What is the difference between the work of Werner Herzog and the ideas and practices of Cinema Verite? Illustrate your essay with specific examples.

Werner Herzog is often referred to as the romantic visionary of German cinema. He has become “a symbol of the filmmaker as adventurer, vagabond, and daredevil” (Nowell-Smith, 1997, p.620), a man who is seen to be an “obsessed, half-crazed auteur willing to risk his life for a film” (Nowell-Smith, 1997, p.620). His protagonists are similarly crazed and obsessed people, searching to achieve their dream, which is invariably grounded in rebellion. Herzog’s work is infused with a sense of danger, originality of vision – a quest. He is a man who is “uninterested in ordinary domestic situations” (Cousins, 2004, p.357), and has therefore ventured further and further from his native home of Germany, in search of stories concerned with “people under pressure, on the edge, staring death in the face” (Cousins, 2004, p.357), much like what he himself seeks to experience. Herzog was one of several filmmakers who came to the fore during the New German Cinema movement, which lasted primarily between the 1960s and 1980s. Indeed, it was the 1950s and 1960s which saw great change to the face of cinema across the world.
Britain experienced ‘free cinema’, America had ‘direct cinema’ and France had the somewhat similar ‘cinema verite’ – meaning ‘cinema truth’. This method of filmmaking was born from radical experimentation and most importantly, technical breakthroughs which “produced nothing short of a revolution, radically altering structure and approach in documentary” (Rosenthal, 1996, p.265) filmmaking. The seed for Cinema Verite was sewn with the work of Dziga Vertov who sought to capture life as it appeared, filmed from the perspective of the unseen wanderer – the so-called ‘flaneur’. Vertov believed the camera could capture and understand actuality with unmatched clarity, but it is here that the link between Vertov and Verite severs – the former focussed on visual style, in-camera trickery and most famously creative editing, the latter took the freedom and perceived anonymity and literally ran with it.
To find and understand the difference – if there is indeed one – between the work of Herzog and the rebellious form of Cinema Verite, we must first seek to appreciate the New German Cinema movement, the work of Werner Herzog, as well as how the theology behind Verite has actually been put into practice since its conception.
During the 1960s, German cinema “experienced something of a reawakening” (Shiach, 2005, p.27) as a new group of young filmmakers (all under 30, children of the post-war climate) burst onto the scene. This group included (among several others) Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog – who, at the 1962 Oberhausen Film Festival, declared ‘the old cinema is dead, we believe in the new cinema’. Their attitude at the time was captured by their “idiosyncratic wilfulness, their denial of shared assumptions, and their ardent zeal to remain distinct” (Rentschler, 1988, p.185). They exemplified an abundance of experimentation and were regarded as “heralding the most promising development in German Cinema since German Expressionism.” (Cook and Bernink, 1999, p.69) While Cinema Verite was kicking against the documentarian establishment, the New German Cinema was refusing to be held prisoner by both the uneasy history of German film and the relatively recent Nazi regime. This new breed of Germanic filmmaking sought to transcend the country’s problematic past. However, despite the insistence of mainly foreign commentators, Herzog himself failed to recognise the movement as cohesive, nor did he recognise himself as being a part of it. One could suggest that his involvement broke free after the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962, and while he was one of Germany’s up and coming young auteurs, Herzog was exploring his own creative path.
Even with a cursory examination of Herzog’s filmmaking, one can suggest that perhaps he uses his art as a mirror unto himself – despite his personal distaste of self-examination (he claims not to know the colour of his eyes). This examination, therefore, is – if it indeed exists – quite possibly a subconscious act, as well as part of the maze-like and somewhat contradictory mythology surrounding Werner Herzog. This mythology is part discredited, and part inspired by the man himself, his productions having become notoriously dangerous – or even life threatening – such as the strained filming circumstances of Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). These strains no doubt partly due to Herzog’s muse, Klaus Kinski (whom Herzog focused on in his 1999 documentary My Best Fiend) – a man of similar obsession and controlled insanity. Herzog’s filmmaking displays a “penchant for depicting states of the insane and the illogical” (Mendik and Schneider, 2002, p.8), and is “characterised by metaphors that refused to reveal the actualite of which they spoke: the vague sense of man against nature, or God” (Mendik and Schneider, 2002, p.153).
