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Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice
Year: 2020
Type of publication: kapitola v odborné knize
Name of source: The philosophy of Werner Herzog
Publisher name: Lexington Books
Place: Lanham
Page from-to: 171-186
Titles:
Language Name Abstract Keywords
cze Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice In an interview with Paul Cronin, Werner Herzog states: “The word ‘documentary’ should be handled with care because we seem to have a very precise definition of what the word means”. Although Herzog himself is skeptical towards theoretical definitions of the concept of the documentary, and although he is reluctant to outline any clear methodology for his own work in film, I think that a closer look at his work will reveal some prominent features of what we call documentary film. Herzog’s work stands in contrast to a veridical tradition in both documentary film and theory, in which film is considered as a means of establishing facts and true descriptions of the world. This opens up a philosophical question, if we do not consider the documentary to be an epistemological category of veridical representations, what then makes a film documentary? In this proposed article I will examines the role of attention as a foundational faculty for the arts of photography and documentary depiction. When we pay attention to how the world looks, we might sometimes be surprised. We might perhaps be reminded that we are too set in our ways of seeing, and that the world can reveal things unknown, or as Stanley Cavell remarks: “how little we know about what our relation to reality is, our complicity in it”. I claim that this “revelatory” capacity of the photograph, its ability to show us things that we have failed to pay attention to due to our habitual ways of seeing, constitutes the aesthetics of documentary depiction. In order to arrive at this conclusion, I will examine how documentary depiction adheres to our experience, without falling back on a generic epistemological framework. This requires an explanation of how an image with a pictorial content can represent phenomenal qualities of perception. How can depiction show how we see, how we attend to the world and lived life, as it unfolds? My examples that will serve as a backdrop for this discussion are the documentary films of Wer Werner Herzog; dokumentární film; pozornost; Stanley Cavell
eng Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice In an interview with Paul Cronin, Werner Herzog states: “The word ‘documentary’ should be handled with care because we seem to have a very precise definition of what the word means”. Although Herzog himself is skeptical towards theoretical definitions of the concept of the documentary, and although he is reluctant to outline any clear methodology for his own work in film, I think that a closer look at his work will reveal some prominent features of what we call documentary film. Herzog’s work stands in contrast to a veridical tradition in both documentary film and theory, in which film is considered as a means of establishing facts and true descriptions of the world. This opens up a philosophical question, if we do not consider the documentary to be an epistemological category of veridical representations, what then makes a film documentary? In this proposed article I will examines the role of attention as a foundational faculty for the arts of photography and documentary depiction. When we pay attention to how the world looks, we might sometimes be surprised. We might perhaps be reminded that we are too set in our ways of seeing, and that the world can reveal things unknown, or as Stanley Cavell remarks: “how little we know about what our relation to reality is, our complicity in it”. I claim that this “revelatory” capacity of the photograph, its ability to show us things that we have failed to pay attention to due to our habitual ways of seeing, constitutes the aesthetics of documentary depiction. In order to arrive at this conclusion, I will examine how documentary depiction adheres to our experience, without falling back on a generic epistemological framework. This requires an explanation of how an image with a pictorial content can represent phenomenal qualities of perception. How can depiction show how we see, how we attend to the world and lived life, as it unfolds? My examples that will serve as a backdrop for this discussion are the documentary films of Wer Werner Herzog; Documentary Film; Attention; Stanley Cavell

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