Herzog enchants and asks tough questions - The Ecstatic truth at Eye film museum

The Ecstatic Truth, the new exhibition at Eye film museum about German filmmaker Werner Herzog, is as unapproachable as the man himself. In the huge space ( the room is about 700m2), there are large screens set up, and a few tables with objects. It is dark. Hardly props, no costumes, nothing that distracts from the man and his work. Uncompromising, yet inviting.

The exhibition opens with film clips in which Volker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders talk about Herzog. Has he changed since the men were part of the Neue Deutscher Film in the 1960s? Not really, they think, maybe he has softened up. Wenders says he has a bit of a sense of humour now, which certainly used to be different. Humourless and deranged, or ruthless, uncompromising, driven? It's just where you put the focus.

Berlin's Deutsche Kinemathek showed the exhibition earlier, on the occasion of Herzog's 80th birthday. The Amsterdam version is slightly different: less props and costumes, darker, and all the focus is on the films.

Enchanting men

My first introduction to Werner Herzog was his film Wodaabe, die Hirten der Sonne from 1989. A beautiful film about the nomadic Wodaabe men in southern Sahara, who woo women during a multi-day festival by jumping as high as possible. Decked out in make-up, jewellery and their finest clothes, they show their best side. Ave Maria is the score; it is not an ethnographic document, but a universal film about young philandering men. Herzog: "The music helps us out of the reality that I call 'the truth of the accountant'; anything else would never touch us so deeply. The film is not a documentary about a specific African tribe, but a story about beauty and desire." An enchanting film, it will be seen again this summer.

His truth, ecstatic truth, is one of extreme circumstances, outcasts and misfits, dreamers and those condemned to death. Sometimes he gives circumstances a helping hand by staging images. Because if we want the unmanipulated truth, that of the accountants, we just watch a security camera.
Passion can certainly not be denied the man. Famous are the films in which he seeks or shows danger.

Grizzly man and moral choices

Grizzly Man is perhaps the best known, in which a man obsessively follows and films a bear until it is eaten. The documentary does not show us the images, does not let us hear sounds, but rather Herzog's reaction to the sound. Perhaps that is equally cruel; after all, our brains fill in the rest. In this way, he holds up a mirror to us: from the first screening, the audience knows what is going to happen. It is not nice, not comforting, not helpful, there is no catharsis. So why do we want to see it anyway? What is our perverse fascination with accidents? He asks the question, but is careful not to give an answer. Are his films about his own voyeurism or ours?

In the case of people who seek danger by chasing bears or volcanoes, you can still somewhat shrug off the idea that people have brought their own doom upon themselves. But what about images of war? In Lektionen in Finsternis shows Herzog destroying oil fields and seas of fire of the second Gulf War. Hyper-aesthetic, with Wagner as soundtrack. Is that ethical? And is it substantially different from our news consumption at the time of that war? The whole world was glued to CNN where the start of the war was documented like a video game. Herzog shows without commentary, or with his own, somewhat turgid, lyrics. It remains detached until the moment when he shows a woman who has gone through so much suffering that she can no longer speak. And then it comes in, much more than a news report.

This is an excerpt on show in the exhibition. And with this, Jaap Guldemond shows himself to be a gifted curator: he knows exactly how to choose the right fragments from the more than seventy films and documentaries Herzog has made. He shows the extremely driven artist, the moral dilemmas that characterise his work, the questions he raises and the beauty. Like the films themselves, the exhibition leaves room for ambiguity, for the questions and doubts. But above all, it encourages you to go and watch. And you can, because in Eye, but also in many other film theatres, a selection of some thirty films will be shown this summer.