The conflict between facts and the truth is a conflict between art and the sciences. Sciences are based around the search for and the achievement of verified truth, whereas art typically does not allow truth to stand in the way of storytelling.
Up until literacy became common, the majority of stories told were of an oral variety that could change extemporaneously based on who was telling the story and what was included. Modern fictional narratives are the descendants of those tales, built on the same principles.
I think it's problematic to conflate facts and truth. I think the sciences search for facts, but rarely reach the truth. The truth changes as much for scientists as it does for the rest of us, including storytellers, I find. It might seem semantical, but facts don't tell you much about the experience of reality, and I think that's what Herzog is getting at here.
I can’t even afford to buy you a cup of coffee right now. But here is an IOU for a few months from now. Such a great article. I’ll carry it with me to the keyboard today.
Well, the comment is almost as good. Thanks, Daniela. And I get it, trust me. If you feel like supporting the Substack, though, please recommend it and/or share it on social media. It helps expand the group of people having this arts conversation here!
Great story. Thanks. I am a fprmer member of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictur on NYC. I post daily on Substack, mostly on spiritual capitalism, practical philosophy, applied game theory, solutions to specific problems, and wealth-building hacks - Lewis
He makes some fair points. But the truth is a hard reality, it's just we're still so low on our evolutionary ladder, it's difficult for us to perceive because we're still rooted in our primordia of tribal fears of the different and the unknown.
But hardwired reality doesn't care about how we see it through our human filters. Still, it remains steadfast in its actuality whether we understand it or not.
I think facts and truth are very different things. It might seem semantical, but facts don't tell you much about the experience of reality, and I think that's what Herzog is getting at here. To find the truth, you need a degree of poetry.
I certainly think that's true when it comes to existentialism. I was referring to the hardwired corporeality of life, the set in stone history. But yes, when it comes to what truth is in meaningfulness, a degree of poetry would be ideal.
But that's the thing, I can't think of much of history that's set in stone. We were taught "facts" for centuries about colonization and colonized peoples. All of it was pretty much propaganda and often completed divested from actual facts. History is a story we tell ourselves, I think. And the story keeps changing. So how much "set in stone history" can we point to besides the most macro descriptions of things like "someone named Saladin once existed and was a participant in X, Y, and Z battles"? The facts that we can agree on are so boring as to not even possess something I'd describe as truth. What I mean is, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. That's a fact that means nothing. The truth about it, if there is any, is in how you interpret a lot of tangential events and cultural and political factors, no?
I think history exists outside of our societal perceptions. Events occur in real time, and sure, they're all subject to interpretation, but Lincoln dying from a bullet happened outside of how we remember it. Same is true for colonial imperialism. I do not think the Indigenous peoples of North America, Africa, and the rest of the world see those events as propaganda, They actually happened. As evidenced not by collective societal intergenerational histories passed down classroom to classroom, but by hard archaeology and anthropology. Sure, history is whitewashed by the ruling class and the people who get to determine what's put into books for children to absorb. But that history still existed outside of how we remember it. I don't think facts, when it comes to how humanity's caste system has sabotaged the entire planet, is subject to interpretation if being viewed outside our civilization and its subjective leanings toward altering 'facts' into opinions or perspectives. That's a ruling class conceit that's been operating for tens of thousands of years. But it doesn't change how the history actually went down. You and I chatting here actually happened, and whether or not Chris Best or Hamish Mackenzie say it happened a certain way after we finish chatting, it did in fact happen. That part of it is indeed set in stone, thanks to space, time, and dimension. :)
Ah, Werner Herzog! A friend introduced me to his movies by showing Even Dwarfs Started Small. One of the highlights of my life in L.A. was seeing him speak about Fitzcaralldo and the making of it (Burden of Dreams) in a small movie theater on Montana.
We always like to quote him and say: “The birds don’t sing, they screech in pain.”
For anyone who hasn’t seen Herzog movies, what would you recommend they start with? (I don’t recommend starting the way I did but I love Herzog nevertheless!)
I think FITZCARRALDO is the perfect place to start. It's brilliant. Once you're finished, I'd then watch the doc about its making, which is amazing. AGUIRRE WRATH OF GOD would also be an excellent start. When you're finished, you could then watch his doc MY FRIEND KLAUS about Herzog's troubled relationship with his friend/star Klaus Kinski (which even involved contemplating murdering him).
