Documentation

In a 2009 interview film maker Werner Herzog made the following statement-

"You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise. Because I stylize, I invent, there’s a lot of fantasy in it—not for creating a fraud, but exactly the contrary, to create a deeper form of truth, which is not fact-related. Facts hardly ever give you any truth, and that’s a mistake of cinéma vérité, because they always postulate it as if facts would constitute truth. In that case, my answer is that the phone directory of Manhattan is a book of books. Because it has 4 million entries, and they are all factually correct, but it doesn’t illuminate us. You see, I do things for creating moments that illuminate you as an audience, and the same thing happens with feature films as well."

Is the role of the documentarian to simply organize facts and present the most clear picture of reality? Or is it, as Herzog suggests, to go beyond black and white facts and restructure to illuminate a deeper form of truth. Which school of thought gives a sense of gravity to the sense of truth in question… is it a case of fact vs. truth, or more complexly, true vs. truth? (Obviously this all takes for granted that the documentarian is a fair source of information.) What information proves to elevate reality from true to revelatory?

I am reading Haruki Murakami's book Underground, a collection of accounts based on the 1995 Tokyo gas attacks. I truly discovered it by chance, and for some reason a book with varied points of view of a horrific incident compiled by a modern surrealist-esque writer of fiction appealed to me. In the preface of Underground Murakami notes that he spent a large part of his interviews with the victims establishing the lives and personalities of the people themselves, who they were before they became statistics and news fodder. While the details of this effort (by t he admission of the author) only appeared in small ratio to the stories of that day, the information wove the stories together in an almost unconscious balance of the "irreducible humanity" Murakami, as a novelist, embraced. It was a conscious effort by the author to offset media reports dealing with facts and pure information that nonetheless devolved into an "us vs them" portrayal of faceless citizens and cruel perpetrators. The book, is structured quite masterfully, with factual information about each car that was hit, followed by the individual accounts based on interviews Murakami conducted with the willing participants. The interviews are all mainly the words of the subject, guided by Murakami's questions, but they are prefaced with brief, almost staccato introductions ("He speaks quickly, and never mulls over his words…He plays guitar…He always carries two lucky charms his wife gave him.") Descriptions, short and jagged like a jotted note or overheard party banter provide tiny glimpses into the victims and always lead to the final words of the intros which violently interrupt the pleasant trivialities with a sentence such as " Mr. Arima had the bad luck to catch the Marunouchi Line-which he doesn't usually take-and get gassed." The effect is jarring and elucidative. It is not so much the emotional effect of envisioning real people in difficult situations as it is contextualizing an event. Adding a sense of reality to what a news report or list of facts would seem to establish as "real."

Without such context we remain trapped in a constant good and evil battle of the unaware, condemned by dry figures with their lack of depth of reality into the tired cliché of "bad things happen to good people." Shrug and sigh. A true documentarian shouldn't let us get off so easy.

Through what filter do we document our own lives, and what do we believe because of it?