The White Diamond

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.

Grizzily Man was not even considered for the Oscar nominations in documentary for a reason. This was simply because it was not included on the ballot paper. This was Werener Herzog's choice. He has no time for playing the Hollywood game. Though it would've been wonderful to see him win it, you've got to admire the man's integrity. He remains one of the greatest and most original film makers at work today. The White Diamond is no exception. It starts out almost like a typical BBC documentary, but it quickly becomes apparent that this man is no ordinary professor, but yet another human being with obsessive drive of dreams and vision. Where does Herzog find these people! May he continue to illuminated us.

In "The White Diamond," famed documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog has fashioned a quirky, visually beautiful tribute to all the risk takers and dreamers who make exploration and discovery possible.

Herzog has chosen for his subject Dr. Graham Dorrington, an aeronautics engineer who has invented a small, helium-powered airship that allows him to fly over and into the canopy of the South American rainforest in order to study the richly varied life forms that inhabit that hitherto unexplored area of the planet's biosphere. Dorrington, who comes across as part humanitarian scientist and part lovable crackpot, is nothing if not eager to share his adventures with Herzog and his crew of brave filmmakers.

Even though there is much of interest in the setting-up stage of the experiment and the short history of aviation Herzog provides at the beginning, the movie itself is almost so lackadaisical in its approach that it often feels unfocused and devoid of passion, but once Dorrington and Herzog himself are airborne, with the camera moving in for unbelievably tight close-ups of the creatures living within the soaring treetops, the movie becomes a treasure trove of rare and wonderful sights that even the least nature-oriented among us will find impossible to forget.

This is one of the least flashy documentary films you will ever see. For despite the very real risks to life and limb involved in the project, this is a work that finds its beauty and drama in the serene majesty of the setting and the elegant simplicity of the airship itself. More mood piece than scientific document, "The White Diamond" should appeal as much to the poet as to the adventurer in all of us.

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.

Herzog's films are often about rulebreakers, visionaries and daredevils, something which he has always been himself. Being a daredevil flirting with death makes one feel alive, which is no small thing, but being a daredevil flirting with something even larger than death, is ecstasy. In this film, Herzog, his film crew and a small band of scientists headed by aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington, head off to a remote area of Guyana to fly a newfangled zeppelin just a toe's length above the treetops of the jungle. Dorrington has his legitimate reasons for the usefulness of his invention, as does Herzog in documenting what may be an important new discovery in science and technology. But both of these men, as well as us in the audience, see these men's laughably primitive jabs at besting nature shrunken by the grandeur of the nature surrounding them. From the fierce power of the waterfall where they are camped out, to the unfathomable grace and sheer numbers of the birds who dwell behind it, the plight of two little men in a motorized air balloon is almost comical. I say almost because a man died in such an attempt ten years earlier - a scene that is described in chillingly vivid detail by Dorrington. Also, there is a kind of nobility in man's stubborn desire to defy his relatively scrawny limitations against nature. Whether it's Fitzcarraldo dragging a steamship over a mountain, Herzog himself trying to make the steamship climb the mountain for his film, or Dr. Dorrington sailing the skies in a contraption that seems as fragile as a butterfly, the dream is everything. The dreams of Herzog's characters - be they real or fictional - are usually short-lived, but at least the dreams do come alive briefly. If I could sum up everything that is great in Herzog's films, it would be in one awesome scene in this film where Herzog shoots the upside-down reflection of the mighty waterfall in a falling drop of rain. This moment, this reflection, this drop of rain is as temporary as life, but in it is the entire universe in all of its beauty, majesty and fragility. If that's not ecstasy, I don't know what is!