Aguirre, the first of five collaborations with Kinski, is loosely based upon the ill-fated voyage to discover the riches of El Dorado, by Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre. The anti-hero descends into madness and crazed rebellion for superiority against his fellow man and surroundings, which spell doom for his expedition party. The film is typically Herzogian, there is no clearly good-natured protagonist and in the case of Aguirre, the lead drifts into an “immaterial place, still driven by material gain; a sad commentary on the indestructibility of human avarice, evil, and irrationality” (Schneider, 2006). Recently, Herzog admitted that the majority of Aguirre is fictional, with only a few historical details translated into the script. The film itself was partly constructed through improvisation, which lends an air of realism to the ‘based on truth’ nature of the film, Herzog even famously referred to storyboarding as the ‘disease of Hollywood’ (Schneider, 2006).
Similar to Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo is loosely based on Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo’s dream of bringing the opera to Iquitos, rather than traversing the Amazon to reach Manaus. His mission involved the transporting of a steam ship across a mountain, and likewise Herzog did the same to attain a deep (and precarious) sense of realism – in a way, re-enacting reality. Herzog’s fiction “functions as documentaries of the mystery of its own coming-into-being. His documentary work offers a converse reflexivity in Herzog’s naked admission that he influences events in front of the camera” (Padania, date unknown). He illustrates a penchant for creating a sense of withdrawal with his camerawork, the roving eye providing further senses of detachment – a style commonly found in Cinema Verite, a movement which went hand-in-hand with the new cinemas of France, Britain and the USA in the 1960s. As the New German Cinema arrived at the same time, it is not unreasonable to link it with its rebellious cinematic siblings elsewhere. Likewise, one could suggest that as Cinema Verite was closely tied with the new cinematic movements, perhaps this newly discovered documentary aesthetic was linked to the work of the new, young Germanic filmmakers – including Herzog. Perhaps not via an obvious path, but via the back routes – a subtle underscore.
Werner Herzog has produced both films and documentaries, but has created many more of the latter. However, his approach to documentary is unique, distanced, and dream-like. Lessons of Darkness (1992), much like his earlier Fata Morgana (1971), observes a landscape (in this case the burning Kuwaiti oil fires) with an impartial eye. Herzog sought to view landscapes as if he were an alien visiting Earth, which in turn has lead him to observe – what would otherwise be traditionally documented by others – with a visual approach, which resembles a dream state. Lessons is almost devoid of commentary and, on one hand, exhibits the isolated observer style of Cinema Verite. However, the key contradiction lies in Herzog’s very personally constructed way of observing at a distance, as if he takes the ordinary and re-paints the existing picture in his own imagination.
Grizzly Man (2005) documents the life of environmentalist Timothy Treadwell, who co-existed with wild bears for thirteen summers before being attacked and killed. Using footage that Treadwell himself shot, Herzog, like in his previous documentaries, gathers the existing information and reforms it into his own creation. It is clear why Herzog was drawn to the project, the simple tale of man versus nature, mirrors his own fascination with, and his relation to it. He even compliments Treadwell’s eye for landscape photography and is respectful of his frenzied self-invention before the camera. It appears as if Herzog has projected himself upon this documentary, even advising, on camera, a relative of Treadwell’s to never listen to, and destroy the audio of the man’s death.
Herzog has attacked the “failure of cinema verite to go beyond a superficial ‘truth of accountants’ based in objectively observable facts” (Church, 2006) – he seeks, what he calls, ‘ecstatic truth’, which can only be gained via imagination and stylisation. Herzog appears to take the spirit of the movement, but has re-interpreted the aims. Indeed, he once was noted as saying he does not believe in Cinema Verite and that a good lie is preferable to the truth, which perhaps he sees as too mundane.
Through his own filmmaking, Herzog has sought to analyse and identify with his subjects, perhaps to subconsciously reflect on himself as he is said to refuse to do so consciously. Despite his attack on Verite, it is somewhat ironic that the documenting style allows the viewer (or filmmaker in this instance) to enjoy vicarious participation and to indulge in a contradictory journey of, on one hand, acting as the invisible flaneur, and on the other, to influence proceedings after-the-fact (e.g. editing, narration, or lack thereof). “The cinema-verite instruments as well as the cinema-verite style produced an anticipation of more knowledge” (Gaines, 1999, p.107), which is a strange suggestion considering the confused and contradictory nature of the form itself. While Cinema Direct is considered to take an observational approach, Cinema Verite is considered to seek to confront (Nowell-Smith, 1997) – yet both instances are essentially one and the same, having been inspired by the same socio-political and cinematic climates at the same point in history. To make the form ever more confused, other commentators suggest that Cinema Verite provides a ‘participant observer’ relationship between the filmmaker and their subject, the former acting as both provoking intruder and silent witness.
