In the labyrinth of memories, I often ask myself how much are they in flux, what mattered when, and how much has evaporated or changed tonality. How true are our memories? The question of truth has preoccupied me in all my films. Today it has even more urgency for all of us because we leave traces on the internet that take on a life of their own. The matter of fake news has achieved a huge prominence because it has so much effect on political life. But there have always been falsifications as long as we have had written signs. In reliefs, an Egyptian pharaoh celebrates his great victory over the Hittites, but we have a written account of the peace treaty that was concluded that tells us that the battle was indecisive. We have fake Neros who, after the death of the Roman emperor, suddenly turned up with great retinues in northern Greece and Asia Minor. We have the fronts of Potemkin villages that were to impress Catherine the Great on her journey down the Dnieper. It’s an unending list.
From early on in my work, I was confronted by facts. You have to take them seriously because they have a normative force, but making purely factual films has never interested me. Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts. Otherwise, the Manhattan phone book would be The Book of Books. Four million entries, all factually correct, all subject to confirmation. But that doesn’t tell us anything about one of the dozens of James Millers in there. His number and address are indeed correct. But why does he cry into his pillow every night? It takes poetry; it takes the poetic imagination to make visible a deeper layer of truth. I coined the phrase “ecstatic truth.” To explain that fully would take another book, so I’ll just sketch out a few lines of it here. It’s on this question that I have sought public conflict with the proponents of the so-called cinema verité who claim for themselves the truth of the whole genre of documentary films. As the auteur of a film, you are not allowed to exist, or not more than a fly on the wall anyway. That creed would make the CCTV cameras in banks the ultimate form of filmmaking. But I don’t want to be a fly; I’d rather be a hornet. Cinema verité was an idea from the 1960s; its representatives nowadays I call the “bookkeepers of the truth.” That got me furious attacks. My answer was “Happy New Year, losers.”
The French novelist André Gide once wrote: “I alter facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.” Shakespeare observed similarly: “The most truthful poetry is the most feigning.” That busied me for a long time. The simplest instance is Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s in Rome. The face of Jesus, just taken down from the cross, is the face of a thirty-three-year-old man, but the face of his mother is the face of a seventeen-year-old girl. Was Michelangelo lying to us? Did he wish to deceive us? Disseminate fake news? As an artist, he behaved perfectly straightforwardly by showing us the deepest truth of the two people. What the truth is is something none of us knows anyway, not even the philosophers or the mathematicians or the pope in Rome. I never see the truth as a fixed star on the horizon but always as an activity, a search, an approximation.
My film Lessons of Darkness, about the blazing oil wells in Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War, begins with a quotation from Pascal: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur, like creation, in grandiose splendor.” The film isn’t a political piece about the crimes of Saddam Hussein’s retreating Iraqi troops; you could see and hear that in crude forms every night for a year on the TV news. I had in mind something different. When I arrived in Kuwait, it seemed to me that there was more going on: an event with cosmic dimensions, a crime against creation. During the entire film, which feels like a requiem, there isn’t a single shot in which we can even recognize our planet. The film comes on as a kind of science fiction apocalypse. Hence the Pascal before the opening scenes—I wanted to raise the viewer to a high level and keep him there until the end. But the quote isn’t from Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher who left us wonderful aphorisms about the universe; it’s by me. I think Pascal couldn’t have put it any better. And another thing: in such instances, I always pointed out that I made something up.
I am always fascinated by the way people apprehend the “truth.” In the Fitzcarraldo shoots, the commune of the local Machiguenga tribe deep in the jungle wanted cash payment in return for their participation, but they wanted some other rewards too, such as a permanent medical outpost, a transport boat, and our support for their endeavor to get a title to their land, their territory. At first, we employed a surveyor to make a map with borderlines, then, with two representatives from Shivankoreni, we met the president of Peru, which led to an acceptance of their rights to their territory a couple of years later. Back then in Lima, there was a moment that for me became “the truth of the ocean.” In the Machiguenga village, there had been a dispute as to whether there was such a thing as the ocean and if this ocean, if it existed, contained salt water. When we were traveling with them, the two Machiguenga representatives waded fully dressed out into the waves until the water went up to their armpits and tasted the water all around them. Then they filled a bottle with seawater, stoppered it up, and carefully carried it back with them to the jungle. Their proof was that if there was salt in one part of the sea, then, as with a large cauldron, all the water in it would be equally salty.
A very recent example makes me think. After I had shot Family Romance, LLC in Japan, Japanese television started to get interested in the phenomenon that nowadays, from an agency that employs some two thousand people, one can rent out a missing family member, say, or a friend for an afternoon. The founder of the agency, Yuichi Ishii, played the lead in my film. He is hired by the mother of an eleven-year-old girl to pretend to be the divorced father of the girl, who is anxious for contact with him. Because the parents split up when the girl was only two, she has no idea what her father looks like. Incidentally, the girl in my film isn’t the actual daughter but a well-instructed nonprofessional actress. Yuichi Ishii was interviewed by NHK television on his enterprise and asked to refer them to a client who had used the services of his agency. NHK then interviewed an elderly man who for one of his lonesome days had hired a “friend.” Straight after the show, the internet was deluged with people pointing out that the “customer” hadn’t been a customer at all, that Ishii had provided the station with an impostor, a cheat from his own agency, who had merely pretended to be a lonely man. The station apologized publicly to its viewers for not having done its homework properly. To lose face like that is the worst possible embarrassment in Japan. So far, so good. But now it gets interesting. I have what follows only on second hand. Yuichi Ishii defended himself with the argument that he had deliberately sent in an actor from his own agency because a true customer, a real old man in miserable solitude, would at most have spoken half the truth. A real customer, to save face and not give too much insight into his innermost being, would presumably have put a gloss on everything, would most likely have lied at least some of the time. But the “swindler” provided by Yuichi Ishii, the “cheat” who had played the part of the “friend” to lonely people hundreds of times, he knew exactly what was going on in the heart of the lonely person. It was only from the swindler that the real truth could be gleaned. And that doesn’t exist, and so I call it “ecstatic truth.”