Werner Herzog accompanies the University of London-based aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington to Guyana. Dorrington has built a small airship in order to explore the flora and fauna of the forest canopy; he trials it in the region around the Kaieteur Falls. The filmmaker’s interest however lies not in the scientific investigations but in observing people in extreme situations.

Herzog begins his film with archive footage from the early days of flight: “Aviation had its early frustrations and crash-landings, but these didn’t discourage others from pursuing this grand vision.” Herzog pinpoints his interest in Dorrington’s undertaking rather precisely; it doesn’t involve finding solutions to the technical problems, though he does make reference to the development of the Zeppelin, the Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst (1937) and its consequences (from that point onwards, non-combustible helium was used to fill airships). Herzog’s main interest lies with the people who seek to fly despite the danger of crashing and who will not let failure dissuade them from obsessively pursuing their ambitions.

Flight is Graham Dorrington’s obsession. Brimming with enthusiasm, he shows the model of his new airship in his lab’s wind tunnel, explains the unusual teardrop shape of the envelope and recounts how he lost two fingers at the age of 14 when a homemade rocket exploded in his hand. This, he says, was the reason he could not become an astronaut. Now he advises children and teenagers to take great care when handling rockets. Though still a young man, his behaviour is slightly oblique and smacks of monomania, not unlike the “nutty” professors often found in Hollywood comedies. This underlying comical tone disappears over the course of the film. Dorrington may be a rare bird, but he is no more a figure of fun than his numerous “comrades” in Herzog’s other works who obsessively revolt against the laws of nature: these include both fictional characters, such as Stroszek in SIGNS OF LIFE who attempts to mount an attack on the sun and Fitzcarraldo who has a steamship pulled over a mountain, and real heroes captured in documentaries such as the woodcarver and ski jumper Steiner or the US pilot in LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY.

Dorrington worries about a “certain heaviness” that has beset him during this project, “quite the opposite of the lightness that I wanted to experience!” It could just as easily have been the director who wrote this comment for him – the statement also relates to the plight of almost all of Herzog’s characters, whose struggles mirror those of Sisyphus; their adversary is the gravity that pulls everything down and they are propelled by the desire for lightness, for weightlessness. The viewer only gradually learns about a terrible experience in the scientist’s past; eleven years prior to this undertaking in Guyana, his German cameraman Dieter Plage fell to his death from an airship built by Dorrington while trying to film the forest canopy, and the scientist feels partially responsible for this. When Herzog asks him about his possible culpability (the conversation is similar to the one in THE DARK GLOW OF THE MOUNTAINS, where the filmmaker discusses with the mountaineer Reinhold Messner the latter’s responsibility for the death of his brother on Nanga Parbat), one cannot help but wonder whether thoughts of his own experience also fill the director’s mind. After the action-packed experience of filming AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, rumours circulated that serious accidents took place during the shoot.

In order to overcome the trauma, Dorrington (like the ski jumper Steiner after a terrible crash-landing) sees only one option: to confront the danger once more. This helps foster the limitless faith in the possibility of making one’s dreams come true, a view almost all of Herzog’s protagonists share, and not just them; in his characteristic manner, the filmmaker himself doesn’t hesitate before climbing aboard the small gondola under the balloon during an earlier flight attempt in order to film the adventure.

Dorrington is tormented by fears that “something else might happen”, but still he wants to prove that “Dieter Plage’s dream was legitimate”. After the first genuinely successful flight attempt over the Guyana rainforest, the scientist is initially overjoyed: “It was sublime! Such weightlessness!” Seconds later however, he is pulled down once more by his erstwhile heaviness when he once more recalls, with tears in his eyes, the late Dieter Plage: “If he only knew what happened today – he was such a great guy!”

Herzog rarely follows a clear dramatic concept in his documentary films; THE WHITE DIAMOND features more “meanderings” than usual. He twice instructs the locals to refer to the airship as “the white diamond”; after Dorrington’s successful attempt, the director explains in the voiceover that he wanted to leave the scientist alone with his thoughts and emotions, so he went to visit a diamond mine. This visit appears to have limited significance to the film and its only purpose is to consolidate the “white diamond” motif. This image of damaged, “wounded” and defiled nature also serves as a brutal contrast to the pristine environment around the waterfall, behind which nest thousands of white-tipped swifts. Herzog entirely omits any mention that the Kaieteur region was long ago developed into a tourist attraction and therefore does not lack the corresponding infrastructure for this. He prefers to cast his eye upon another dreamer, local man Mark Anthony Yhap, Dorrington’s pseudo-counterpart. His family has emigrated to Spain and he feels lost and alone, yet he lives in harmony with nature, unlike the scientist. Mark Anthony is given a single opportunity to ride in the airship and his reaction to the experience is one of delight; he felt absolutely safe and only regretted that he wasn’t able to take his cockerel with him: “He’s such a nice guy!” Dorrington, an academic, admires the man for his knowledge of naturopathic medicine and his wisdom. The desire for a different, non-academic form of knowledge is also one of Herzog’s central motifs, though it lies beneath the surface of his film.

Production Country

Germany (DE), Japan (JP), United Kingdom (GB)

Production Period

2004

Production Year

2004

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,85

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Documentary

Topic

Film History, Science

Available Media

DVD

Original Version

English (en)

DVD

Subtitles

English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Italian (it), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Russian (ru), Chinese (zh), German (de), Arabic (ar), Turkish (tr)