The White Diamond

The documentary form (“creative treatment of actuality” in the classic Grierson formulation) is capacious enough to contain Werner Herzog’s recent films, but truly they are personal essays written on film. He is not looking to record the “truth,” but his own wonderings and wanderings about subjects that attract him. He’s a trippy guy, and it’s a trip to take trips with him. To the Arctic for Grizzly Man and to tropical Guyana here, following the obsessive quest for flight (and “levity”) by the designer of a small airship intended to float over the jungle canopy. The other main character is a local sage called Redbeard, who dubs the contraption, “the white diamond.” It’s not what we would call diamond shaped, but later Herzog takes us to one of the local diamond mines, to see what a diamond looks like straight out of the ground, and sure enough the comparison is apt. I really wish I had seen this film in a theater, for the immersive spectacle of it, the prolonged rapture of something like the climactic shot when thousands upon thousands of swifts fly past the immense waterfall to their nesting place in the cliff behind. The film is random, jottings in Werner’s notebook, but cumulatively revelatory. (2005, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-83.)