In a NY Times interview, Werner Herzog, the legendary German filmmaker, responds to accusations that he’s taken liberties with facts in some of his documentaries and his latest feature, “Rescue Dawn:”
"If we are paying attention about facts, we end up as accountants. If you find out that yes, here or there, a fact has been modified or has been imagined, it will be a triumph of the accountants to tell me so. But we are into illumination for the sake of a deeper truth, for an ecstasy of truth, for something we can experience once in a while in great literature and great cinema. I’m imagining and staging and using my fantasies. Only that will illuminate us. Otherwise, if you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate."
This statement reminds me of Stephen Glass and also the controversy around fabricated interviews with celebrities in the German SZ-Magazin (the equivalent to the NY Times magazine) several years ago, marking the end of “pop-journalism,” a free-spirited, highly damatized and subjective approach to documenting people and events (long before Lonelygirl15!).
I must say I still have a lot of sympathy for the pop-journalists, and I wholeheartedly agree with Herzog. I’m not saying making up or distorting facts is a prerequisite of great journalism, but facts can appear wrong when the solipstic truth behind them is not meaningful. Storytellers – and that includes both filmmakers and journalists - know too well that the moral of the story is that there is no story without moral.
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