Werner Herzog drops science right on top of your FACE!

"LESSONS OF DARKNESS"

Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."

Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can..t legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn..t call, doesn..t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don..t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog

tah witchu molahs.

try to laugh without smiling. seriously. it's a lot of fun.

trepanning scene extension drafts

the sisters are performing primitive brain surgery on john. They are dressed for a masquerade at the court of Louis IV and they use arcane implements. the wound in john's side heals during the process, as the sisters remove john's pineal gland.

John:
Like church music messages. Hey, Big Sis, remember that? did you see that?

Lil Sis:
You don't talk! We're performing a procedure!

John:
But

Big Sis:
Tap write, Sister Sleighbells. Tap write into the brainpan dummy.

John:
I am almost certain that I dreamt about your mother.

Big Sis:
"Weathervanes, Ivy, The Brown Sound".Write it, sis. Tap write into the brainpan.

Lil Sis:
The Brown Sound!

Big Sis:
heh-heh-heh...the brown sound!

John:
I don't think there's any sound in here.
beat
whoa! what's that!

Big Sis:
That's Ivy, John.

that old thing?

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this old thing?

i have been a senator inside her.

in other lives or other times

we danced in open graves, she chewed the backs of my thighs.

plotting some mischief little sister, pulling her hair.

creepy creeps, a whole danged family of creeps out in the grass, under the porch, tying ribbons and bells to the cats and to the kids.

singing christmas songs at halloween.

i was some awful monster inside her, pulling paint off the walls, sucking air, swallowing the vibrations.

my teeth grew to accomodate her tastes, she were an epicure, she wanted something ugly.

i offered at supper, at the haus, to help her with her prayers.

she invented horses. she invented hay.

woyzchek played it wrong (apologies to G. Buchner)

(something filthy for my sister):

spit in your hands, champ. do it indelicate.

wring something out of this. do it complete.

(something for me):

rest on the grass and listen to the armies underground.

go home, soldier. get violent.