The Minnesota Declaration
PORNO HAD REAL NAKED TRUTH
oleh Asmayani Kusrini
Redaktur Rumahfilm.org, Brussel

‘Cinema Vérite is not the answer anymore. In our situation, they are the losers, nothing but the losers!’.

Dua kali saya mendengar kalimat ini dari orang yang sama. Pertama kali ketika dia berkunjung ke Brussel dalam serangkaian program Retrospektif film-filmnya. Dan kedua kalinya di International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 2007. Siapa lagi kalo bukan Werner Herzog.

Dalam dua kali pertemuan itu, ucapannya selalu saja disambut tepuk tangan yang meriah. Kalimat itu seperti pembakar semangat, untuk para pembuat film dokumenter. Herzog memang selalu tegas, tak ada batas antara dokumenter dan film feature. Baginya, Fitzcarraldo (film feature yang dianggap sebagai masterpiecenya) sama dengan Grizzly Man  (film dokumenter yang juga dianggap sebagai masterpiecenya).

Menurutnya, kedua film itu dibuat dengan proses yang sama. Ada bagian yang harus direkonstruksi, ada bagian yang benar-benar murni disyut tanpa persiapan, tanpa terduga. Jadi teori Cinéme Vérité baginya tidak berlaku. ‘I truly hope to be one of those who finally bury cinema vérité for good,’ kata Herzog.

Untuk inilah, suatu malam, ketika sedang menghabiskan waktu disebuah hotel transit, Herzog menulis The Minnesota Declaration. Sejumlah point yang menentang teori cinema vérité.  Ke 12 poin ini ditulis ketika sedang bosan menonton ‘documenter’ TV tentang kehidupan binatang.

Setelah menghabiskan waktu pindah dari satu chanel ke chanellain, yang isinya documenter-dokumenter yang tak kalah membosankan, Herzog malah menemukan chanel film porno. ‘My God, finally something straightforward, something real, even if it is purely physical. For me the porno had real naked truth.’ Dan malam itu, lahirlah The Minnesota Declaration.

THE MINNESOTA DECLARATION

Truth and Fact in Documentary Filmmaking

Lessons Of The Darkness

By Werner Herzog

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinéma Vérité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. ‘For me,’ he says, ‘there should be one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.’ Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinéma Vérité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a ting as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: ‘you can’t legislate stupidity.
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song Of Life.
11. We oght to be grateful that Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species –including man--, crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness Continue.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

April 30, 1999

(ikuti wawancara selengkapnya dengan Werner Herzog. Hanya di www.rumahfilm.org)