The Deeper Truth

Along with very gentle piano notes, this man is ski-flying in the air. Both the motion and the music is so slow, as if time has been passing slower as he flies. Closer and closer, he is bending into a straight line. He got cut out of the lenses for a bit, but then he is back. The music makes it feel like we are floating in outer space. The movement of the background shows how fast he is actually moving, but somehow everything feels very gradual and calm. It feels like we are able to take a peak into his mind, and realize that, in that moment, nothing matters: he is infinite. He flies in and out of the lenses, out and then in. As he is getting closer to the ground, he spread his wings and stretched his legs. He embraced the reality as he lands and slides. Steiner escaped death and made a record-breaking jump. This is part of the ending scene of Herzog’s film The Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, where he explored the truth beyond the physical.

In another film The Forgotten Dreams, Herzog also looked into a deeper kind of truth. A mysterious, careful, and unknowing string background music begins, along with millions of bright dots that seem like stars of the milky way. These starlike dots are spatial points that mapped every single millimetre of the Chauvet cave in which contained the oldest human-painted images ever discovered. Every feature of the cave is known. These dots piece together the inside of the cave while the visual experience takes us forward as if walking deeper into the cave. Then, the three dimensional shape of the entire cave is shown with facts about the cave, such as the length of the cave and the number of scans and stations. Afterwards, an interview with an archeologist was presented. He explained that through precision and the scientific methods, this mapping allows scientists to study and create new understating of the cave. Herzog points out that the spatial map is like a Manhattan phone directory, which contains millions of precise entries, but we would never have answers to questions like “do they dream, do they cry, what are their hopes, what are their families” through the phone book. The archeologist then shared that when he first got the chance to entered the cave for five days, it was so powerful that he had the same emotional shock every day he went in and continued to dream of both real and paintings of lions. After the five days, he had to take a break before going back in again because he needed time to absorb what he saw. He described that it was a “feeling of powerful and deep things” and it is not understood directly.

In a well-developed society, there seems to be a new quest for the world to search for factual truth. We humans try to explain everything with science and logic. We try to conduct experiments to find more data that could be used to explain situations and phenomena. We believe that we need hypothesis and evidences to support the reality to be true. This type of deepening in truths is effective in generating more knowledge. Along with the development of technologies, more information are reachable for an increase amount of people within a reduced amount of time. While it is very easy for people to spread information around, it is also very easy to create false information. Therefore, to prevent people from being tricked, educators are now aware that the society is lacking critical thinking abilities and are trying to educate people in having the abilities to distinguish between what is true and what is false, and what to believe in. Critical thinking allows people to be more judgmental with information, and allows people to think and generate more useful questions and understandings. While the search of factual truth is very clear, reasonable, and allows the society to gain a lot more knowledge, it also disables us to experience a more emotional and sensational aspect of understanding.

Werner Herzog proposed through his films that there is another type of truth that people should search for: the ecstatic truth. He mentioned in a speech describing “in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft”. He explained by saying “it’s not fakery when Michelangelo’s Pietà portrays Jesus as a 33-year-old man, and his mother, the mother of God, as a 17-year-old”. This statue of Jesus and his mother does not make logical sense because the mother should always be older than the son. However, because of the symbolic ideas the two of them carries, it makes a lot of sense for Jesus to be old, since he went through a lot to sacrifice himself and help people, and his mother to be younger because she represents the pure and sacred lady who gave birth to the Saviour. This statue is not factually accurate, but that is because it is sending an even greater message to the audience by creating the differences that does not seem logical. This is a representation of ecstatic truth. Herzog also explained ecstatic truth by comparing it to the idea of a Greek philosopher about sublime, “Whatever is sublime does not lead the listeners to persuasion but to a state of ecstasy; at every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer”. This means that ecstatic truth is something that people could not control when they encounter it, and they would be forced to “elevate ourselves over nature” because it is built on top of the raw, natural experience.

