The White Diamond

I am a huge Werner Herzog fan. His early films filled me with a wonderful sense of what movies could do and so hooked me at a young age on the most powerful of all drugs, celluloid.

More than his fiction films I am a fan of Herzog's documentaries. There is something about the way he sees a subject that opens your eyes to things other than the subject at hand. Often his documentaries are almost something else, his Lessons in the Darkness about the oil well fires in Kuwait is structured as an aliens arrival on earth. Its a haunting film that is more magical and informative than the similar IMAX film Fires of Kuwait.

The White Diamond, is on the face of it the story of the building of an airship to study the canopy of the rain forests. It is also, as Werner Herzog tells it, the story of the search for absolution for the death of the inventors friend. I will certainly buy the first part, but I highly doubt the second.

This is simply one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. The shots of the balloon in flight, the waterfall, the birds that live by the falls and the life in the canopy make this the first time I ever wanted to own the biggest and best TV ever made just so I could see these images. I doubt that other than on a rare occasion you'll ever have seen anything as beautiful.

Herzog also introduces us to some real characters Dr Dorrington, the inventor of the airship is a man of great passion. Mark Anthony Yhap, a man hired to help porter materials is probably worthy a film himself. Also the rest of the crew are also intriguing characters for the brief period they cross the screen. It is the mix of people and image that make this film work as well as it does.

The trouble is that the film almost doesn't work. As a narrative the film is sloppy and unfocused. We are told about the cave behind the falls where the birds live and where no one has ever gone.We see a camera lowered down to a climber so footage inside the cave can be shot, only to be told we will not be shown the footage. It is only sometime later that we are told why, what is in the cave is a legend and to reveal whats there could up set the belief of the population. Its an odd way round the subject and feels completely backwards. The real trouble with the film is the way Herzog hammers away at Dorrington about the death of a friend some years earlier when a ship he had made got caught up in the trees. Dorrington was in no way responsible for the accident of the death (other than he built the ship that was involved) but Herzog trumpets the point over and over in order to give some dramatic tension to what appeared to be a pretty straight forward test flight of the airship. It adds a false note that almost sinks the film...from which it recovers from when ever we see the ship in flight or get away from the morbid subject.

Definitely worth seeing. Its a flawed masterpiece that's a must in High Definition or on a really good TV.

Once again, the most adventurous documentary film maker of our time returns to his most beloved subjects and his most beloved setting. The White Diamond is about an obsessed man who wants to conquer a relatively unexplored frontier in the South American rain forest. Yet this is no sequel or remake of the amazing Herzog film Aguirre. Rather, in The White Diamond, Herzog returns to his beloved rain forest to tell the story of Dr. Graham Dorrington's struggle to build and fly an ultra-light helium airship as a way to explore the resources and ecology of the South American rain forest canopy.

Unlike many of Herzog's recent films, The White Diamond has an irrepressibly upbeat tone, as Herzog seems - as he can seemingly only do in South America - to celebrate the simultaneous absurdity and brilliance of the human spirit. Like Little Dieter, Fitzcarraldo, Rescue Dawn and Kaspar Hauser, The White Diamond is about remarkable people who do remarkable things. And like almost all of Herzog's portfolio, the photography and soundtrack are magnificent.

Herzog appears quite often in this film, and, as he has done frequently in recent times, gives us a bit more of a view of his interior world. Unlike Grizzly Man, however, this is not the dark, constrained hostility of the great director's view of life, but rather the hopeful Herzog who is interested in what makes people tick. And, unlike many of his films, he seems to like what he sees this time.

The White Diamond occasionally tangentializes away from the main story to talk to us about things that inspire the local inhabitants of the rain forest where the story takes place. A mysterious cave is explored, but the mystery is preserved in deference to the wishes of a local tribe. The poet philosopher of Dorrington's team is a local Rastafarian herbalist who finds tranquility and joy in everything, but whose rooster is his major inspiration. And then there are Herzog and Dorrington themselves, who are a whole different story. Some of Dorrington's incessant commentary can be a little annoying, but I believe Herzog left it in the film to give us a clear sense of the man himself - for which I can not fault the director.

Literally and spiritually uplifting, The White Diamond is a truly lovely film which uses setting and story to create a lasting impression. Like most of Herzog's films, it bears intense, wide-awake, and repeated scrutiny, and is worth thinking about afterward.

At one point in the development of air travel, the zeppelin was seen as the future. However after the Hindenburg disaster its days were essentially numbered although, decades later, London University lecturer Dr Dorrington has always had a dream of producing a small zeppelin to glide over the unexplored tree tops of a South American jungle. A previous attempt left a nature cinematographer dead so Dorrington is nervous about this next project and the responsibility he feels he has. As he reaches the endgame of his project he is joined Having only seen a couple of Herzog films I cannot refuge the comments of other reviewers that have said this is poor by his standards but for me I found it mostly very interesting. We only share a few scenes with Dorrington outside of the jungle and it is to the benefit of the film because it allows it to bring in things other than just his personality and his mission. So we look at some of the legends in the jungle and get to know some of the locals – specifically Mark Anthony who is funny and interesting, even if Herzog goes a bit far in painting him as some sort of great man to be learnt from. The main focus is still interesting, although I personally struggled to see the value in it, it was still engaging to watch it all come together and fall apart at different times.

At times the delivery by the individuals is a problem. Dorrington is a normal, driven person when he is not talking to camera but when he addresses the camera directly he suddenly turns into a sort of pre-school teacher. Given that he is a university lecturer I was surprised by the way he spoke in childish terms and strengthened his point by widening his eyes and making noises – at any point I expected him to take me through the square window. Herzog is OK but he did come off a bit pretentious at times. The best example of this is when he gets a really good shot through a water droplet on a leaf that shows the waterfall perfectly; it is a beautiful shot and is ruined by him asking Marc if he can "see the whole universe if that droplet". Fortunately the film keeps these "gems" to a minimum and mostly it is very engaging – the one take where Dorrington described the accident that happened a decade before is horribly enthralling.

