A few years back (okay, a bunch of years back), I was having a few beers with Werner Herzog & Al Milgrom.

That evening I’d attended a session of the University Film Society, at the Bell Museum on the University of Minnesota campus – an event managed by Al. Guest for the evening: Werner, I think to promote Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, though that night we watched Aguirre, the Wrath of God, part of a series.

Afterwards, we went for drinks. A hot topic of the day – the Jonestown People’s Temple mass suicide – came up in the conversation. The Jonestown Massacre. It was still very much in the press. What did Herzog think?

“I think that’s great, 900 fewer assholes in the world.”

Ka-ching! Another one of those bang-on quotes that has resonated for many, many years.

So imagine my surprise when I discover this morning, on Werner Herzog’s own site, a little manifesto he calls:

The Minnesota Declaration:

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité 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 only 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. Cinema Verité 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 thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité 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 the 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 ought to be grateful that the 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

Werner Herzog

My hero.