Week of May 4, 2006, Issue #550
FILM
The Moviegoer
Paul Matwychuk / moviegoer@vueweekly.com
I put Werner Herzog’s unforgettable Grizzly Man, his film about a dangerously naïve naturalist named Timothy Treadwell, nearly at the top of my list of last year’s best films, but it wasn’t until this week that I caught up with The White Diamond, the other documentary he released in 2005 and which turns out to be equally miraculous.The film follows a British aeronautical engineer named Graham Dorrington on an expedition to Guyana, where he seeks to test a small, elegant white airship he’s designed and built, which he hopes will one day sail quietly above the leafy canopy of the region’s jungle, an incredibly diverse ecosystem that even today remains largely unexplored by humans.
However, it’s an even more mysterious location that truly piques Herzog’s curiosity: a cave behind a giant waterfall that houses an enormous flock of swifts.
The key moment of the film comes when one of Herzog’s crewmembers rappels down the waterfall to look inside the cave. Herzog lowers a camera down to him on a separate rope, but explains in his narration that he ultimately decided not to use any of that footage in the finished film. “Nobody knows what story lies behind there,” a former tribal leader tells Herzog. “I don’t think you should ever publish [your film of the cave]. What you see is yours. You keep it to yourself.”
Something similar happens in Grizzly Man when Herzog uses a pair of headphones to listen to an audiotape of Treadwell being mauled to death by a bear and tells us not only will he refuse to include the recording in his film but that, in his opinion, the tape should be destroyed outright.
There’s a certain amount of coy showmanship to these moments—you can practically hear Herzog chanting in his singsong German accent, “I know something you don’t know.” But I think there’s something much more serious going on in these movies—I think Herzog is making a tough moral choice, one that most mainstream directors refuse to make, much to their detriment.
When I say “moral choice,” I don’t mean that Herzog is refusing to show us sensual or violent images because he thinks sensuality and violence are somehow impure or detrimental to our spiritual well-being. No, Herzog is essentially telling those of us in the audience that we don’t deserve to see these images. They’re too sacred. If you want to earn the right to see them, you need to do more than simply pay the price of a movie ticket or a DVD rental. You need to be willing to travel to remote places, to prove yourself as a certain kind of human being, to show those images the proper respect and having taken them in, to know enough to follow Melville’s advice and keep them to yourself.
Maybe this all sounds a little featherheaded, but after watching The White Diamond, I found myself wondering whether a lot of that emptiness that I feel at the end of so many big-budget Hollywood blockbusters is my guilty conscience telling me I’ve simply seen too much.
Blockbusters are all about showing you as much amazing stuff as they can: spectacular explosions, huge car chases, gorgeous women, elaborate gunfights, all this stimulation that was manufactured much too easily by the studio and which I’ve bought at much too cheap a price. Done well, this kind of movie can be exhilarating, but when they’re done badly (as they are most of the time), you can actually feel your spirit being dragged down as you watch them, like the helium balloons that are pulled out of the air by the waterfall’s downdraft in The White Diamond. V