Ferocious Reality ─ Documentary According to Werner Herzog

Filmmaker Werner Herzog has made more than thirty documentaries. He is one of the most acclaimed contemporary film directors. However, few discussions of documentary film even mention him. It may have something to do with his perspective on nonfiction film, or with his way of talking; quotes of Herzog on documentary theory here include such sentences as: "Life in the oceans must be...a vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger." Luckily, author Eric Ames is a professor of German (German and cinema studies, U. of Washington). He is here to translate Herzog from the Germanic. Ames writes as an academic, so readers may find some background in film or performance studies helpful. However, he uses a clear, straightforward academic style, and many readers may find what he has to say useful. His basic argument is that Herzog's films are best understood in the terms of performance, where the artist's material is the audience's experience. Ames argues that Herzog stylizes his films to give the audience a more literal experience of the film's subject, and this is how Herzog describes what documentary film should do. Since there is no objective point of view in the world, a film is accurate as a documentary when the audience directly experiences the subject's own point of view. The result is that the film doesn't look like what the subject would look like when seen from a distanced, outside perspective, which is the approach usually called documentary. The book will be useful to readers interested in the relationship between fiction and nonfiction in any medium, or between art and truth, as well as readers interested in documentaries, film, performance, German intellectual traditions, or Werner Herzog. Ames understands the territory of performing nonfiction very well; he has also written a book on the Hagenbecks, inventors of the modern circus. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)