As an octogenarian, Werner Herzog stands as a enduring figure who works entirely on his own terms. Similar to his quirky and enchanting movies, Herzog's latest publication challenges traditional structures of composition, blurring the distinctions between reality and fantasy while examining the core nature of truth itself.
The brief volume details the director's perspectives on truth in an period dominated by technology-enhanced deceptions. His concepts appear to be an elaboration of his earlier manifesto from the turn of the century, containing strong, enigmatic opinions that include despising documentary realism for hiding more than it clarifies to surprising declarations such as "rather die than wear a toupee".
Several fundamental ideas define Herzog's interpretation of truth. First is the belief that pursuing truth is more significant than finally attaining it. As he explains, "the quest itself, bringing us nearer the unrevealed truth, permits us to participate in something fundamentally unattainable, which is truth". Furthermore is the belief that bare facts offer little more than a boring "financial statement truth" that is less valuable than what he terms "exhilarating authenticity" in helping people comprehend reality's hidden dimensions.
Were another author had authored The Future of Truth, I believe they would encounter severe judgment for teasing out of the reader
Reading the book feels like hearing a hearthside talk from an entertaining family member. Included in numerous fascinating narratives, the most bizarre and most striking is the account of the Sicilian swine. In Herzog, long ago a swine was wedged in a vertical drain pipe in Palermo, the Mediterranean region. The creature was stuck there for years, living on bits of nourishment thrown down to it. Over time the swine took on the form of its confinement, transforming into a type of translucent block, "ghostly pale ... unstable as a large piece of jelly", absorbing food from above and expelling waste beneath.
The filmmaker uses this narrative as an metaphor, relating the Palermo pig to the risks of extended space exploration. If mankind begin a voyage to our nearest habitable planet, it would need generations. Over this time the author imagines the brave explorers would be obliged to reproduce within the group, evolving into "changed creatures" with no understanding of their mission's purpose. Eventually the astronauts would transform into light-colored, larval beings rather like the Palermo pig, equipped of little more than consuming and eliminating waste.
This morbidly fascinating and unintentionally hilarious transition from Mediterranean pipes to interstellar freaks offers a example in the author's notion of rapturous reality. Since audience members might discover to their dismay after trying to substantiate this fascinating and biologically implausible cuboid swine, the Sicilian swine appears to be mythical. The pursuit for the limited "literal veracity", a reality based in simple data, overlooks the point. Why was it important whether an imprisoned Italian livestock actually became a quivering wobbly block? The real lesson of the author's story abruptly is revealed: penning animals in small spaces for long durations is unwise and generates freaks.
If a different author had authored The Future of Truth, they would likely face negative feedback for unusual composition decisions, digressive statements, conflicting ideas, and, frankly speaking, mocking out of the reader. After all, Herzog allocates multiple pages to the theatrical plot of an opera just to illustrate that when artistic expressions feature powerful feeling, we "invest this ridiculous kernel with the full array of our own feeling, so that it seems strangely genuine". However, since this publication is a assemblage of uniquely characteristically Herzog musings, it resists negative reviews. The sparkling and creative version from the source language – in which a crypto-zoologist is portrayed as "lacking full mental capacity" – somehow makes Herzog even more distinctive in style.
Although a great deal of The Future of Truth will be known from his prior works, films and discussions, one relatively new aspect is his meditation on digitally manipulated media. Herzog refers multiple times to an computer-created perpetual conversation between fake audio versions of himself and a fellow philosopher online. Given that his own techniques of attaining rapturous reality have involved inventing statements by prominent individuals and casting performers in his documentaries, there is a potential of double standards. The distinction, he argues, is that an discerning individual would be reasonably able to recognize {lies|false
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