In Pursuit of Ecstatic Truth: a Conversation with Werner Herzog

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Filmmaker Werner Herzog will join Aro Velmet (Associate Professor of History) in a wide-ranging conversation related to his recent book, The Future of Truth (2025). Organized by the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities in partnership with the School of Cinematic Arts, Visual Studies Research Institute, and Levan Institution for the Humanities.

Description: “I have always vigorously opposed the foolish belief that equates truth with facts.” In his recent book titled The Future of Truth, Werner Herzog unfolds his thoughts on the perils of truth-making as the central issue of both his documentaries and feature films. At this event hosted by the Society of Fellows for the Humanities, Herzog discusses his work and preoccupations with truth in a wide-ranging conversation with Prof. Aro Velmet. Herzog’s work is indicative of a multifaceted filmmaker. By mobilizing his fascination with liminal experiences and places, with the unusual, the outrageous, the absurd, he unearths the profound ordinariness of being human. His notion of ‘ecstatic truth’ inhabits a similar tension: through stylization, poetry, and imagination he strives to tell “a deeper layer of truth, one that can access a distant echo of something that can illuminate us, far beyond the reach of fact.” As his films take audiences from the deepest woods of Alaska through Vietnam’s rainforests and into outer space, his book takes readers on a journey from ancient text to ChatGPT generated poetry, from Michelangelo’s sculpture to “Peace Village” in Korea’s DMZ, from alien abductions to Harry Houdini. In our conversation we follow Herzog along some of these winding paths toward truth, a destination that remains perpetually out of reach.

Werner Herzog was born in Munich on September 5, 1942. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and studied History and German Literature in Munich and Pittsburgh. He made his first film in 1961 at the age of 19. Since then he has produced, written, and directed more than sixty feature- and documentary films, such as Aguirre der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, The Wrath of God, 1972), Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu, 1978), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Lektionen in Finsternis (Lessons of Darkness, 1992), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), Mein liebster Feind (My Best Fiend, 1999), Invincible (2000), Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Die Höhle der vergessenen Träume (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010). Werner Herzog has published more than a dozen books of prose, and directed as many operas. Werner Herzog lives in Munich and Los Angeles.

Aro Velmet is Associate Professor of History at USC. He is a historian of modern Europe, colonialism, science, technology, and medicine. His first book, Pasteur's Empire (OUP, 2020), looks at how microbiology became a tool of colonial governance in French West Africa, North Africa, and Indochina, and how African politicians, Vietnamese doctors, French administrators, international regulators and many others shaped the development of vaccination programs, industrial agriculture, urban policing, education, and many other fields of social life. He is currently working on a history of state data processing in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Europe, primarily in Estonia and Ukraine.