NELSON HANCOCK GALLERY

If you don't want to spend 150 euros to buy the complete box set from Herzog's website, you can see them one at a time in the coming weeks at the Film Forum

In recent reviews (like this good one by Eric Kohn), and interviews (like the Henry Rollins interview on youtube), Herzog discusses his enduring interest in devising innovative approaches to non-ficition filmmaking. To Eric Kohn he says:

Documentaries today are dated. I compare it to a medieval knight who would go to battle for centuries, and all of a sudden gets confronted with cannons and firearms. We have to ask questions about reality in a different way.

to Henry Rollins:

Everything is pointing towards a redefinition of reality. We have to start seeing and blocking and explaining and articulating reality in movies in a different way. Cinema verite was the answer of the 1960s. Today there is something else out there. I have always said ‘sure, reality has to be seen in a different way’ but that is not the interesting part. The interesting question is: Where is truth in all of this? Cinema verite is the accountant’s truth [but] I have always been after what I call an ecstatic truth, an ecstasy of truth … Facts do not create truth. Facts create norms but they do not create illumination.

posted by Nelson on May 17, 2007 4:38 PM