Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
“The line between fiction and documentary doesn’t exist for me. My documentaries are often fiction in disguise."
This will be less about Little Dieter Needs to Fly than it will be about Pavements, which I reviewed for the Portland Mercury and is currently in limited release.
In 1997, Herzog had sublime forgery on the mind. He’d written and directed 1995’s Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices, a docu-fictional musical travelogue through the life of Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa—renowned 16th century composer, Italian prince, and rich maniac—in which he both wholesale imagines bleakly beautiful episodes from the prince’s life, and cajoles people in the street to do what he tells them because he has a camera. Still, Gesualdo reads as a documentary, and no one would suspect that Herzog asked academics to lie about their beloved subjects.
Filled with oddness and curiosity and a luridly soothing tone, the film feels like Herzog has stumbled upon one fascinating chunk of the universe after another. All of it is connected simply because all of it shares in a Herzog film—which can sometimes feel like watching something elemental unfold. Whether Gesualdo gruesomely murdered his son or not (likely not), Herzog taps into the historical figure’s chaotic nature more essentially than a more faithful, less stylized biographical documentary ever could.
I wrote this for Paste magazine two and a half years ago as part of a piece on the 25th anniversary of Little Dieter Needs to Fly. This Herzblog, the dungeon which imprisons all of my basest writing aspirations, demands by default that, as a completionist, I return to subjects about which I’ve already written exhaustively. When inevitably I have nothing new to write about, I recycle. I recontextualize. I re-quote.
This is not unlike most filmmakers who get mired in self-reflexivity as part of their whole thing. In that piece for Paste, I bring up Nathan Fielder via Richard Brody’s real-pissed-off review of The Rehearsal for the New York Times, which alludes to Jean Rouch and William Greaves as sources for the kind of, according to Brody, ethically dubious documentary methods Fielder employs. I’m going to quote my own writing again because it’s easy to do so:
Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) is surely something of an Ur-text for Fielder’s approach, layering manufactured reality over manufactured reality until the film’s purpose returns to the feet of the director himself. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm weaves together three interdependent parts: 1) a documentary of the casting process for an in-progress film called Over a Cliff; 2) a documentary of the documentary of the casting process for an in-progress film called Over a Cliff, which include scene of Greaves’ crew openly criticizing his methods, scenes he records secretly; and 3) a documentary about the documentary of the documentary of the casting process for an in-progress film called Over a Cliff, wherein the director of the first documentary also happens to be directing the third documentary, which may or may not be what Over a Cliff is about. Because Fielder doesn’t show any of his crew resisting his increasingly invasive methods, they are, to Brody, “mere onscreen emblems of planning and labor” rather than real people with visible impact on the filmmaking process.
In Fielder’s latest season of The Rehearsal, he converses with previous versions of himself, as far back as when he worked on Canadian Idol, and as recently as his first serious acting role in The Curse. The conceit of the season—that the Fielder Method could seriously assist in the long-gnarly problem of plane crashes resulting from miscommunication and intimidation between captain and co-pilot in the cockpit—could be an externalizing of the inherent solipsism of the whole experiment of the first season, wherein Fielder rehearsed having a family and emotionally devastated a child in the process.
Still, the Fielder Method is by nature an invasive practice, requiring people to buy into the legitimacy of Fielder’s parallel practice world. This, of course, does not sit well with everybody, to put it non-litigiously, and Fielder’s moral compass has once again been doubted.
I have no connection to Richard Brody beyond that he followed me on Twitter up until I liquidated that account, so I feel like I can say: Brody didn’t seem to think that one through. One can’t pick and choose deep and earnest truths from the stuff that we want to be deep and earnest when watching the stuff of filmmakers who tread insistently through one manufactured reality after another.
Werner Herzog released Little Dieter Needs to Fly on October 2, 25 years ago, barely two years before he’d codify the phrase “ecstatic truth” in 1999’s “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Filmmaking,” which he claims he wrote in 20 minutes in a Duluth hotel room.
The declaration, a 12-point approach to “non-fiction” film, really starts buzzing around number five: “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 only be reached through fabrication and imagination and stylisation.” As he later explains to Paul Cronin in Guide for the Perplexed…, “the fundamental idea behind [the declaration] is that we can never know what truth really is. The best we can do is approximate.”
Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s new film, produced and edited by Robert Greene, is an attempt to approximate the truth of the band Pavement, as I try to argue in my review, a film that is “less an attempt to grasp why Pavement is loved than how, coming to terms with what it means to make a movie about a band at all. We attach narratives to haircuts, fasten drama to the general exhaustion of life, or even wish their albums were spectacularly arranged jukebox musicals rather than the ramshackle burners they actually were.”
Greene’s is a name I also bring up in my Paste piece. As a documentary director, he’s staged reenactments to toy with the documentary form, questioning the legitimacy of historical narratives as they’ve been popularly told. In Bisbee ’17, he cast locals as real-life figures in the 1917 Bisbee Deportation—when deputized vigilantes paid by the mining company Phelps Dodge kidnapped around 1,300 striking miners in Arizona and deported them via cattle car 200 miles into New Mexico—to suss out the tragedy of that day for a community that has long forgotten it. In Procession (2021), Greene provided survivors of sexual abuse in the Catholic church the opportunity to tell their stories through directing their own short films.
In meticulously detailing the process of making a movie that’s never actually made in Kate Plays Christine (2016), Greene leans into the artifice of filmmaking to examine if “ecstatic truth” is unethical to exploit entirely.
In that film, Greene works with Kate Lyn Sheil while she prepares to play Christine Chubbuck, a news reporter who died by suicide on live television in 1974. Struggling to identify with Chubbuck, attempting to submerge her sense of self beneath her subject’s, Sheil and her director—and by extension the film—begin to doubt the performance should happen at all. Chubbuck’s life, however evocative of the time in which her life was briefly television content, is not a mystery to be solved through the power of storytelling.
Pavements does not claim to solve anything, only unveil new facets of the band to explore, injecting some real pungent insincerity into a film that questions the sincerity of any sort of project like this. But Perry and Greene, like Herzog, are encouraging us to look ever-inward the whole time, to really interrogate what it means to be “obsessed” with an artist at all.
How well can we know our favorites when the terrain they steer is one massively baffled by representations of representations of representations? How well does Little Dieter Needs to Fly convey the man who Herzog knew and, very potentially, loved?
We’re not owed any answers.