Where reality is: The performance of authenticity in Werner Herzog's documentary films (original) (raw)

This research aims to analyse how the German director Werner Herzog uses performance to compose his documentary mise-en-scène, emphasizing the Man- Nature relationship to build sublime moments in his narrative, which he calls Ecstatic Truth (Ekstatische Wahrheit). Within the director's extensive documentary film set, we chose the documentaries The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974) and The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984) since both refer to protagonists practicing extreme sports, in which the potentiality of risk by body movement in action means a significant performative composition in the Herzoguian narrative. From this perspective, this work is divided into four parts. The first one seeks to contextualize the figure of Werner Herzog and establish inferences that may have influenced the construction of his authorial cinema (Autorenkino). In the second part, we discuss the meaning of Ecstatic Truth, linking it to the theoretical debate about truth and realism in the documentary cinema. The third part deals with the concept of performance, mainly (but not only) by the bias of Erving Goffman (1967, 1971), since we assume that the performative element constitutes the central idea of Ecstatic Truth. Finally, the fourth part focuses on the selected films by using the picture and sound approach (iconic analysis) systematized by Aumont and Marie (2004). In this part, we take into account three big pillars: filmic landscapes, soundtrack and corporeities. Our results suggest that Herzog's filmic landscapes represent a deterritorialized and anti-referential zone, adopting romantic aesthetics and depending on the spectator's previous capacity of subjectivity; the soundtrack shows mainly the rhetorical, interactional and self-reflexive strategy operated by the filmmaker, supporting the social actor's performance by exposing emotional acts as admiration, humanity and fragility; finally, the staged corporeities, the essence of a performative action, represent, through emersion, the motto "to step outside oneself", determining the experiences of sublimity via ecstasy. Through the set of the categories analysed in this Thesis, Herzog makes uses of continuous rehearsal, repetition and self-reflection to create a process of stylization that culminates in designing an aimed context where his characters, in convergence with the intersection Man/Nature, can reach the climax of his documentaries, the Ecstatic Truth.