Penguin
Review by George Yatchisin
Who better than Werner Herzog, the Bavarian mad genius, to take us on a heady time-travelling exploration on what truth might mean/be/permit? The Future of Truth is a summation of his life project, all 70+ films, both narrative and documentary, all his other books, all his late-in-life winking appearances, like the one on Parks & Recreation as a monotone depressive who wants to sell his haunted home and move closer to Walt Disney World. For as much as everyone asserts their devotion to the truth, Herzog also knows “there is such a thing as a collective willingness to be transported into the realm of poetry, of madness, and of the pure joy of storytelling.” (What a wickedly beautiful trio that is, no?)
Herzog has satisfied that collective willingness as much as any film director, from his conquistador tale of raging megalomania, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (how mesmerizing are that film’s final moments, the Amazon’s monkeys overtaking all the boats caught in a vortex’s gyre) to his doc about his fellow yarn-spiller, Nomad: In the Steps of Bruce Chatwin. Defending Chatwin’s use of invention in his nonfiction prose, Herzog quotes Chatwin’s biographer Nicholas Shakespeare: “Bruce never gave you a half truth. What he would give you was always a truth and a half.”
Such is the case with one of Herzog’s parables he passes off as gospel. He relates the tale of the Palermo Pig, trapped in a Sicilian sewer, but still fed by kindly passers-by. Turns out the chute is four-sided, not tubular, so when the swine is finally freed “it was ghostly pale, translucent as a minnow and had taken on a cubic form, wobbly as a great hunk of Jello.” Herzog’s point: our environment makes us what we are. And so truth, too, must always be malleable. Take his disdain for cinema vérité, which he claims, “offers you the accountant’s truth.”
This is a man who asserts—even in this book, but most famously in Of Walking on Ice, the essay about his three-week, six-hundred mile grueling march from Berlin to Paris as an effort to “save” his ill mentor Lotte Eisner—“the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.” So it’s little surprise to discover Herzog considers truth more a verb than a noun, an act, not a thing. He expresses his admiration for the ancient Greek word for truth, aletheia, which refers to “the not-concealed, the thing brought to light.” And, filmmaker that he is, that makes him think of the process of photographic development.
So, sure, in some ways The Future of Truth is an apologia for decades of Herzog’s work. As a visionary it’s his job to show us the big T Truth, damn the nigglingly fact-checkers. Plus he’s upfront with critics and the public about his self-called “ecstatic inventions.” So when he begins his grimly terrifying 1992 doc Lessons of Darkness, filmed in Kuwait after the retreating Iraqis torched every last oil well, leaving utter, blackened ruin, he felt it fair to quote Pascal: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.” Of course, Pascal never wrote that line, and while Herzog fesses up to his fabrication, he also writes, as an aside in a parenthetical sentence, “Though I don’t think Pascal could have said it any better.” Might as well have your art and your ego, too. [As a sidenote that’s hard to find the proper place for in this review, the book is gracefully translated by Michael Hoffmann, notably billed as a “German-born poet who writes in English” on the dustcover.]
A book that barely breaks a hundred pages shouldn’t have room for repeated, lengthy digressions, but Herzog shoes them in, from a painstaking plot re-cap of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino to his surprising bonding with Mike Tyson at a meeting to consider if he would make a film about the troubled boxer (alas, the project floundered). Consider him peripatetic of mind as well as foot. The book’s concerns travel the globe and rocket into space, consider figures from Daniel Defoe to Elon Musk, tackle concepts from the forged Donation of Constantine to AI. One reason it’s easier to trust Herzog is he knows so many obscure, wide-ranging facts, you can easily wave away anything not to the last detail honest.
Herzog also offers some correctives for our world of fakes and truthiness, starting with books. “He writes, “When young directors come to me, I tell them: Read, read, read, read, read….If you don’t read, you will never make anything great.” Kicking off one’s reading list with The Future of Truth—a provocative, prickly, well-informed mind essaying its way through the wickets of reality—certainly might help.
