Werner Herzog - The Shock of the True

By all accounts, Werner Herzog likes going to extremes. From his infamous, explosive collaborations with Klaus Kinski to his latest film, Rescue Dawn, which sees Christian Bale back in Machinist mode as a starved POW, Herzog has tried to put on screen stories that show people pushing themselves to the limit, actor and character alike.

In Little Dieter Needs To Fly, out on DVD this month, Dieter Dengler (who Bale portrays in Rescue Dawn) is both actor and character, as he retraces the steps he took into and out of capture in Laos as a shot-down US pilot during the Vietnam war. It's a harrowing story, which Dieter 'leads' us through, though it's made slightly uncomfortable by the knowledge of Herzog's reputation as a forceful director. Post-traumatic stress counselling it ain't, and a later visit to Dengler's home, complete with a basement full of canned goods and emergency rations, shows some residual insecurities. Having grown up in Germany getting bombed by US planes in the Second World War, Dengler strove to be the one in the plane, and what emerges from the film is a poetic juxtaposition between the threat on the ground and the safety of rising above it, one that fits in with Dengler's life represented in this film, as well as American tactics in Vietnam. To be shown this in a documentary is both amazing, but also immediately suspicious. Such character arcs are the stuff of fiction, aren't documentaries supposed to be real? Both BBC and ITV's recent troubles with the representation of 'facts' is a clear example of the problem of engagement with what is essentially always going to be an illusion, and Herzog seems to be the only filmmaker out there who not only plays gladly with the contradiction, but seems to be blind to there being any such contradiction.

The Wild Blue Yonder, also out this month, is revealed at the start as a 'science fiction fantasy', but you get the feeling this tagline is purely there because Herzog didn't think he could get away with saying it was all true. It's the story of an alien (Brad Dourif at his angry, funny best) whose descendants, all amazing scientists, travelled for generations from Alpha Centauri to settle on Earth. Unfortunately by the time they made it the generation that arrived "sucked." As did their attempts at a shopping mall and Pentagon. Recruited by the CIA, he can only observe as humans attempt the return mission to Centauri. While it's clearly a fabrication (isn't it?) there are still elements of this film, which include interviews and documentary footage, which you will believe to be real, and at the same time doubt. There are elements of chaos theory, illustrated by scientists at whiteboards and projectors, that will leave you perplexed as to where the made-up stuff starts and the truth ends. The funny thing is, you probably won't want to know which way it goes. The film is such a convincing and affecting piece of work, with a moral far beyond the basic environmentalist one that is often linked to it, that you will will it to be true, or at least not want to have it spoilt by knowing it's not.

What is at the heart of these, and many other of Herzog's films, is a manifesto that states that every idea you impose on the world is a delusion, which either keeps you alive or kills you. By telling it to us straight in that sense at least, he is allowing us the choice to believe whatever we want of what he shows us. So why are people unsettled by this choice? Why do the press feel the need to tell us that Nigella's kitchen is actually a - wait for it - television studio? Perhaps it's the scary conclusion of this train of thought; in a world where people follow what they choose to believe, the only difference between freedom and madness is luck. But wasn't it Confucius who said, "You're never going to survive unless you get a little crazy.?"