"Ecstatic Truth": Research Onwerner Herzog’s Documentary

Werner Herzog, an innovative director of New German Cinema, is undoubtedly an eccentric existence in the20th-century German film history, whose documentaries contain extremely profound implications with frenetic and lonely maniacs as their protagonists and the confrontations and conflicts between man and nature as their themes. To attain the deeper truth of what he called "ecstatic truth" in his productions, Herzog never hesitated to adopt the creative method of "fictionalization", which filled his movies with poetics, adventures and imaginations, thus made his movies a unique landscape in the world documentary filmmaking history. His way of observing the world and filmmaking surely surpasses that of movie representation in the past. Therefore, it is difficult to categorize and judge his documentaries with the established film classification. With Herzog’s documentaries as the research subject, this dissertation aims to explore the representations of "ecstatic truth" in the movies, probe theoretically into the differentiations between his "ecstatic truth" and the traditional documentary aesthetics and then predict its significance in the world movie history.Based on a comprehensive survey of the domestic and international researches on Herzog, the introduction of the dissertation establishes its own theoretical foundation, radicates the goal and the significance of the study, and briefly introduces the research content, research conception and methods and the innovation of the paper.The dissertation falls into seven chapters, which can be summarized as five parts.With the growing experience of Herzog, the first chapter clarifies the shaping of his aesthetic "ecstatic truth" and expounds in detail its intrinsic characteristics and aesthetic style.The second chapter mainly explicates Herzog’s documentary filmmaking guided by "ecstatic truth", presents his extraordinary awareness of and profound insights into the relationship between man and nature, between primitiveness and civilization, and between reality and dream, and makes a thorough investigation on the representation of his aesthetics.In the third and the fourth chapter, by elaborating such methods as "fiction","represent" and "artistic ways", the author digs deep to see how Herzog realized his "ecstatic truth" by means of "fictionalization", and emphatically discusses the dichotomy between "fictionalization" and "ecstatic truth" in his documentaries.Chapter Five and Chapter Six explore further the stylized representation in Herzog’s pursuit of "ecstatic truth", including emotional narration, characterization of natural landscape, and the application of music in his movies.In the seventh chapter, through demonstrating the differences between "ecstatic truth" and the traditional documentary aesthetics, the author proposes to examine Herzog’s films through dichotomic method of "documentation" and "Constitution".Based on an intensive reading of the texts, the author expatiates the distinctive charm of documentary film in its content and form and clarifies the thread of "ecstatic truth" from Chapter Two to Chapter Six. The author also tries to cover Herzog’s documentaries in different periods in order to reveal the aesthetic unity and integrity of his so-called truth.In the conclusion part, the author sums up the purport of this dissertation and points out that Herzog’s documentary filmmaking cherishes a valuable significance for the documentary production of domestic directors.