In practice, the complex theory surrounding Cinema Verite becomes clearer – returning to the original intent, irrespective of individual interpretations. Verite “rejects the requisite distance of voyeurism and relinquishes the proximity of fetishism as soon as it comes close to the object, relinquishes the having of the object in favour of just watching it” (Gaines, 1999, p.107). Indeed, it is this internal frustration and indecision, which provides Cinema Verite with its unique, yet hard to define, style. However, there is an inherent problem with the documentary format, which aids the filmmaker but cheats the viewer. Simply being told we are watching a documentary, we automatically assume the events unfolding are indeed ‘cinema truth’ – this allows the form to become easily manipulated (e.g. Michael Moore) or even lampooned (e.g. ‘mockumentaries’). A standard documentary retains a formal stylistic approach, but “the look and sound of cinema verite documentary can elicit viewer’s uncritical belief in what they are shown” (Bordwell and Thompson, 2001, p.112) – the ‘hand held’ nature of proceedings suggest a more life-like and truthful ruggedness, even if the image quality and editing are slick.
Despite Werner Herzog’s distaste for what he views Cinema Verite to be, due to the format’s fluid nature and by examining Herzog’s technique, one could suggest that there does exist an undercurrent of Verite in his work. However, due to the aforementioned fluidity, his work is equally not related to the movement in question. With Verite, the filmmaker’s goal is to respond to “presentations of self rather than to re-present, and therefore construct, the subject according to his own preconceptions” (Nowell-Smith, 1997, p.527).
Cinema Verite was born out of technical advances and a revolution within the film industry, and at the same time the New German Cinema was developing. Lighter, quieter and much more reliable equipment inspired the basic idea behind Verite – to capture events as they unfold; for the filmmaker to cause as little disturbance to the subject as possible during filming. The form typically follows a single person or event, through a journey or crisis. Interviews are at best limited (but more often than not, non-existent). As the shooting process is generally an uninvolved procedure on the filmmaker’s part, the film is truly made in the editing room. Verite is a form bound to high shooting ratios (as high as one hour of raw footage for one minute of edited footage). Essentially, the filmmaker creates a story from disparate – yet connected – footage. Since its inception, Verite has changed and been manipulated over the course of time to the point that today the form has split, with one half regaining the traditional ‘talking heads’ part of traditional documentary filmmaking. Most importantly however, the influence of the director has grown and become as important (if not more so) than the subject matter itself.
Werner Herzog’s work blurs the boundaries of film and documentary, reality and fiction, and typically focuses on single figures – obsessive or border-line insane protagonists. His films, whether fictional or documentary, are steeped with a love of nature and man’s struggle within it (as well as with himself). Due to his chaotic and challenging productions, Herzog’s career has almost completely become a mythological entity unto itself. While on one hand his fiction films refused to recognise contemporary socio-political issues, a sense of reality was infused within them – the filmmakers treading similar ground to the original men whose stories are retold by Herzog. “The physical feat and dangers of the production process became absorbed into the emotions that appeared on screen” (Cousins, 2004, p.357)
The obvious difference between Herzog’s work and Cinema Verite is that Herzog is creating films merely based on actuality. Even his documentary work, such as Lessons of Darkness, utilises a filmmaker’s eye to re-interpret reality. Despite the taste for improvisation and physical realism, Herzog’s films are scripted – they are constructs – they are planned and they are ultimately the work of a dedicated team of people. His stories are retold in his own vision; he seeks to make the viewer see what he sees. His work is connected with running themes – man, nature, obsession, insanity and working against the odds. However, much like Cinema Verite, the camerawork within his films remains often handheld and at a distance to the subject. It is removed and observational – precisely the technique used in Verite. Grizzly Man likewise displays several traits reminiscent of the technique. The self-shot footage (by Treadwell) was copious (100 hours of raw footage) and was trimmed down by Herzog – a figure who was previously completely uninvolved in the subject matter. Much like verite, the film was made in the editing from a somewhat withdrawn back catalogue of real life moments.
The works of Werner Herzog, and the nature of Cinema Verite, are complex and contradictory bodies. They are hard-to-define, they transcend blurred boundaries and they take many forms in varying degrees of connection to the original theory behind the form, be it fictional storytelling or impartial documentary. Herzog and Cinema Verite go together because they are equally contradictory, but similarly they don’t go together because they are equally contradictory. The question is, in a sense, unanswerable. There is no clear definition of who Herzog is, or what his work ultimately represents beyond a reflection of himself and his subconscious. There is also no clear definition of precisely what Cinema Verite actually is. Both these entities of the filmmaking world assume a variety of forms and degrees of concentration, and ultimately contradict their foundations.