The Great Ecstasy of Werner Herzog: Truth, Heidegger, Apocalypse

For decades now, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog has been promoting the idea of ‘ecstatic truth’ as opposed to ‘cinéma vérité’ or to what he mockingly calls ‘the truth of accountants.’ Truth is illumination, revelation, an unveiling of what ordinarily lies hidden. Far from merely reproducing the visible, however, Herzog makes and moves images to disclose the invisible, to reveal truths that are literally ecstatic, standing out beyond what is otherwise accessible. Yet this revelation cannot occur unless we, as viewers, are transported beyond the everyday realm. We too must stand outside of ourselves. Herzog aims to make us ecstatic. In this paper I first analyze portions of Herzog’s rare programmatic speech “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth” (§1). I then show how many of Herzog’s ideas are prefigured and illuminated by Martin Heidegger’s understanding of truth, especially as it relates to the work of art (§2). Next I turn to several scenes in Herzog’s films to show how he puts his theory to work. I first discuss the ethereal ski-jumps in The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (§3), and then examine Herzog’s use of Richard Wagner at the beginning of Lessons of Darkness and Lo and Behold (§4). I conclude with a few words on the significance of ecstatic truth in our purportedly ‘post-truth age’ (§5).