THE WHITE DIAMOND

Werner Herzog defies cinematic limitations. In The White Diamond, he is writer, director, cinematographer, and narrator. He shares these roles with others, but he is the prime mover. Like past Herzog films, The White Diamond is about a man and his obsession. In this film they are Graham Dorrington, a British aeronautical engineer and his plan to build a perfect airship, an updated zeppelin, that will fly over the jungles of Guyana, north of Brazil. He hopes to find unknown medicinal plants that might cure diseases all too well known.

A youthful fortyish, with a striking resemblance to Kevin Spacey, Dorrington teaches at a London university. He is articulate enough to coax birds from trees and even to raise funding for his scheme. And also to get Herzog to fly along in his two-seater airship. He explains to Herzog that the cause of his mutilated left hand was a toy rocket he was holding that exploded when he was 14. Ten years earlier, while filming with a close friend, Dorrington’s first airship was trapped in jungle treetops, and his friend fell 150 feet to his death. After nursing his grief and guilt, Dorrington has designed another airship and come to Guyana’s Kaieteur Falls, higher than Niagara, where he and his team assemble it. The new airship, gleaming white and shaped like flat teardrop diamond, gives the film its name. And if a diamond is forever, so is mankind’s obsession with flying, from Icarus to Space Odyssey.
   

The fantasy of flying is familiar to most people, and I’m sorry for those who don’t share it. Mine started when I was seven and my father took me on a flight in a Goodyear Blimp over Miami and the Atlantic. I remember the thrill of seeing the earth passing slowly below. Since then, I’ve flown umpteen thousand miles, but no airplane can recreate the feeling of slow, silent airship flight. That is what Dorrington and Herzog do so vividly in The White Diamond.

Past Herzog films are about obsessions, such as Fitzcarraldo, who builds an opera house in the Amazon; and Aguirre: Wrath of God , about the Pizarro lieutenant who leads a party down the Amazon and turns into a megalomaniac. Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre are feature films based on fact and seem to validate their obsession. Fitzcarraldo’s opera house has been restored lately and this year was the site of a performance of all four operas of Wagner’s Ring. The White Diamond looks more to the future, seeing the jungle as a potential source of medication. The film also blurs the line between documentary and fiction, showing that fact and fantasy are not totally inseparable, at least to Werner Herzog.

                                                                                         John L. Hochmann