A higher form of truth

I believe we can confidently say that Werner Herzog is the greatest living documentary filmmaker. Beyond that, he is the one who has definitively shattered all the boundaries between documentary and fictional cinema. He is a director who has seamlessly blended forms, languages, and aesthetics to the point that, in some of his films, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the reality he portrays and the poetic elements he adds, invents, or manipulates in the best sense of the word. When asked how to interpret what he is filming, he often responds, “I am looking for a higher form of truth, a representation that is more effective than the simple, banal mechanical reproduction of what is happening.”
This approach extends beyond his narrative films to his works documenting sensational events, such as the burning oil wells in Iraq, Lessons of Darkness, or natural phenomena he’s filmed under extreme conditions, something many directors would never dare attempt. Herzog pushed the boundaries of what can be represented in cinema to previously uncharted levels, greatly expanding our capacity to see. From the start, his mission has been to search for images that have never been seen before and to explore what is unrepresentable, challenging the fact that there are fewer and fewer things left to discover, especially in an era of ubiquitous content shared via mobile phones.
His latest film, Ghost Elephants, which he will present here in Venice, continues this quest with the extraordinary search for an elephant thought to be extinct, which he eventually manages to find. How many other documentary filmmakers embark on such an intensely personal and visionary mission? There are certainly excellent professionals in the field of documentation, and we have some of them here this year as well, but Herzog has always been a step ahead of everyone.