The movie Werner Herzog calls “arguably the best documentary ever made”
By his own admission, Werner Herzog isn’t a director that spends a considerable chunk of his spare time watching movies. Instead, he favours devouring as many books as humanly possible, but that hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for the art of cinema at large.
Since making his filmmaking debut as a teenager with 1962’s nine-minute short film Herakles, the maverick auteur has been kept continually busy by his efforts behind the camera, with documentaries eventually outstripping narrative features as his preferred creative outlet.
Over the course of a stellar career that’s been defined by his outspoken nature, legendary feuds, and withering assessments of anything that doesn’t take his fancy, Herzog has comfortably sailed past a half-century of credits, so it would be safe to say that he’s become well-versed in what constitutes capturing greatness on film.
With 15 shorts, 20 features, and 34 documentaries under his belt, Herzog speaking out on which of the latter may well be the greatest ever made is something well worth listening to. It isn’t even a full-length effort, either, but rather a 28-minute work that stretches to 36 in its extended form, and served as the catalyst for the creation of an entire sub-genre.
Filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch was one of the founding figures of cinéma vérité, with the Niger-born director dedicating the majority of his professional career to Africa. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, he was also credited as the originator of melding docufiction and visual anthropology into the ethnofiction offshoot of cinema.
Focusing its attentions on the Hauka religious movement, 1955’s Les maîtres fous – or The Mad Masters – saw Rouch detailing how the native population performed ritualistic military ceremonies similar to those found in French Colonial culture, but applies a more spiritual and psychedelic element to the practice.
In conversation with The Guardian, Herzog called The Mad Masters “arguably the best documentary ever made,” before outlining how the factual account of some very odd social norms made it stand out as the single finest example of the documentarian style that he’d ever witnessed.
“It’s about workers in Ghana: On weekends, they’d go out into the mountains and they drugged themselves by chewing some sort of lianas and do very, very strange rituals about the arrival of the Queen’s high commissioner,” he said. “It was shot with a camera that you have to crank, so the maximum length of each shot is 24 seconds.”
One of the downsides of Rouch’s signature ethnofiction approach was that many other African filmmakers didn’t care much for the way he’d distort reality for creative purposes. They claimed, in turn, it could convince audiences unfamiliar with the local culture that what they were watching was 100% factual and in no way whatsoever the work of a filmmaker who was intentionally melding the fictional with the factual. Nevertheless, it ended up making a huge impression on the German-born Herzog either way.