Ecstatic truths and damnable lies

Ilay awake the other night thinking about Werner Herzog and Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich, you may remember, made a remarkable statement about a year ago when CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, citing FBI data, challenged Donald Trump’s assertion that crime rates were soaring.

“The average American—I’ll bet you this morning—does not think crime is down, does not think they are safer,” Gingrich said.

“But we are safer and it is down,” Camerota responded.

“No, that’s your view,” Gingrich countered. “What I said is also a fact. The current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics that theoretically might be right, but it’s not where human beings are.”

Now that sort of thinking—the idea that feelings trump facts—might be dangerous in some scenarios. You would not want your surgeon or airline pilot to adopt such an attitude. Maybe you don’t want the people running your country to prioritize the subjective over the objective, but remove politics from the equation and I have to concede that Gingrich isn’t (completely) wrong.

The “facts” often aren’t where human beings are.

Herzog, who may still be in Arkansas after putting on his film school at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival Saturday, has a theory of what he calls “ecstatic truth” which he mainly defines by placing it in opposition to cinema verite—which, to make a simple concept even simpler, is the idea that if you set up a camera and record life as it happens you might discover something interesting. Herzog might argue that, yes, sometimes you will, but only sometimes, and then only by accident.

In a way Herzog might be using this theory of emotionally enriched ecstatic truth as justification for his making the kinds of documentaries he wants to make. Which are tweaked or engineered in some ways, perhaps lightly choreographed. Herzog uses a blend of naturally occurring and constructed moments to get at an emotional truth he holds more profound (and truer) than the “accountant’s truth” available in statistics and actualities. He might script scenes. He might have a subject invent an obsessive-compulsive tic or bribe locals to stare deeply into a frozen lake so he can say they’re looking for a lost city beneath the water.

Above all, what he does is introduce an uneasy feeling of doubt in the viewers’ minds. Is what we’re watching real? Or has Herzog somehow manipulated the image? How has he done this? To what purpose?

In the newspaper, we tend to mostly pursue accountant’s truth, and in many cases that’s the only responsible course. Newspaper journalism is not complicated (which isn’t to say it isn’t hard; it’s like writing poetry—if you don’t think it’s hard you’re not doing it right). It’s largely a matter of talking to people who are supposed to know about things and writing down what they say. Then you try to fairly present that information to a general audience, some of whom rely on the reporting to make decisions about their lives.

While I identify as a journalist, I approve of Herzog’s methods. My favorite sorts of documentaries are those that acknowledge the epistemological limits of our senses, that lead us to question what we think we know and how we think we know it.

A filmmaker, on the other hand, has only one job: to connect with an audience. What matters is the quality of that connection, not the method through which it is achieved.

Maybe you can achieve it like Frederick Wiseman, with manipulation of the subject limited to where you point your camera and how you edit your film. Maybe you achieve it like George Lucas, inventing universes long ago and far away. Or maybe you do it like Herzog, throwing your shadow across “real” events in sober and playful ways. We shouldn’t care how they get there, if they get there.

Of course, we should worry about being lied to. One of the films at this year’s HSDFF is Sam Pollard and Reuben Atlas’ ACORN and the Firestorm,

which charts the rise and fall of the controversial community organizing group which got its start in Little Rock. But much of ACORN and the Firestorm is actually concerned with the work of conservative political activist James O’Keefe and his efforts to “sting” the organization through undercover recordings in 2009.

O’Keefe’s footage appeared to show low-level ACORN employees in six cities offering advice to a couple (played by O’Keefe and Hannah Giles) on setting up a brothel and evading taxes. O’Keefe prefaced his recording with footage of him and Giles dressed in outlandish pimp and hooker costumes, implying that they were wearing these outfits when they interviewed the ACORN workers. Lots of people in the media accepted O’Keefe’s footage as a fair representation of what occurred. ACORN workers were fired, and the organization—already near bankruptcy—couldn’t survive the publicity.

But it turns out O’Keefe’s ecstatic truth was closer to an outright lie. He heavily edited his footage, fooled around with the chronology and cut out all exculpatory material—moments when the ACORN people told him they couldn’t work with him or when they indicated they knew O’Keefe was putting them on. He didn’t mention that some of them called the police after he left. (On the other hand, some of his footage did put ACORN in a bad light. Just not an unbelievably horrible light.)

O’Keefe’s filmmaking was artless and intended to deceive. But if it accomplished a goal your tribe thought worthy, maybe you’d call it a good movie. Maybe that’s also a fact. If you want it to be.