The film looks good – someone else describing it as being home movie standard just doesn't know what he is talking about. I would have liked a lot more inspiring footage but there are still some excellently captured views and the sight of this perfect "white diamond" floating in the sky is a pleasing contrast to the rich greens and blues of the jungle. Overall an interesting documentary despite the delivery problems of the people, the occasional touch of pretension and the vanity value of the project and well worth seeing.

I like Herzog's films generally, but I think that he is most satisfying as a documentary filmmaker. It seems to me that Herzog is not really interested in "story," the aesthetic feature which dominates the response of probably about 99% of the people who watch films in the United States. Herzog is interested, it seems to me, in visceral experiences, and the documentary form frees him more to explore this kind of experience. I found this film thrilling. What is it "about"? There are lots of false leads for those viewers who want to reduce it to something package-able, but I don't think it's about "obsession," as the Netflix blurb suggests. I also don't think it's simply about Dorrington, the Guyanese rain forest, adventure, or "atonement," which is another Netflix suggestion. I think that, as Herzog would have it, the film is about something ineffable, perhaps whatever is behind that mammoth waterfall where millions of swifts live. Is that cave a metaphor for the world the camera is always trying to connect us to? It doesn't matter. I think Herzog wants us to "experience" this film rather than to analyze it. Herzog seems to me to make films by following his gut instincts and there are times when his cinematic choices are thrilling. I am especially fond of his courage with long takes, holding the camera on Dorrington's confessions long after we have become uncomfortable with them. I think Herzog is forcing us to experience Dorrington as a human being. If we choose to distance ourselves with analysis, that is our choice and I suspect that Herzog would shrug that response off and simply make another movie.

The dream of flight is the dream of being one with the birds, one with Nature. To break gravity's hold means to escape human limitation, to transcend the banal and achieve a purer, lighter, truer existence. Such is the goal of people like Graham Dorrington, the subject of Werner Herzog's documentary The White Diamond.

Dorrington has been fascinated with flight since he was a boy messing with rockets (and losing a couple fingers in the process). To soar weightless over the earth is for Dorrington literally a dream; he sees himself floating over cities in his sleep. He seeks to realize his dream in a specially designed airship, a pygmy blimp shaped like a giant ball with a conical tail, a flimsy frame gondola dangling below it. Not content with flying the ship over the dull English countryside, Dorrington journeys with it to Guyana, intending to guide it over the unexplored jungle canopy. His quest, which seems only mildly insane (compared to activities detailed in other Werner Herzog films), is lent extra urgency by his guilt over the death of a colleague, the jungle cinematographer Dieter Plage, who crashed a vehicle similar to Dorrington's White Diamond (its name comes from its resemblance to the gem) during an earlier expedition.

Werner Herzog has tackled characters like Dorrington before, in both fiction (Fitzcarraldo) and non-fiction (Little Dieter Needs to Fly) films. What seems to fascinate Herzog is the single-mindedness of these men, their willingness to dare destruction in the name of achieving some goal whose significance is apparent only to them. Herzog relates to these men, because he himself is a man given to folly; the quest of Fitzcarraldo, to bring opera to the Amazon via riverboat, is scarcely less mad, less potentially disastrous, than Herzog's own quest to film the story as realistically as possible (real jungle, real riverboat). Not content to merely record the craziness of others, Herzog seems motivated to join in it. The jungle provides a perfect proving ground for people like Herzog and Dorrington; the everyday world doesn't have the right dimensions, the right sprawling spaces, the right sense of teeming, hostile life, to match these men's expansive visions. Herzog, no longer the mad genius of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (the jungle is no longer a surrealistic hell for Herzog, but a place of spiritual majesty), has honed his craft to a fine edge. He tells his story efficiently, paints his portrait of Dorrington precisely, revealing the guilt beneath his gentle eccentricity. Dorrington is the sort of man who always seems to be looking somewhere else; his mind seems always on the verge of wandering into some kind of reverie. But it's not only his dream of flight that distracts him; he's haunted by his perceived culpability in the death of Dieter, and seems driven by the need for atonement.

Herzog's aim in The White Diamond is to correlate the random, incomprehensible beauty of the jungle with the randomness and mystery of human obsession. The airship experiment is carried out near a giant waterfall called Kaieteur (it's four times higher than Niagara Falls), and in a cave behind the falls roost up to a million swifts, which Herzog films soaring and swirling through the air, and swooping in endless streams into the unexplored void behind the watery curtain of the falls. A climber endeavors to film the cave beyond the falls at one point, but his footage has been left out of the film at the behest of the natives, who believe that to reveal the truth of the cave, which they hold to be filled with mythic monsters, would be to destroy some essential part of their culture. The eternally hidden cave becomes a metaphor for that which is unknowable, not only in Nature but in the human heart, and specifically in men like Dorrington, who, like the swifts as they dance and dart through the air, and plummet into the darkness of their cave, are driven by impulses no one else can understand, an inner-music no one else can hear. There's a whiff of New Age jive to all this, as there is in much of Herzog's work, but what the film may lack in philosophical weight it makes up for in pure imagist excitement. Even working in DV, which doesn't make for the kind of haunting effects film can achieve, Herzog manages to evoke the wonder, the peril, the profound mystery of the jungle. The sky may call to Dorrington, but the jungle has always called to Herzog, and in The White Diamond the two obsessions merge to form something joyous, inscrutable and lurkingly dangerous.