I think I need to write longer on this but I have been thinking about this since this morning, and I don't think I agree. Maybe its because I am history nerd, but this very much feels to me like an excuse to use the weight that supposed truth gives you to say what you want to say. Sorkin, for example, in the Social Network, wanted to write an anti-hero story and so ended up making Zuckerberg much more sympatric in the film than he deserved in real life, even at the time. The people who did the American version of House of Cards apparently didn't understand the first thing about how American politics actually work so they could tell the easy story of corruption and cynicism without having to dela with the reality of making a disparate country function -- and what it says about our country and our country's worship of the founding generation that doing so is so hard and so vicious.
I can give other examples. (And heck, I am a hypocrite on this point -- I wrote a script about a female clockmaker trying to hold onto her shop in early modern Germany that ends with her essentially inventing the prosthetic industry, something that absolutely did not happen on that scale at that time.) But it feels as if Herzog doesn't want the truth -- he wants the power history gives him to leverage it into whatever he wants to say. Because facts complicate our nice, easy stories they are important to actually understanding human beings and the human condition. The facts make it harder to tell the tale you want, and I think that is both good and leads to more honest looks at the human condition.
On the other hand, movies are their own separate thing and writers and directors have to make choices about what to emphasize -- much like historians have to do. And such emphasis does tell a story. But it should be a story constrained by actual human facts. The idea that facts get in the way of actual truth? I think that is more self-serving than actually, well, true.
The problem is, for my money at least: facts change. We learn new things. Relying on them to tell a story about a Medieval royal conflict does little to illuminate the subject, too. The facts don't involve the human experience of them. They're cold and unfeeling. What it was like to be at the Battle of Waterloo, for example, is not something that can be expressed by simply dramatizing facts. You need to find the truth of the experience or audiences don't care and, thus, fail to find illumination. It gets even more complicated when you do follow facts and the facts interrupt the truth. An example here is how Victorians casually spoke. If you attempted to recreate that accurately, audiences would reject the facts. The poetry of literature has supplanted the facts, and consequently we can only find truth through lies. I find all this heady talk. There's no one answer, of course.
I agree and disagree. Yes, there are certain facts that do not translate, that are superfluous, that do not convey meaningful information. But if you completely ignore facts in search of a higher truth, then you run the very real risk of misunderstanding the truth. If you show Napolean at Waterloo being chap with his men's lives to make the point that ar is bad or dictators bad, then you miss out on why men would follow a dictator and war-monger into battle -- an important truth is missed because the creator ignored the facts.
And to me, that is the greater danger. We have human history that shows us how humans actually behave. We can learn from that, but if we ignore facts that do not fit our story, then we aren't actually learning, we aren't actually reaching a meaningful truth, IMO.
As you said, there is no right answers, but I instinctively mistrust the notion that there is a truth the supersedes the lived experiences of the people of history. IMO, artists that want to get to the truth should be studying those experiences, not discounting them. Yes, it must be balanced with the needs of story and modern expectations, but the truth relies on the facts, IMO.
I have numerous friends who are historians, and very few of them believe history isn't fluid given how rapidly our understanding of it changes. Fidelity to it is itself a risky endeavor, I think. But here's a fun fact: A film generally considered to be one of the most accurate -- truthful -- historical films made about England's Middle Ages is A KNIGHT'S TALE. The whole thing is fiction that wildly distorts facts and yet it provides one of the best understandings of the period that cinema has managed to produce. Go figure.
Knight's Tale is a great film, and I agree that history is fluid. As the saying goes, we will be amazed tomorrow at what we knew today. But I think that one of the reasons Knight's Tale works is because it respects the facts. It took the facts about the social relationships, the place of tourneys in the medieval social life, etc. and turned them into a movie that reflected the truth of the time even if most of the factual details were wrong. And I may be a hypocrite because the one script i have written is very much in the Knight's Tales tradition -- a story that I hope respects the facts of being a female shop owner in early modern Germany that does not actually get all the details correct.
But I read that different than what Sorkin did in Social Network or the writers did in House of Cards and what I think that Herzog is arguing for. They put their conception of the story they wanted to tell ahead of respecting the reality of the facts in a way that Knight's Tale did.
I don't know, maybe I am closer in an agreement with you than it seems. But I think the distinction between respecting what we understand the facts to mean today to build the story on and throwing that respect away in order to leverage the belief among people that history must be "true" in order to tell a story that you believe in, facts or no facts.
This is quite an enjoyable read. I've never heard of this guy, but I will have to check him out.
He's one of the most prolific and celebrated filmmakers of the past fifty years. You won't be disappointed.
