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Notes
1. Hoberman, “Arrested Development,” in Village Voice.
2. My thanks to Michael Renov for making this point regarding Herzog in response to a presentation of the some of the arguments presented herein.
3. Following the work of American scholars, this essay will use the Americanized spelling of dogma with an “a” in place of the Danish “e.”
4. Knudsen, “The Man Who Would Give Up Control.” Lars von Trier: Interviews, p. 123.
5. Ibid.
6. Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in Grierson on Documentary, p. 147.
7. Reprinted in Christensen, “Documentary Gets the Dogma Treatment,” p. 186
8. Ibid., p. 187.
9. Mackenzie, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology.
10. Unleashed: A Dogumentary. Dir. Lisa Grossman. Imp Entertainment, 2009. Film.
11. The relationship between the men is as fascinating and mediated as that between Herzog and Dengler (or Herzog and Treadwell, for example) as discussed later in this essay.
12. For Renov (“Towards a Poetics of Documentary,” in Theorizing Documentary), the “functions” of documentary are: 1) record / reveal/preserve, 2) persuade/promote, 3) analyze/interrogate, and 4) express. Bill Nichols discusses the first four modes—expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive—in Representing Reality (pp. 32–75). A fifth mode, the performative, is explicated in Blurred Boundaries (pp. 92–106).
13. Arthur, “Beyond the Limits: Werner Herzog's Metaphysical Realism: 40 Years of Boldly Going Where No Documentary Has Gone Before,” in Film Comment, p. 47.
14. The original Dogma documents have been widely reprinted and can be found as the opening pieces for the 10th issue of P.O.V. on Dogma.
15. Herzog's document is reprinted alongside others on his webpage at <http://www.wernerherzog.com/52.html>
16. Basoli, “The Wrath of Klaus Kinski: An Interview With Werner Herzog,” in Cineaste, p. 35.
17. See James (“Revolt into Style,” in Sight and Sound) and Klosterman (Eating the Dinosaur) for fairly recent and informal comments on the manifesto. Ames (Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog) begins his monograph with a sustained consideration of the manifesto as a representation of Herzog's thinking and as a foundation from which to consider his nonfiction work.
18. Cheshire and Knipfel, “Q&A With Werner Herzog,” in NY Press <http://www.nypress.com/qa-with-werner-herzog/>
19. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, p. 239.
20. Point 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.”
21. Gray (Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts) explores trailers, games, “making-of” documentaries, and more media to argue persuasively that paratexts “create texts, they manage them, and they fill them with many of the meanings that we associate with them” (p. 6). Film manifestos might be included in what Gray terms “entryway paratexts” in that they “grab the viewer before he or she reaches the text and try to control the viewer's entrance to that text” (p. 23). But Gray's neglect of soundtracks—as pointed out to the author by Todd Decker in 2014—is a considerable oversight.
22. MacKenzie, “Direct Dogma: Film Manifestos and the fin de siècle,” in P.O.V, <http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_10/section_4/artc6A.html>
23. Borges, “Kafka and His Precursors,” in Selected Non-Fictions, p. 365.
24. Prawer, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, p. 67.
25. Faced with Cronin's direct invitation, “Have you any final advice for your readers?,” Herzog offers an explanation and exhortation that implores Cronin and future generations to look to Herzog for life advice rather than a famous Hollywood actress: “Well, I recently saw a film celebrating the life of Katharine Hepburn, who I actually like as an actress. It was some kind of homage to her but unfortunately it turns out that she has these vanilla ice-cream emotions. At the end she is sitting on a rock by the ocean and someone off-camera asks her, ‘Ms. Hepburn, what would you like to pass on to the younger generation?’ She swallows, tears are welling, she takes a lot of time as if she were thinking very deeply about it all, then she looks straight into the camera and says, ‘Listen to the Song of Life.’ And the film ends. I was cringing it hurt so much. I still smart just thinking about it. And hearing this was such a blow that I even wrote it into the Minnesota Declaration, Article Ten, which I repeat here and now for you, Paul. I look you right in the eye and say, ‘Don't you ever listen to the Song of Life.’” (Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, p. 300).
