Werner Herzog: The art of story telling

Over the weekend, I drove to Charlottesville to see Werner Herzog do an artist talk. While I know that all of you (probably) know who Herzog is, and I'm not actually introducing a new artist to you, what he said was worth telling you about.

Werner Herzog understands storytelling to level that I can only dream to achieve. I had always loved Herzog's work before this artist talk, but I never really appreciated the subtle details and the, honestly, profound ideas and statements. After hearing him speak about his work, and why he does some of the things he does, and even how he came to the place that he wanted to create films, I have a new found appreciation for him.

One thing in particular that really stuck out to me was a story he told about an interview he had with a woman while doing a documentary piece on Russian culture. The woman was a part of a group of people who lived by a frozen lake. These people believed that there once was a great civilization somewhere in Russian, that was constantly being sacked by huns. The people of this civilization prayed to the gods to save them, so as a result the gods sunk their city to the bottom of a bottomless lake. Here, the people lived in peaceful bliss, where they sing and ring bells for the rest of eternity. These people who live around the frozen lake believe that their lake is the lake from the stories, and that if you listen closely you can hear the bells and songs. Because of this, once a year the people make a pilgrimage where they crawl all over the lake, putting their ears up to the ice, and praying.

He then started to talk about truth. He said no one in the world can ever know truth. He said there is no such thing as truth for anyone, except for people who are deeply religious. He explained, that for anyone who isn't deeply religious, our idea of truth is based on facts and things we observe, but constantly those things are being challenged, amended, and disproven. Because of this we cannot know truth, because our truth is always changing, and may at one point be a completely different version of itself. Deeply religious people on the other hand, have only one piece of fact: their scripture. This never changes, and as a result they only have one ultimate truth to believe in. Because of this, they are the only people who can know what truth is.

This was fascinating to me already, because it shows Herzog's ability to put himself into other people's shoes more than I have ever seen someone do before. He talked about the deeply religious people's truth as if they were his own, even though he is not deeply religious.

However, he wanted to explain this concept in his film; he wanted to show that these people truly believed that they could hear these bells and songs. So he found a woman who claimed to have heard the bells the other week. He began to interview her and noticed that her hand had bandages on it, so his first question was: tell me the story of how you hurt your hand. She began to go into detail about how she was feeding her pigs just the other day, and one got far too rowdy. The pig jumped up and bit her hand, so she needed to bandage it up. He then asked her to tell him the story of the bells. She proceeded to tell the story in the exact same way, that she told the story of the pig biting her hand. By drawing parallels, and comparing and contrasting, Herzog was able to show us, not tell us, how this woman sees these things as a truth. For her, the fact that the pig bit her hand, and the fact that she heard the bells are one and the same. All Herzog had to do was show us, and ask two simple questions.

He took 'show don't tell' to a whole new level in the one moment, and moments like that exist a hundred times or more in each of his films. He is truly an incredible person, and an incredible storyteller.