The conflict between facts and the truth is a conflict between art and the sciences. Sciences are based around the search for and the achievement of verified truth, whereas art typically does not allow truth to stand in the way of storytelling.
Up until literacy became common, the majority of stories told were of an oral variety that could change extemporaneously based on who was telling the story and what was included. Modern fictional narratives are the descendants of those tales, built on the same principles.
I think it's problematic to conflate facts and truth. I think the sciences search for facts, but rarely reach the truth. The truth changes as much for scientists as it does for the rest of us, including storytellers, I find. It might seem semantical, but facts don't tell you much about the experience of reality, and I think that's what Herzog is getting at here.
I like that bit about Jesse Ventura. I bet he and Herzog would make a great team.
I can’t even afford to buy you a cup of coffee right now. But here is an IOU for a few months from now. Such a great article. I’ll carry it with me to the keyboard today.
Well, the comment is almost as good. Thanks, Daniela. And I get it, trust me. If you feel like supporting the Substack, though, please recommend it and/or share it on social media. It helps expand the group of people having this arts conversation here!
Lots of great tidbits in here, but I especially like the idea about oceans (#12). It does seem terrifying....
Great story. Thanks. I am a fprmer member of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictur on NYC. I post daily on Substack, mostly on spiritual capitalism, practical philosophy, applied game theory, solutions to specific problems, and wealth-building hacks - Lewis
He makes some fair points. But the truth is a hard reality, it's just we're still so low on our evolutionary ladder, it's difficult for us to perceive because we're still rooted in our primordia of tribal fears of the different and the unknown.
But hardwired reality doesn't care about how we see it through our human filters. Still, it remains steadfast in its actuality whether we understand it or not.
I think facts and truth are very different things. It might seem semantical, but facts don't tell you much about the experience of reality, and I think that's what Herzog is getting at here. To find the truth, you need a degree of poetry.
I certainly think that's true when it comes to existentialism. I was referring to the hardwired corporeality of life, the set in stone history. But yes, when it comes to what truth is in meaningfulness, a degree of poetry would be ideal.
But that's the thing, I can't think of much of history that's set in stone. We were taught "facts" for centuries about colonization and colonized peoples. All of it was pretty much propaganda and often completed divested from actual facts. History is a story we tell ourselves, I think. And the story keeps changing. So how much "set in stone history" can we point to besides the most macro descriptions of things like "someone named Saladin once existed and was a participant in X, Y, and Z battles"? The facts that we can agree on are so boring as to not even possess something I'd describe as truth. What I mean is, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. That's a fact that means nothing. The truth about it, if there is any, is in how you interpret a lot of tangential events and cultural and political factors, no?
I think history exists outside of our societal perceptions. Events occur in real time, and sure, they're all subject to interpretation, but Lincoln dying from a bullet happened outside of how we remember it. Same is true for colonial imperialism. I do not think the Indigenous peoples of North America, Africa, and the rest of the world see those events as propaganda, They actually happened. As evidenced not by collective societal intergenerational histories passed down classroom to classroom, but by hard archaeology and anthropology. Sure, history is whitewashed by the ruling class and the people who get to determine what's put into books for children to absorb. But that history still existed outside of how we remember it. I don't think facts, when it comes to how humanity's caste system has sabotaged the entire planet, is subject to interpretation if being viewed outside our civilization and its subjective leanings toward altering 'facts' into opinions or perspectives. That's a ruling class conceit that's been operating for tens of thousands of years. But it doesn't change how the history actually went down. You and I chatting here actually happened, and whether or not Chris Best or Hamish Mackenzie say it happened a certain way after we finish chatting, it did in fact happen. That part of it is indeed set in stone, thanks to space, time, and dimension. :)
😂
Ah, Werner Herzog! A friend introduced me to his movies by showing Even Dwarfs Started Small. One of the highlights of my life in L.A. was seeing him speak about Fitzcaralldo and the making of it (Burden of Dreams) in a small movie theater on Montana.
We always like to quote him and say: “The birds don’t sing, they screech in pain.”
For anyone who hasn’t seen Herzog movies, what would you recommend they start with? (I don’t recommend starting the way I did but I love Herzog nevertheless!)
I think FITZCARRALDO is the perfect place to start. It's brilliant. Once you're finished, I'd then watch the doc about its making, which is amazing. AGUIRRE WRATH OF GOD would also be an excellent start. When you're finished, you could then watch his doc MY FRIEND KLAUS about Herzog's troubled relationship with his friend/star Klaus Kinski (which even involved contemplating murdering him).
