23 Feb The White Diamond (2004)

Flows, Roosters

Watching a Herzog documentary is first a mystery about why it was made. About halfway through you understand why: an obsessed man made a flying balloon, mostly by making stuff up and killed his cinematographer. Now he wants to do it again, in a more dangerous location and Herzog wants to be the replacement cinematographer. Once in the jungle, we watch Herzog wangle to be on the maiden flight, clearly hoping for a disaster to film.

He gets one: not fatal. It is hardly interesting, and the tortured scientist who supposedly is the center of thing is bore.

Herzog‘s beautiful cinematography annotated by his profound gift of matching dreamy music to images turns even this mundane adventure into a spectacle, a thing of beauty. It is clearly not enough for him, so the man goes off in search of other beauty, and finds it in the face of a local man, ‘Red Beard.‘ He’s a Rastafarian, who we first see completely wasted; in that state he names the airship ‘the white diamond.‘ We meet him, his medicinal plants, his beloved rooster and his dancing buddy.

But the main character is an amazing waterfall, one in scope beyond my imagination for such a thing. We see this thing, this thing of wonder. It may be that no one but a practiced German can see mountains this way and convey majesty so powerfully. He sends a colleague down on a rope to examine the never-before-seen caves behind the falls. They are filmed, buy Herzog refuses to show it to us, because Red Beard, in his first appearance in the thing tells us that the caves are a holy mystery and showing them would ruin the nature of the place.

From that moment on, Herzog complies and enters the simple world of amazed appreciation of this man. It is something he has done many times before. The result is that the images build and accrete. The crackpot guy gets to fly; his thing works, sorta. But that hardly matters by the end because we have the two men: Herzog and flyboy, belly down looking over a sharp cliff down the throat of the waterfall. They talk about the million swifts that live in the caves behind the falls. Then we get the payoff: we see those birds returning to their roost.

Everything builds to this image. We have the camera at its perch, stationary, looking down. There is a quarter mile difference between groundlevels because one side of the earth is flowing skyward. In geological time, it remains for only an instant to allow us to place an eye, but for us, we cannot see the movement. There is the flow of the water, just as powerful, fighting the flow of the earth. They really did a good job on this, including a few earlier segments which showed its power. In one, a barechested German adventurer is lowered to make the film-never-to-be-shown, and we see the scale of things.

And now we have the swifts. First we see them peppering the sky breathing in waves, but soon we look again down the waterfall and watch a million birds return to their still-secret roosts. They flow for ever so long, a stream of life woven into the two other streams. This image will stick to you for as long as you live, and I say that as someone who has seen something like this in life. The way Herzog has set up for this, and how he has established the flows is pure genius.

Posted in 2010

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB