Watch The White Diamond For Free

Simply A Masterpiece

Really Surprised!

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

I have recently discovered that Werner Herzog's greatest strength as a director isn't his fictionalized films (such as "Fitzcarraldo", "Aguire: The Wrath of God" and his remake of "Nosferatu") but his documentaries. Early in his career and later after he became a well respected filmmaker he mostly made documentaries--and all of them have been very good. In fact, several I have seen blew me away because of the lengths to which he's gone to make these documentaries--every bit as logistically difficult as his fictional films set in South America (which are legendary for their awfulness due to them being made in the middle of no where--such as well within the Amazon rain forest). So far, I've seen Herzog make films in Antarctica, inside French caves, death row and Siberia! He certainly is willing to go just about anywhere or do anything to make these films! In the case of "The White Diamond", Herzog and his crew trek to the middle of nowhere in Guyana, South America. They are going to one of the largest and most difficult to reach waterfalls in the world. And, what makes this unique is that one of the folks will be using an extremely tiny dirigible to go up to the very edge of the falls and film it in a way no one else could.Now you'd think that this would be THE focus of the movie, but at times the film took huge deviations and spent a lot of time talking about the deaths of film makers in some very dangerous situations--such as the one killed by a gorilla in Central Africa. These stories were very interesting but would have been best to put in their own film. Instead, very little actual footage of the falls and the jungle are in the film compared to what could have been there. Also, there were LOTS of shots that I am sure Herzog loved (such as closeups of lizards, bugs, people philosophizing, etc.) but combined with the discordant music, it just lost me--as did the guy break dancing near the edge of the falls. As I said, I've really enjoyed other documentaries he's made but this one was difficult to enjoy or complete. I respect what he was trying to do--it's just not among his best work. The best thing about this were the shots of the falls--but there wasn't nearly enough of this nor were there shots FROM the dirigible.

Watching a Herzog documentary is first a mystery about why it was made. About halfway through you understand why: an obsessed man made a flying balloon, mostly by making stuff up and killed his cinematographer. Now he wants to do it again, in a more dangerous location and Herzog wants to be the replacement cinematographer. Once in the jungle, we watch Herzog wangle to be on the maiden flight, clearly hoping for a disaster to film. He gets one: not fatal. It is hardly interesting, and the tortured scientist who supposedly is the center of thing is bore.Herzog's beautiful cinematography annotated by his profound gift of matching dreamy music to images turns even this mundane adventure into a spectacle, a thing of beauty. It is clearly not enough for him, so the man goes off in search of other beauty, and finds it in the face of a local man, "Red Beard." He's a Rastafarian, who we first see completely wasted; in that state he names the airship "the white diamond." We meet him, his medicinal plants, his beloved rooster and his dancing buddy. But the main character is an amazing waterfall, one in scope beyond my imagination for such a thing. We see this thing, this thing of wonder. It may be that no one but a practiced German can see mountains this way and convey majesty so powerfully. He sends a colleague down on a rope to examine the never-before-seen caves behind the falls. They are filmed, buy Herzog refuses to show it to us, because Red Beard, in his first appearance in the thing tells us that the caves are a holy mystery and showing them would ruin the nature of the place.From that moment on, Herzog complies and enters the simple world of amazed appreciation of this man. It is something he has done many times before. The result is that the images build and accrete. The crackpot guy gets to fly; his thing works, sorta. But that hardly matters by the end because we have the two men: Herzog and flyboy, belly down looking over a sharp cliff down the throat of the waterfall. They talk about the million swifts that live in the caves behind the falls. Then we get the payoff: we see those birds returning to their roost.Everything builds to this image. We have the camera at its perch, stationary, looking down. There is a quarter mile difference between groundlevels because one side of the earth is flowing skyward. In geological time, it remains for only an instant to allow us to place an eye, but for us, we cannot see the movement. There is the flow of the water, just as powerful, fighting the flow of the earth. They really did a good job on this, including a few earlier segments which showed its power. In one, a barechested German adventurer is lowered to make the film-never-to-be-shown, and we see the scale of things.And now we have the swifts. First we see them peppering the sky breathing in waves, but soon we look again down the waterfall and watch a million birds return to their still-secret roosts. They flow for ever so long, a stream of life woven into the two other streams. This image will stick to you for as long as you live, and I say that as someone who has seen something like this in life. The way Herzog has set up for this, and how he has established the flows is pure genius.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Werner Herzog's The White Diamond is further evidence the German director possesses a one-of-a-kind wonderment and curiosity with the world around him. No other filmmaker possesses Herzog's child-like innocence and this is precisely why no other filmmaker can capture the bizarre and touching, magic-realism common in many Herzog films.WD is familiar Herzog ground, this time his fixation with obsessed eccentrics leads his lens to Dr. Graham Dorrington, a man determined to build a zeppelin-like flying machine to explore the seldom seen canopy of the South American rain forest. Complicating matters, Dorrington's impossible dream is haunted by a tragic accident that cost his colleague (biologist) Dieter Plage his life. There's no question Herzog himself is an obsessed eccentric and we're witness to this when he shares screen time with Dorrington, each of them battling to make their vision a reality. In one telling scene we watch as Herzog's undaunted will and laughably adolescent logic trumps Dorrington's overwhelming sense of guilt and responsibility. As this scene plays out and things do go wrong, you realize Herzog has no problem sacrificing everything - including his life- to make his film. You can't help but think of Fitzcarraldo and how powerful (and possibly insane) the will of this man truly is. As he's strapped into the zeppelin before its maiden flight, Herzog grips his camera and defines his unwavering faith by declaring: "In cinema we trust."WD isn't without its flaws, one of which is Herzog's overzealous lust to portray the Guyanese guide Marc Anthony as a mythical sage. Marc is a peaceful and serene man, but Herzog's camera lingers on him to a point where an act is coaxed out of Marc, one not nearly as profound as Herzog wishes it to be. But there are so many other moments of sheer magic that you can't help but excuse Herzog for the same naïveté that more often than not, elevates his films to a special place. Perhaps the most poetic moment in the film is when another of the local guides dances atop a rock formation adjacent to the mystical and daunting Kaieteur Falls in the heart of Guyana. These same falls boast a legend that no man has ever explored behind the falls and when Herzog manages to film images of this no- man's land, he opts to not show the images out of respect for the local mythology. Few filmmakers would ever show such reverence for preserving myth than someone so deft at creating them himself.http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/

With some proper editing Herzog would have been left with about 27 minutes of film. However, that 27 minutes is breathtakingly beautiful and you aren't likely to see it otherwise. As such- check this out, be prepared to be bored. My tip- as soon as you hear our protagonist's spiel about the air balloon and you understand what he is trying to achieve and why- simply fast forward through his boring butt every time you see him, unless he has balloons in his hand- and get on to the good stuff- the rainforest. He has very little to say that is interesting- his subject is the interesting part of this film- the rainforest jungle.Watching the rainforest scenes is a reminder to me as how instrinisically incorrect our current society is and how much better off we would be if the jungle could simply engulf us all once again and wipe out what we have "built". Once upon a time we worried about being eaten by a tiger, now we worry about getting shot by a crackhead- the same chances of death, the only difference is that now the water is bad and the air is foul and there are no more fish in the rivers, so we can't go back to the old ways since they only work when you Don't destroy your surroundings. Herzog found a place where all that has not happened as badly as it has here and there are still some beautiful things left to behold.So check it out on film while you still can because we are a culture that is hell bent on destroying all of this beauty with no regard to the inevitable cost of our own lives and grandchildren's lives which is very obviously the ultimate cost of destroying this once beautiful ghost of a planet. In a world where we think wiping out natural beauty is an acceptable part of progress this is a diamond in the rough. Could have used some better editing though and a bit more footage of some jungle stuff.