Great Ecstasy

This is a great ten minutes of cinema, I've been watching it over and over again for the last couple of days. Ever since I read about his idea of ecstatic truth, I've been fascinated by it and by Herzog himself. As far as I understand it, the idea is that truth doesn't rest in facts so much as something beyond them, in something both to do with us and completely separate from us. It has something to do with nature, too, some conception of a primitive human. The "bare life" that Giorgio Agamben talks about.

I was struck when I saw Grizzly Man by the apparent fictionality of the interviews with Timothy Treadwell's friends, the doctor that did the post-mortem and others. I later read that Herzog schooled his interviewers, rehearsing what they were to say and preparing lighting effects and the like, so that when it came to shooting they were effectively acting a part. His point is that the truth would not be served by their "spontaneous" descriptions to the camera, the apparent "reality" depicted given extra technical weight by the lack of carefully planned lighting; the apparent on-the-hoof-ness of it. Truth exists as something far past that.

It's a strange sort of spirituality that I like in his films. Moments of almost-transcendence (I think he'd hate that description) pop up frequently, filmed in slow motion to separate them from the film. It's a fascination with the edges of life - or perhaps the very middle - those moments where life appears close to something beyond its consituent parts, like flying through the air on skis in this film, or living in Antartica, living with bears, dragging a boat over a hill. There's something "other" to his films that's never spelled out or looked at directly, it's always by looking at the effects of whatever this other is that we see it, never it itself.