F@ck Your Facts: Werner Herzog's Theory of Ecstatic Truth
One of our greatest living filmmakers has long advocated that clinging to facts gets in the way of finding meaning in 'true stories' (and life)
Werner Herzog is one of the biggest personalities in cinema. At eighty-one years old, he’s directed more films (features and documentaries) than I will likely ever be able to watch, acted in many more, written several books, and become so iconic that he is endlessly parodied – sometimes even by himself. Calling myself a fan of his would be an understatement. Today, I want to share with you his theory of storytelling, which informs every work of art he creates. It involves an idea he describes as ecstatic truth, which is a rejection of facts in favor of a greater truth.
Or, as the author André Gide once wrote, “I modify facts to such a degree that they resemble truth more than reality."
Well, maybe not.
Herzog quite often explains his philosophy by citing this Gide quote, but no one has ever been able to source it. When Herzog has been challenged about this, he likes to say some version of, “I may have made it up.”
And there you go: Herzog’s ecstatic truth as a kind of performance art predicated on a lie to express a deeper truth.
I bring up ecstatic truth because it echoes something I have been preaching to artists for years:
“Don’t let facts get in the way of the truth.”
When I interview artists for 5AM StoryTalk’s conversation series, I ask those who are writing or famously wrote “true stories” about their artwork’s relationship to the truth and even how they feel about facts and truth with regard to storytelling. For example, what is their obligation to the facts when developing and writing such “true stories”? Answers always vary. Cultural backgrounds can impact opinions, too. But at the end of the day, most seem to agree that facts all too often distort the truth of an event.
This is the heart of Herzog’s problem. He believes clinging to facts prevents us from being able to understand what something means. I tend to agree.
Here's something he said on The New Yorker Radio Hour last year1:
“It's very complicated, but ecstatic truth, I coined this term – I think I coined it – has to do with a different approach to truth. Number one, nobody knows what truth exactly is. Neither the philosophers are in consensus, nor is the Pope in Rome, nor are mathematicians, or whoever. We have to be very cautious … There's a school in filmmaking, the so-called cinéma vérité, it claims truth in its very essence, but it's fact-based. It's fact, fact, fact. I keep saying, facts do not illuminate us.
“The Manhattan phone directory, four million correct entries do not illuminate us. We do not know why is James Miller, and there are probably 200 different James Millers with correct address, and so why is he crying in his pillow every night? We do not know that. That's my approach that is beyond or outside of facts, and it requires stylizations. It requires somehow shaping, creating something like poetry, a sense of poetry that gives us an approach into truth.
“Truth, I understand, is something vaguely somewhere at the horizon. It's out there. I'm fairly sure. The intense quest for it and search for it, the approach to it is worthwhile, and that's what I'm doing in films and in literature and in everything I do.”
This distinction between facts and truth might sound like unhelpful philosophical hooey-flooey to some of you, but art is about trying to discover the truth, isn’t it? Or at least that’s my understanding of it after spending my life in the service of art. Facts are something you recite like the names of French monarchs, the dates of famous battles fought by Ancient Greece, or how many crimes Donald Trump has been charged with and/or convicted of. They can be enumerated. They can be memorized. But truth? Well, that requires a different kind of interrogation…and that’s where art comes in.
