The set-up is that Dr Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical engineer, wishes to build a balloon in order to float above a jungle canopy and film the wildlife below. Dorrington is haunted by guilt over a previous expedition in Indonesia 10 years before, when a noted wildlife cinematographer crashed his balloon into a treetop canopy, and fell to his death from it. This expedition to Guyana is partly his attempt to atone, in his own mind, for the mistakes made in that tragedy.
Dorrington is highly enthusiastic and engaging, and also very articulate, about his ambitions, regrets, and his spiritual search. One of Herzog's distinctive methods is to find interesting subjects, then let them tell their tale, and Dorrington is a very good narrator - obsessive, vulnerable and humorous.
The co-star of the film, apart from Herzog himself, who is always present as narrator or off-screen participant, is Marc Antony, a local with a mischievous smile and wit, who labels the ballon the white diamond (one of the principal industries of Guyana is diamond mining, and Marc Antony was a miner) He represents the spirituality of Guyana, but also a Rastafarian indolence, and Herzog indulges him. He knows the local herbs which can have medicinal properties, which is one of the justifications for the expedition - biologists consider the jungle canopy to be one of the last unexplored habitats in the world, which may well yield useful pharmaceuticals, not to mention previously undiscovered flaura and fauna.
The expedition is to a waterfall in the jungle, behind which is a cave that is home to over one million swifts. Although they manage to film into the cave, a sight no human can previously have seen as it requires being suspended from a rope beside the falls, Herzog respectfully doesn't show this footage, as a local tribal leader says that the myths about the cave are potent in the local culture, and to expose the reality is to destroy a little bit of that. This is a typical Herzog touch, putting himself into the story, engaging with the indigenous culture, and maintaining himself as the gateway to a mystery. He does something similar in Grizzly Man, when he films himself listening to a recording of Treadwell's death, but daren't play it to the audience. It's a little bit of gamesmanship.
There are some remarkable shots in the film, notably of the falls as viewed through a suspended raindrop, and the closing shot of a million swifts flying into their cave behind the falls.
My enjoyment of this film, which was immense, was slightly altered by my mistaken belief, due to a misreading of a post before I saw it, that the Graham Dorrington might have been acting (someone had said that a secondary character was a bullshitter, but I didn't know then which character it was) This meant that I was watching some of the most affecting scenes, of him relating the death of his previous colleague, on a dual level, uncertain whether it was a true revelation or a performance. As Herzog is known for tricks like this, blurring the distinction between factual documentary and storytelling, it pays to be wary. But, having researched it since, it appears that Dorrington is genuine, although he does admit that some of the things he said on camera were scripted, and the argument with Herzog was a set-up - it didn't feel convincing on screen, it was just a pretext to allow Herzog to be in the balloon for the first flight. No matter, that didn't substantially alter the veracity of the film, or the visual impact of it.
Graham Dorrington Interview
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