Herzog’s exploration of ecstatic truth is what makes up his idiosyncrasy. Ecstatic truth could only be comprehended through well craftsmanship. He uses filming and editing techniques to create the experience of ecstatic truth for his audience, and the pursue of creating this unique experience makes all his films seem odd and unique. Take the aforementioned ending scene of The Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner as an example. Herzog’s cinematography causes Steiner to be in and out of the shot. The unpredictability of where will Steiner be going seems to be hinting how dangerous ski jumping can be because there are so much uncontrollable factors. It creates this sense of mysterious and hard to capture atmosphere that correlates to what Steiner was feeling when he is in the air. Also, Herzog's usage of slow motion in this scene also contributes greatly to the experience of the audience. Herzog once explained that “sometimes the beauty or the horror of an image only settles in the mind when it is shown for an extended period.” Reaching elevated states such as ecstatic truth often requires more time to absorb because the elongation allows information and senses to sink deeper into people. Therefore, by extending the length of the flight, Herzog keeps the audiences’ attention on Steiner for a longer period of time and permits the deeper processing of the scene. The slow motion is also a portrayal of the flying experiences because people often feel like time is frozen or going very slow when they are in extremely heightened stages. Therefore, using slow motion gives audiences a better understanding of what actually feels like flying. Besides the visual designs, Herzog also conveys ecstatic truth through the audio aspect. Most of the time, instead of using words or lyrics, he chooses to use pieces that set moods. Herzog chose to use a music that sets a calmly and carefully exploratory mood. The music did not describe the situation when the jump happened or what it felt like watching the jump. Instead, it is used to create a similar feeling of Steiner flying, where it feels like one is in a different universe, and everything in the world is left behind. Because each jump is very dangerous, each flight seems to be in a space between life and death, and every movement needs to be controlled carefully. Despite that death could be right around the corner, the experience itself is considerably peaceful. All of these sensations are conveyed through the music, along with the slow motion and cinematography design. Herzog did not simply report what happened during Steiner’s jump, instead, he allowed the audience to look deeper into the experience of Steiner. This kind of unconventional experience is the practice of ecstatic truth.

Herzog’s ecstatic truth is different from factual truths because it is much more original, raw, direct, and naked for human experiences. One way that Herzog differentiates facts and norms is by saying “facts create norms, truth illuminates”. This means that facts could only tell us what is going on in the society, yet finding the ecstatic truths allow people to go one step forward, seeing the path and creating the future. The spatial points in the film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams described in the beginning of the essay is a great example. Every single position of the cave in known through the scientific scanning conducted, there are a lot of factual truths that were gathered by hard working scientists. However, the information these data points can tell us is only limited to the physical. What is more important is the ecstatic truth of what was going on in the lives of the people during that time, what are the stories carried by the cave paintings, and how are we connected to them. During the film, when the spatial points were presented, the background music Herzog chose was not something uplifting or renovating, but something that conveys hesitation, questionability, and concerns. This indicates Herzog’s attitude towards the extensive data collecting. It shows that he is concerned about this type of methods to understanding because it is not personal or complex enough. Data alone are like phone directory, we can only learn very limited things from them, while the cave offers so much more. The cave paintings were so powerful that the archeologist dreamed of it every night and had to take breaks from the cave in able to digest the experience. This is not something that could be achieved through reading numerous numbers of data because the experience is connected to the person in a much profound level. The cave should be admired and appreciated through experiencing the ecstatic truth of it, rather than learning about all the stones and calcification. The cave should be an inspiration for how we can communicate to the future despite of the time differences, and the convolution of experiencing the messages disclosed by humans thousands of years ago cannot be tasted through statistics. Another beautiful example in the same film is when scientists found foot prints of a wold and a boy. Herzog asked through his narration, was the boy eaten by the wolf, were they friends, or were they at the same place numerous years apart? We would not know. Yet the infinite possibilities of what happened maximizes people’s curiosity and imagination. It is extraordinary and incredibly romantic because there could be incalculable answers while we will never know which one is the reality. This is the type of truth that people should be pursuing.

