As an octogenarian, Werner Herzog remains a cultural icon who functions entirely on his own terms. In the vein of his strange and captivating movies, Herzog's newest volume defies traditional structures of storytelling, merging the boundaries between reality and invention while exploring the core concept of truth itself.
The brief volume outlines the director's views on veracity in an era flooded by digitally-created falsehoods. His concepts seem like an expansion of Herzog's earlier declaration from the turn of the century, including forceful, gnomic beliefs that cover criticizing cinéma vérité for hiding more than it clarifies to shocking statements such as "choose mortality before a wig".
Two key principles form Herzog's vision of truth. First is the idea that pursuing truth is more important than finally attaining it. As he states, "the journey alone, bringing us nearer the unrevealed truth, enables us to engage in something inherently elusive, which is truth". Second is the belief that bare facts offer little more than a boring "financial statement truth" that is less useful than what he describes as "ecstatic truth" in helping people understand life's deeper meanings.
If anyone else had written The Future of Truth, I believe they would receive severe judgment for teasing out of the reader
Reading the book resembles listening to a fireside monologue from an fascinating relative. Within numerous compelling narratives, the strangest and most remarkable is the tale of the Italian hog. As per the filmmaker, once upon a time a hog got trapped in a vertical sewage pipe in the Sicilian city, the Italian island. The creature was stuck there for years, existing on leftovers of sustenance tossed to it. Over time the pig assumed the shape of its confinement, transforming into a kind of semi-transparent mass, "ethereally white ... wobbly as a large piece of Jello", taking in nourishment from above and eliminating excrement underneath.
The filmmaker uses this tale as an allegory, connecting the Sicilian swine to the risks of extended space exploration. Should mankind undertake a expedition to our closest habitable world, it would require generations. Throughout this duration the author imagines the brave travelers would be compelled to reproduce within the group, turning into "changed creatures" with little comprehension of their mission's purpose. Ultimately the astronauts would change into light-colored, worm-like beings rather like the trapped animal, able of little more than eating and eliminating waste.
This unsettlingly interesting and inadvertently amusing turn from Mediterranean pipes to cosmic aberrations presents a example in the author's notion of ecstatic truth. As readers might learn to their dismay after attempting to verify this fascinating and biologically implausible square pig, the Italian hog seems to be mythical. The search for the limited "literal veracity", a existence based in simple data, ignores the meaning. What did it matter whether an incarcerated Mediterranean livestock actually turned into a quivering square jelly? The true lesson of Herzog's story suddenly emerges: penning beings in small spaces for long durations is unwise and produces aberrations.
If anyone else had authored The Future of Truth, they might receive negative feedback for unusual composition decisions, digressive remarks, inconsistent concepts, and, honestly, mocking out of the audience. Ultimately, Herzog allocates several sections to the theatrical storyline of an opera just to show that when artistic expressions feature intense feeling, we "pour this preposterous core with the entire spectrum of our own emotion, so that it seems curiously genuine". Yet, because this volume is a assemblage of uniquely characteristically Herzog musings, it avoids severe panning. A sparkling and creative translation from the original German – where a legendary animal expert is described as "not the sharpest tool in the shed" – remarkably makes Herzog more Herzog in tone.
While much of The Future of Truth will be recognizable from his prior publications, movies and conversations, one comparatively recent element is his meditation on digitally manipulated media. The author points repeatedly to an computer-created perpetual conversation between fake sound reproductions of himself and a contemporary intellectual on the internet. Because his own approaches of attaining exhilarating authenticity have included creating remarks by famous figures and selecting performers in his factual works, there exists a possibility of hypocrisy. The distinction, he contends, is that an thinking mind would be fairly equipped to discern {lies|false
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