I think I need to write longer on this but I have been thinking about this since this morning, and I don't think I agree. Maybe its because I am history nerd, but this very much feels to me like an excuse to use the weight that supposed truth gives you to say what you want to say. Sorkin, for example, in the Social Network, wanted to write an anti-hero story and so ended up making Zuckerberg much more sympatric in the film than he deserved in real life, even at the time. The people who did the American version of House of Cards apparently didn't understand the first thing about how American politics actually work so they could tell the easy story of corruption and cynicism without having to dela with the reality of making a disparate country function -- and what it says about our country and our country's worship of the founding generation that doing so is so hard and so vicious.
I can give other examples. (And heck, I am a hypocrite on this point -- I wrote a script about a female clockmaker trying to hold onto her shop in early modern Germany that ends with her essentially inventing the prosthetic industry, something that absolutely did not happen on that scale at that time.) But it feels as if Herzog doesn't want the truth -- he wants the power history gives him to leverage it into whatever he wants to say. Because facts complicate our nice, easy stories they are important to actually understanding human beings and the human condition. The facts make it harder to tell the tale you want, and I think that is both good and leads to more honest looks at the human condition.
On the other hand, movies are their own separate thing and writers and directors have to make choices about what to emphasize -- much like historians have to do. And such emphasis does tell a story. But it should be a story constrained by actual human facts. The idea that facts get in the way of actual truth? I think that is more self-serving than actually, well, true.
The problem is, for my money at least: facts change. We learn new things. Relying on them to tell a story about a Medieval royal conflict does little to illuminate the subject, too. The facts don't involve the human experience of them. They're cold and unfeeling. What it was like to be at the Battle of Waterloo, for example, is not something that can be expressed by simply dramatizing facts. You need to find the truth of the experience or audiences don't care and, thus, fail to find illumination. It gets even more complicated when you do follow facts and the facts interrupt the truth. An example here is how Victorians casually spoke. If you attempted to recreate that accurately, audiences would reject the facts. The poetry of literature has supplanted the facts, and consequently we can only find truth through lies. I find all this heady talk. There's no one answer, of course.
I agree and disagree. Yes, there are certain facts that do not translate, that are superfluous, that do not convey meaningful information. But if you completely ignore facts in search of a higher truth, then you run the very real risk of misunderstanding the truth. If you show Napolean at Waterloo being chap with his men's lives to make the point that ar is bad or dictators bad, then you miss out on why men would follow a dictator and war-monger into battle -- an important truth is missed because the creator ignored the facts.
And to me, that is the greater danger. We have human history that shows us how humans actually behave. We can learn from that, but if we ignore facts that do not fit our story, then we aren't actually learning, we aren't actually reaching a meaningful truth, IMO.
As you said, there is no right answers, but I instinctively mistrust the notion that there is a truth the supersedes the lived experiences of the people of history. IMO, artists that want to get to the truth should be studying those experiences, not discounting them. Yes, it must be balanced with the needs of story and modern expectations, but the truth relies on the facts, IMO.
I have numerous friends who are historians, and very few of them believe history isn't fluid given how rapidly our understanding of it changes. Fidelity to it is itself a risky endeavor, I think. But here's a fun fact: A film generally considered to be one of the most accurate -- truthful -- historical films made about England's Middle Ages is A KNIGHT'S TALE. The whole thing is fiction that wildly distorts facts and yet it provides one of the best understandings of the period that cinema has managed to produce. Go figure.
Knight's Tale is a great film, and I agree that history is fluid. As the saying goes, we will be amazed tomorrow at what we knew today. But I think that one of the reasons Knight's Tale works is because it respects the facts. It took the facts about the social relationships, the place of tourneys in the medieval social life, etc. and turned them into a movie that reflected the truth of the time even if most of the factual details were wrong. And I may be a hypocrite because the one script i have written is very much in the Knight's Tales tradition -- a story that I hope respects the facts of being a female shop owner in early modern Germany that does not actually get all the details correct.
But I read that different than what Sorkin did in Social Network or the writers did in House of Cards and what I think that Herzog is arguing for. They put their conception of the story they wanted to tell ahead of respecting the reality of the facts in a way that Knight's Tale did.
I don't know, maybe I am closer in an agreement with you than it seems. But I think the distinction between respecting what we understand the facts to mean today to build the story on and throwing that respect away in order to leverage the belief among people that history must be "true" in order to tell a story that you believe in, facts or no facts.