The existing of ecstatic truth indicates that there are serious imperfection in how we perceive our world and our cognition. With the development of the internet, people read news online and scroll through social media every single day. We think we know everything because information are accessed easily and we can get as much information as we want. However, we are missing a lot of dimensions in our ways of thinking. We now believe that critical thinking is the solution to false facts, but there is actually a whole different aspect that people never think much about on top of that. An ongoing movement that demonstrates the problematic nature of the emphasis on factual truths and ecstatic truth is the Movement in Hong Kong. People tend to think that the more they know, the more accurate they are. However that is not how the world works. There are serious flaws in how people gather information because a lot of the people nowadays only find what they are looking for and see what supports their own perspectives. In a world full of technologies and selective information, people are only living within their own world-views. Some people support and participate in the movement because they think the polices are unjust, some people support the government unconditionally, some people think the methods are too extreme, some people do not understand why people can destroy their own homeland, and some people believe they are just protecting their own country. When people try to convince others of their own perspectives, they throw out a lot of facts that they believe can tell other people how wrong the other party is. Yet, they don’t realize that they are experiencing something so extreme and difficult to replicate that people would not simply understand by data. There are something in the experience that are irreplaceable when people are protesting, the attitudes of selflessness, the attempt and motivation, the perseverance despite the danger, and much more are only felt by people who are directly involved. Without well planned crafting, like Herzog, it is very difficult to bring people to a similar level of understanding. However, most people do not realize that there are untransferable truth within their experiences and are convinced that giving more information equals to more accuracy.

The internet is the future, and that is a fact. However, what are we going to allow the internet to do is the truth. The internet is fulfilling human’s desire for more information exchanging and more conveniences. Yet in this perfect world that seems to have the method of finding answers to everything is still full of imperfection. In Herzog’s film Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, a professor said towards the end of the movie that “The internet is the worst enemy to deep critical thinking, imaginative and creative thinking. Youth today are using machines to replace their examination of the things they are observing. They don’t understand what they are looking, hearing, or learning. They depend upon the internet to tell them and decipher it. They look at numbers instead of ideas”. This shows that the increasing in technological development is only reducing people’s ability to think on their own, and eventually the ability to encounter and feel the nature and essence of experiences. This means that people will even lose the ability to experience ecstatic truth because they are not going to be perceivable. Herzog showed a scene in the film in which a group of monks were using their smartphones and he asked “Does the monks stopped meditating? They are all tweeting”. Has the Internet blend and become a part of our lives, to such an extent, that even people who should be focusing the most on spirituality and experiencing the sublime and ecstatic truth is losing their identity? Are we losing our humanistic characters as we embrace the internet, which is something that is made up of numbers and codes. For ecstatic truth to not be lost and valued, we need to promote people to open their senses more and keep their eyes off their screens. A lot of people nowadays are already choosing to take breaks from the internet because they think they need to focus more time on theirselves and work on their ideal selves. This shows that although the internet flooded us with informations and connections, there are still people who have the desire to dig deeper and pursue a more meaningful self. Another academic said that his hope is that “there are still going to be the appeal of deep immersion in something that through the school system, we still subject our kids to, we can really try to turn them on to its charms, so they become intrinsically self-motivated to pursue it”. This alines perfectly with Herzog’s expectation of ecstatic truth. Though this film, Herzog hopes to convey that there are a lot more in the world outside the internet and the factual truths it offers. He hopes that the society will put more focus on nurturing the willingness and eagerness to search for this more profound truth.

There is this old Chinese saying “If you read thousands of books, why not walk thousands of meters.” While technologies are bringing humans forward in terms of exploring more of the factual and unexplored, there is a type of truth, the ecstatic truth, that is equally, or even more important, for people to experience. Learning about what Steiner did to break a ski jumping is great, but it is even better to know what it feels like flying. Learning about the statistics of the Chauvet Cave is also interesting, but it is more intriguing to know what life was like thousands of years ago. There are some authenticity that is lost through our technological communication and lifestyles. Werner Herzog uses his films to attempt to recreate these ecstatic experience, trying to remind and promote people to search for these experiences themselves. What a waste it would be to not live in ways that we are designed to live in our nature.