Product Description

Acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man ,Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo) follows enigmatic airship engineer Dr. Graham Dorrington as he embarks on a trip in the heart of Guyana to test his new helium-filled invention above the rainforest. Dubbed the "white diamond" on account of its unique teardrop shape, the expedition begins with some early mishaps but is soon airborne high above the treetops. With every success though, Dorrington is haunted by a similar expedition twelve years ago that killed his friend as they were testing an airship much like the "white diamond." Herzog magnificently captures Dorrington's struggles to atone for what he calls "a stupid, meaningless accident" while at the same time presenting stunning never-before-seen images of the true beauty of nature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41484 in DVD
• Brand: Genius
• Released on: 2005-10-25
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English, German
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
It's a good bet there are no directors who float between feature and documentary filmmaking as smoothly as Werner Herzog. The White Diamond (2004) is a companion piece of sorts to his well-received Grizzly Man. Both are about eccentric dreamers who travel to harsh landscapes following their dream with tragic consequences. In other words, perfect "Herzogian" fodder. Two important differences: White Diamond is filmed in the standard way (not piecing together another's videotape) and the tragedy occurred years before cameras rolled. Dr. Graham Dorrington is a man driven to fly. The Cambridge scientist creates new types of airships to explore the canopy of tropical rain forests. Herzog and his crew follow Dorrington to Guyana to see if this new-age dirigible can bring us closer to this fragile and important ecosystem. The film is less about what those discoveries might mean and more a portrait of a man. This is not Dorrington's first attempt to go to the jungle. A haunting accident a decade earlier in the forests of Borneo nags at him and Herzog prods Dorrington's recollections. The 90-minute film has some very rich side trips well worth taking: a legend of the gigantic Kaieteur Falls, the diamond mines of the area, and getting to know one of the hired porters. Herzog injects his own thoughts and gets into the action (he's on the initial flight, much to the chagrin of some of the team members) while delivering a satisfying, gorgeously shot film. --Doug Thomas

From The New Yorker
Werner Herzog, who gave us such singular tales as "Nosferatu" and "Fitzcarraldo," appears to have forsaken the fictional. These days, he dwells on documentary, although whether that is his natural field is open to debate; he seems not so much an inquirer as a bearer of visions, and, as a result, some of his accounts of life on the margins and backwaters of the world seem closer to reverie than to reportage. This new and typically unhurried work follows a British aeronautical engineer named Graham Dorrington to Guyana, where his two-man airship is tested over the roof of the rain forest. The movie traces the project to its completion, although Herzog's attention is endlessly diverted-into a cast list of local characters, toward the thunder of a nearby waterfall, and, piece by piece, into the story of an earlier Dorrington endeavor that ended in calamity. There are moments so ravishing that no other director could conjure them, yet too often the strangeness feels willed, and the drift of the film resembles that of the ship itself-tranquil, exasperating, and dangerously short of purpose. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A Beautiful, Haunting Film
Werner Herzog has made another utterly original movie. I don't even know how to catagorize this film. It's partly an exploration of the nature of obsession, partly a wildlife documentary, partly an aviation documentary, and partly a call home from a man who misses his family.

Obstensibly, it's about a scientist who is haunted by the death of his friend in a South American rainforest airship accident, and goes back to the rainforest to fly a new airship over the canopy. But Herzog appears to be figuratively panning the camera in all directions, and the movie goes in several directions simultaneously. The effect is a visually gorgeous film that not only explores the landscape of the rainforest, but also of human emotion.

At one point Herzog is able to film the secret nesting place of a huge swift colony. Herzog shows the local chief explaining that showing the nesting grounds to others will bring disaster--and then leaves the actual footage of the nests out of the picture! Wow. I loved this film.

Ecstasy
Herzog's films are often about rulebreakers, visionaries and daredevils, something which he has always been himself. Being a daredevil flirting with death makes one feel alive, which is no small thing, but being a daredevil flirting with something even larger than death, is ecstasy. In this film, Herzog, his film crew and a small band of scientists headed by aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington, head off to a remote area of Guyana to fly a newfangled zeppelin just a toe's length above the treetops of the jungle. Dorrington has his legitimate reasons for the usefulness of his invention, as does Herzog in documenting what may be an important new discovery in science and technology. But both of these men, as well as us in the audience, see these men's laughably primitive jabs at besting nature shrunken by the grandeur of the nature surrounding them. From the fierce power of the waterfall where they are camped out, to the unfathomable grace and sheer numbers of the birds who dwell behind it, the plight of two little men in a motorized air balloon is almost comical. I say almost because a man died in such an attempt ten years earlier - a scene that is described in chillingly vivid detail by Dorrington. Also, there is a kind of nobility in man's stubborn desire to defy his relatively scrawny limitations against nature. Whether it's Fitzcarraldo dragging a steamship over a mountain, Herzog himself trying to make the steamship climb the mountain for his film, or Dr. Dorrington sailing the skies in a contraption that seems as fragile as a butterfly, the dream is everything. The dreams of Herzog's characters - be they real or fictional - are usually short-lived, but at least the dreams do come alive briefly. If I could sum up everything that is great in Herzog's films, it would be in one awesome scene in this film where Herzog shoots the upside-down reflection of the mighty waterfall in a falling drop of rain. This moment, this reflection, this drop of rain is as temporary as life, but in it is the entire universe in all of its beauty, majesty and fragility. If that's not ecstasy, I don't know what is!

An incomparably moving film full of stunning images
This film goes way beyond documentary into the realm of art. As Herzog once said about a mountain, and as someone said about Herzog's work, it is "difficult ... dangerous ... ecstatic." It begins as a more or less conventional documentary about airships and one man's attempt to design a smaller and more maneuverable ship, but as it goes, it turns into a meditation on what this ship, the "White Diamond," means to the people who encounter it, from the engineer who seeks redemption for his colleague's death, to the village children who cannot "see" it, to the local man who wants to fly to Europe to find his family and cease being "a lost brother, a lost son." The airship is counterpointed with dazzling photography of the million swifts that fly in and out of a "Secret Kingdom" behind a waterfall, a flight that even the White Diamond cannot make. Other themes weave in and out -- levity, danger, and human emotion. The music is stunning. A superb movie.