Jean Cocteau knew the Horror embedded in both Truth and Lies. Listening to spies broadcasting code words on pirate radio stations becomes poetry that unlocks the doors of perception that separate us from the Otherworld.
Watching many of Werner Herzog's films lately and knowing his feelings about “fact and truth in filmmaking, and ecstatictruth”I came to the stretchedconclusion that Cocteau's cinéma vérité of dreams penetrate into some kind of reality not dissimilar from Herzog's.
Herzog's cinema is inherently able to present a number of dimensions much deeper than the level of truth that we find in cinéma vérité and even reality itself, and it is in these dimensions that are the most fertile areas for him and us as viewers/dreamers. Herzog is fond of saying cinéma vérité is the accountant’s truth, that it merely skirts the surface of what constitutes a deeper form of truth in cinema.
Herzog, like Cocteau I believe, is able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth that most films never attain. This deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only, as he says, by not being bureaucratically, politically, and mathematically correct. Through invention, through imagination, through fabrication, their works become more truthful.
Cocteau was grandmaster of the Priory of Sion, Herzog captured the Loch Ness Monster.
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