The White Diamond (2004)
Werner Herzog has spent five decades building one of the most singular bodies of work in world cinema, and the through-line connecting nearly all of it is a preoccupation with men who burn themselves up chasing something the rest of us would have the good sense to leave alone. The White Diamond, released in 2004 and co-produced by a somewhat unlikely consortium of German, British, Japanese, and BBC Storyville money, fits that pattern precisely. The film follows Graham Dorrington, a British aeronautical engineer who has designed a teardrop-shaped airship and is determined to fly it low over the jungle canopy of Guyana, partly for scientific observation, partly for reasons that seem to run rather deeper than science. The project carries a personal weight for Dorrington that the film does not rush to explain, and that patience is characteristic of Herzog at his best.
Herzog directed from a screenplay credited to himself, his son Rudolph Herzog, and Annette Scheurich, who also appears in the film. That the screenplay credit exists at all for a documentary is worth noting: Herzog has always treated the form not as a neutral recording exercise but as something closer to authored fiction, shaped by his own perspective and preoccupations. The other principal figures on screen include Marc Anthony Yhap, a local man whose quiet presence gives the film some of its most genuinely affecting moments, and Dieter Plage, a wildlife filmmaker whose own history with the jungle hovers over the project in a way the film handles with considerable care. The cast, such as it is, also includes Herzog himself, who appears on camera and whose voice, that familiar Bavarian baritone, provides the narration. For those who know his other work, that voice carries its own set of associations by now. I have written about several of his films on here, including Lessons of Darkness and The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, both of which share this film's tendency to use an ostensibly factual subject as a vehicle for something more philosophical and harder to name.
The cinematography is shared between Henning Brümmer and Klaus Scheurich, and what they capture above the Guyanese rainforest has a particular quality: pale morning light breaking over an unbroken green canopy, the airship drifting in and out of low cloud, the sense of immense space rendered through a relatively small vessel. There is nothing showy about the camerawork, no studied visual grandeur, which makes the occasional wide shot of the balloon suspended above the trees feel genuinely earned rather than arranged for effect. Joe Bini, who edited the film, has a long working relationship with Herzog, and the cutting here follows a rhythm that is unhurried without being slack, allowing scenes to settle and breathe before moving on. The score, composed by Ernst Reijseger and Eric Spitzer, draws on sources that do not obviously belong to a documentary about aviation: there are textures in it that feel closer to devotional music than to anything you might expect from the subject, which suits Herzog's habit of treating physical adventure as a kind of spiritual enquiry. Reijseger, a Dutch cellist and composer, had collaborated with Herzog before The White Diamond, and the music here carries that established shorthand, adding a warmth to the film that prevents it from tipping into the austere.
Nobody makes documentaries quite like Werner Herzog, and I am not sure anyone else would have made this one at all.
The White Diamond follows Graham Dorrington, a soft-spoken English aeronautical engineer, as he builds and then test-flies a small airship over the jungle canopy of Guyana, which is about as niche as documentary subjects come. In anyone else's hands it might have been a dry half-hour on an obscure corner of aviation. In Herzog's, it turns into something far stranger and rather wonderful.
By now I have seen a fair few of his films, the weird fringe documentaries especially, and this is Herzog to his fingertips. It is funny, in that bone-dry, faintly melancholy way of his, and it drifts off, as he always does, into musings on obsession, nature and mortality that have nothing to do with airships and everything to do with whatever is on his mind. He has always been drawn to driven, faintly mad men chasing impossible things, from the ski-jumper of The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner to the opera-house dreamer of Fitzcarraldo, and Dorrington, risking his neck for a better look at some birds, slots into that gallery perfectly.
Is it niche? Hopelessly. This is not a film I would press on just anyone, and if you have no patience for a German director philosophising over a man and his balloon in the rainforest, it will drive you round the bend. But I found it consistently interesting, unexpectedly moving in places, and exactly the sort of odd, humane, off-the-map curio Herzog does better than anyone alive. Three and a half stars, and a quintessential entry in one of the most singular careers in cinema.
The White Diamond is the sort of documentary that reminds you how elastic the form can be when a filmmaker refuses to treat it as simply a mechanism for delivering information. It sits comfortably alongside Herzog's other portraits of obsession, polished but unremarkable on the surface and considerably stranger underneath, and it rewards the patience it asks of its audience. See also Fitzcarraldo for the fictional counterpart to everything this film is thinking about, or, for something made in a very different register but equally interested in what drives people to extremes, Cobra Verde. Some films justify their existence simply by being exactly what they set out to be, and this is one of them.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2004 | Watched: 2026-09-17
Trailer
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