hits me hardest, makes me realize the play's ideas about legacy and death and holding on to the past, in a way that learning about Abraham Lincoln's head wound in 11th grade history never did. And isn't that the way history has always worked? What matters more, whether or not the famous photo at Iwo Jima was actually staged or the impact it had on the people who saw it? Who cares whether or not George Washington cut down the cherry tree? The fact that we trust the story tells us far more about who he was and who we are than the "accountant's truth" of his great battles and victories. So, then, history and historical theater aren't so different after all. We pick out what we want to remember, we embellish the details we like and gloss over the others that don't fit our plans. We tell history the way we choose. History is a long series of "ecstatic truths," and its the artists, the playwrights and the filmmakers, who get to tell it with props, with dream sequences and ghosts and hyper-kinetic Civil War re-enactments. Or, in Herzog's case, jellyfish. |
An investigative history of the Hartford Circus Fire of July 6th, 1944. Nominated for a Fringe First at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.