The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better. This falsified and yet, as I will later demonstrate, not falsified quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to deal with in this discourse. Anyway, to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.
But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft. In this context I see the quotation from Blaise Bascal about the collapse of the stellar universe not as a fake, but as a means of making possible an ecstatic experience of inner, deeper truth.
Herzog also talks about the assault of virtual reality. When I posted this photo of an old film set, several people said it reminded them of video game locales. That was a holy shit! moment for me: do we really live in a world where reality resembles video games, rather than the other way around? Has our thinking really shifted so much so quickly? If so, that’s amazing, and a little disconcerting, too.
Sep 28, 2011