ABSTRACT

Werner Herzog avers that cinema reveals a truth beyond mere fact, a truth he calls ‘ecstatic truth’. The film that offers the clearest view of this conception, the mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004), remains understudied and obscure. In Incident, Herzog plays a fictionalized version of himself who is making a documentary about the Loch Ness monster. This fictional version of Herzog shares the real Herzog’s filmmaking philosophy, a philosophy Incident lays bare for study: namely, Incident reveals how the pursuit of ecstatic truth takes us to the limits of human understanding. While Incident helps us explore the concept of ecstatic truth, I argue it also helps us understand much of Herzog’s oeuvre, including 2005’s Grizzly Man. In this paper, therefore, I analyze ecstatic truth as presented in Incident and apply that understanding to Grizzly Man and its controversial tape scene. Examining said scene through the lens of the ecstatic truth will, I argue, not only garner us fuller insight into Herzog’s films, but will also shed light on the effects of Herzog’s controversial choice to not play the tape of Timothy Treadwell’s death in Grizzly Man.

摘要

沃纳·赫尔佐格断言，电影揭示了一个超越事实的真理，他称之为“欣喜若狂的真理”。伪纪录片《尼斯湖事件》（2004 年）对这一概念提供了最清晰的阐述，但它的研究仍然不够深入且晦涩难懂。在《事件》中，赫尔佐格扮演了一个虚构的自己，他正在制作一部关于尼斯湖水怪的纪录片。这个虚构版本的赫尔佐格分享了真实的赫尔佐格的电影制作哲学，这一哲学为《事件》提供了可供研究的哲学：即《事件》揭示了对令人欣喜若狂的真理的追求如何将我们带到人类理解的极限。事件发生时帮助我们探索狂喜真理的概念，我认为它也帮助我们理解赫尔佐格的大部分作品，包括 2005 年的《灰熊人》。因此，在本文中，我分析了《事件》中所呈现的欣喜若狂的真相，并将这种理解应用于《灰熊人》及其有争议的磁带场景。我认为，通过令人欣喜若狂的真相镜头审视上述场景，不仅能让我们对赫尔佐格的电影有更全面的了解，而且还能揭示赫尔佐格有争议的选择不播放《灰熊人》中蒂莫西·特雷德韦尔死亡磁带的影响。