26. Corrigan, “Producing Herzog: From a Body of Images,” in The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, p. 9.
27. German filmmakers also offered the world “The Oberhausen Manifesto” (which famously did not involve Herzog) and the later and far less famous “Hamburg Declaration of German Filmmakers” in 1979 (which does count Herzog as a signee). The latter begins by noting the influence of the earlier document (“Seventeen years after Oberhausen we have taken stock”) and conclude with a call to “imagine a totally different kind of film.” In the middle are three statements following the proclamation that “We will not let ourselves be divided.” The first division to be resisted is “the feature film from the documentary film.” These texts are included in Mackenzie's Film Manifestos.
28. Ames, “Herzog, Landscape, and Documentary,” in Cinema Journal, p. 68.
29. Prager, “Werner Herzog's Companions: The Consolation of Images,” in A Companion to Werner Herzog, p. 2.
30. Herzog has a gift (or skill, depending on the degree of one's cynicism) for repeating stories and anecdotes nearly word for word at various time and occasions. The version of the inciting incident for the “Minnesota Declaration” offered in Herzog on Herzog is very similar to other utterances. For comparison see his interviews with Basoli (“The Wrath of Werner Herzog”) and also Cheshire and Knipfel (“Q&A with Werner Herzog”). This essay relies on Herzog on Herzog in part because of Herzog's statement of (authorial) intent at the beginning of Cronin's text: “Facing the stark alternative to see a book on me compiled from dusty interviews with all the wild distortions and lies, or collaborating—I choose the much worse option: to collaborate” (Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, p. xii).
31. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, p. 239.
32. Most importantly here, Herzog responds to “hard core” pornography. Such films offer the promise of “real”—not simulated, not fabricated, though admittedly stylized—sexual encounters. Herzog seems uninterested in questioning the particular truth claim of this mode of filmmaking or its melding of the real and the scripted. In such films the “real” and the “fictionalized” are united to create a distinct genre which few scholars would call documentary. On the emphasis on “visible proof” in pornography, see Williams (Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.”).
33. Cheshire and Knipfel, Q&A With Werner.
34. Winston, Claiming the Read: The Documentary Film Revisited, pp. 148–158, 181–188.
35. Errol Morris, for example, makes the same error in a public defense of documentary reenactment (Morris, “Play It Again, Sam [Re-Enactments, Part One],” in New York Times).
36. Barnouw, Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film, pp. 231–261.
37. Winston, Claiming the Real, p. 188.
38. Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” in Cine-Ethnography: Jean Rouch, p. 255.
39. Björkman, Trier on von Trier, p. 255.
40. In Solanas and Getino's terms, this is both “first” and “second” cinema. Dogma offers not “third” cinema. in their terms but something closer to a second attempt at a pure, authorial, “second” cinema See Solanas and Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” pp. 927–928.
41. Point 7 cements the relation of the film to the present in time and space: “Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)” The Dogma, though fictional, is bound to a particular type of profilmic event, one that shares considerable commonalities to the profilmic event of documentary. Note as well that there is no stipulation regarding editing. Though editing is certainly difficult to police by the brethren, the authors perhaps naively regard editing as a tool for managing footage more than manipulating it.
42. Griffiths, “The Manipulated Image,” Animate.
43. Morin, “Chronicle,” p. 263.
44. Rouch, “The Camera and Man,” Cine-Ethnography: Jean Rouch, p. 39.
45. Herzog also began making films in the early 1960s and at times made use of the same technical innovations that made documentary practice alter to the point that the work required new theoretical underpinnings.
46. Nichols, Representing Reality (1991), p. 109, emphasis original.
47. Ibid., p. 115, emphasis original.
48. Ibid., p. 111, emphasis original.
49. Jerslev, “Dogma 95, Lars von Trier's The Idiots and the ‘Idiot Project,’” in Realism and ‘Reality’ in Film and Media, p. 51, emphasis original.
50. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, p. 278.
51. Kelly, The Name of this Book is Dogme95, p. 198.
52. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, p. 278.
53. Ibid., p. 239.
54. Each film's protagonist also reflects the director. While Herzog's film is about the individual and the survival of the individual, von Trier's film is about a woman finding herself through involvement with a group. In this way one can argue that the texts reflect not only each filmmaker's manifesto, but even the creation of that manifesto. Herzog writes alone, seeking only to provide an example to others to find their own way to make films. This is evident in his interactions with, and statements about, filmmakers such as Harmony Korine and Errol Morris. And though von Trier appears as the greatest among equals, he clearly acknowledges the work of others in a way Herzog largely avoids. Von Trier involved Vinterberg in writing the manifesto, and enticed two other directors to join the Dogma movement.
55. The collection of texts around Fitzcarraldo is the necessary precedent for Zack Penn's Incident at Loch Ness (2004) and its marketing campaign. For discussion of Incident at Loch Ness see Herbert, “Real Monster/Fake Auteur: Humor, Hollywood and Herzog in Incident at Loch Ness,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video).
56. Similar to the unnamed film that Herzog claims spurred him to write his manifesto, von Trier's film includes real sexual activity, demonstrating each filmmaker's interest in images that could not be “faked.” The orgy scene is von Trier's most famous violation of the Dogma “Vow of Chastity.” Here the film incorporates close-ups of porn actors. This scene, and the censorship issues it stirred around the world, also necessarily promoted the film.
57. Rockwell, The Idiots, p. 45.
58. Ibid.
59. As the diary and The Humiliated each reveal, von Trier was drawn to the actress during the production of the film. See Oxholm and Nielsen, “The Ultimate Dogma Film: An interview with Jens Albinus and Louise Hassing on Dogma 2—The Idiots,” in P.O.V.
60. Casper, Kent. “Herzog's Apocalypse as Eternal Return: The Circularity of La Soufrière,” in Perspectives on German Cinema, p. 529.
61. Dengler's story, not unlike The “Idiot Project,” exists in a web of texts. There are, of course, the English and German language versions of Little Dieter, but as Ames explores, the work was initially undertaken for a television program. Finally, Herzog's fictional Rescue Dawn (2006) features a studied Christian Bale performance as Dengler that also reveals how much of the power of Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a result of Dengler's cooperation with Herzog in creating the film.
62. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, p. 265.
63. Ames (Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog) uses Richard Schechner's theory of “restored behavior” in his Herzog monograph for a unique approach to the vexed area of documentary reenactment. See especially pp. 12–13 and pp. 183–185. Striking versions of nonfiction reenactment appear in works as different as Michael Paul Stephenson's Best Worst Movie (2009), William Friedkin's The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) and Emile de Antonio's In the King of Prussia (1982). For a discussion of the latter film, see Fuhs, “Re-imagining the Nonfiction Criminal Narrative: Documentary Reenactment as Political Agency,” in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies.
64. This footage appears on the Anchor Bay DVD. There is no additional information about the funeral footage on the disc or the DVD package.
65. Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, pp. 239–240.
66. Ibid., p. 136.
67. These are La Soufriere (1977), Little Dieter Needs to Fly, My Best Fiend (1999) and Fata Morgana (1971). The last of these is an especially eccentric demonstration of Herzog's interest in playing with definitions of the nonfiction film and one he has called “science fiction” on several occasions. See Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, pp. 248–249.
68. It is worth noting, however, that each of these films is heavily reliant on footage shot by someone other than Herzog. In order to integrate his own footage with the existing digital video footage, it is logical that he create his material with the same technologies.
69. The film has received considerable attention so far most noticeably on the internet. See for example, Hyden, “Werner Herzog Has Made the Greatest and Most Disturbing Driver's Ed Movie of All Time,” in Grantland.