There's a moment close to the start of this documentary which switches its tone from a standard documentary to an almost perfect representation of Werner Herzog as a documentary maker. Starting with a brief montage about the birth of manned flight and the death of Zeppelins the documentary quickly cuts into the lab of a British inventor named Graham Dorrington. Dorrington gives us a tour around the lab, his energy infectious like a children's TV presenter as he takes us through experiments designed to test his prototype flying machine. Dorrington stops his preamble and beams into the camera waiting for a cut, Herzog keeps filming and asks about two missing fingers on Dorrington's hand. Dorrington explains about an accident when he was a boy with a rocket and is obviously flustered, finally saying "and that's why I can't be an astronaut" his eyes wide with fear and apprehension.
That gets to the heart of The White Diamond which is one part a documentary about an attempt to fly a prototype air ship across the canopies of an African jungle and one part examination of a man who is haunted by past mistakes. There's an ethereal quality to Dorrington at times and Herzog knows exactly when to push his subject and exactly when to allow his camera to rove elsewhere. Capturing the characters who make up the local populace to better flesh out the feel of the film. Like Grizzly Man and the majority of Herzog's fictional work this film is largely about obsession and about the loss of sight of a man on a mission, Dorrington almost oblivious to the stories that Herzog keeps finding around them.
Anyone else seen it?
