🔗 Share this article

At 83 years old, the iconic filmmaker stands as a living legend who works entirely on his own terms. Much like his strange and mesmerizing movies, the director's latest publication defies standard rules of narrative, blurring the boundaries between fact and fantasy while delving into the core concept of truth itself.

A Slim Volume on Authenticity in a Modern World

The brief volume details the filmmaker's opinions on truth in an period dominated by AI-generated falsehoods. These ideas seem like an elaboration of his earlier manifesto from 1999, including powerful, enigmatic opinions that range from despising cinéma vérité for hiding more than it illuminates to surprising declarations such as "choose mortality before a wig".

Central Concepts of Herzog's Authenticity

Two key concepts form his understanding of truth. Initially is the notion that seeking truth is more significant than actually finding it. In his words puts it, "the journey alone, drawing us toward the hidden truth, enables us to participate in something essentially unattainable, which is truth". Second is the belief that bare facts deliver little more than a boring "bookkeeper's reality" that is less valuable than what he terms "ecstatic truth" in guiding people grasp existence's true nature.

Should a different writer had composed The Future of Truth, I believe they would face severe judgment for taking the piss out of the reader

Sicily's Swine: An Allegorical Tale

Reading the book feels like attending a campfire speech from an entertaining family member. Included in several gripping stories, the strangest and most memorable is the account of the Palermo pig. According to the author, long ago a hog was wedged in a upright sewage pipe in Palermo, Sicily. The animal remained stuck there for an extended period, surviving on scraps of nourishment tossed to it. Eventually the swine assumed the shape of its pipe, becoming a sort of see-through mass, "ghostly pale ... shaky like a great hunk of Jello", receiving sustenance from above and eliminating waste below.

From Sewers to Space

Herzog utilizes this tale as an allegory, linking the Sicilian swine to the perils of extended space exploration. Should humanity undertake a expedition to our nearest inhabitable celestial body, it would require hundreds of years. During this period the author imagines the brave voyagers would be compelled to inbreed, turning into "genetically altered beings" with minimal awareness of their expedition's objective. Eventually the space travelers would transform into pale, worm-like beings rather like the Sicilian swine, capable of little more than eating and eliminating waste.

Exhilarating Authenticity vs Literal Veracity

This disturbingly compelling and unintentionally hilarious transition from Mediterranean pipes to space mutants presents a demonstration in the author's concept of ecstatic truth. As readers might discover to their dismay after trying to substantiate this intriguing and anatomically impossible square pig, the Sicilian swine appears to be apocryphal. The pursuit for the limited "accountant's truth", a existence grounded in simple data, overlooks the purpose. How did it concern us whether an imprisoned Italian livestock actually became a quivering wobbly block? The real message of Herzog's story suddenly is revealed: confining beings in tight quarters for long durations is foolish and produces monsters.

Unique Musings and Audience Reaction

Were anyone else had authored The Future of Truth, they might encounter negative feedback for unusual structural choices, digressive comments, conflicting ideas, and, to put it bluntly, taking the piss out of the reader. After all, the author devotes five whole pages to the theatrical storyline of an musical performance just to show that when art forms feature powerful sentiment, we "channel this preposterous kernel with the complete range of our own emotion, so that it feels mysteriously genuine". However, as this volume is a compilation of uniquely characteristically Herzog thoughts, it avoids severe panning. The excellent and creative translation from the original German – in which a mythical creature researcher is portrayed as "a ham sandwich short of a picnic" – in some way makes the author even more distinctive in approach.

Deepfakes and Contemporary Reality

Although much of The Future of Truth will be familiar from his prior books, cinematic productions and discussions, one somewhat fresh aspect is his contemplation on digitally manipulated media. Herzog refers more than once to an computer-created perpetual conversation between synthetic audio versions of himself and a fellow philosopher online. Given that his own methods of achieving ecstatic truth have included fabricating quotes by famous figures and choosing artists in his non-fiction films, there is a risk of hypocrisy. The separation, he contends, is that an thinking mind would be fairly able to identify {lies|false