Werner Herzog: What Constitutes Truth?
Werner Herzog directed Rescue Dawn, the story of Dieter Dengler, the only U.S. pilot to successfully escape from a North Vietnamese-controlled prison.
In an audio NPR interview Herzog says:
What constitutes truth? In, for example, a great poem, 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 some deep inexplicable and mysterious truth in it; and the same thing happens in movies.
And it does not happen strangely enough in most of the documentaries that you would see on television. You would not find it in the so-called cinéma vérité which can only scratch the surface of what is truth: it’s the accountant’s truth; it’s the bookkeeper’s truth.
And yet I have been for years after the question: how can you dig into a very deep stratum of truth, into something inexplicable, something mysterious?
And, of course, 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 and deep and elusive and that is a certain truth.
[via Sarah Allen]