I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

the audience applauded

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Werzog has made some good documentaries, I will not deny him that, but I couldn't help but feel that this film was just poorly made, and totally uninspiring (contrary to what people seem to think of it. The main protagonist (Graham Dorrington) is just unbearable to watch. Awkward, unprofessional and really annoying. Werzog is trying too hard to turn this into an inspiring, deep story, but fails on both fronts. The narration is bad (and often pointless), the story is actually quite boring, often lacked direction (the main focus of the film swerves from Graham Dorrington to Marc Anthony somewhere in the middle) and I had no interest by the time the film finished.I am so tired of people worshipping directors/filmmakers unconditionally based on one (or a few) good films. Werzog IS a good documentary film-maker, but that does not make this good.3/10

"Cinema Verité merely reaches a superficial truth; the truth of accountants. It confounds fact and truth, and thus ploughs only stones." – Werner Herzog"The White Diamond" finds director Werner Herzog following yet another character into the jungles. Our hero's name? Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical engineer tasked with flying a custom built airship over the leafy canopies of Guyana. From this mobile, airborne platform, Dorrington hopes future researchers will be able to photograph, up close, previously unseen and undocumented ecosystems. But what can Dorrington's camera, Herzog asks, really see?Herzog's adventurers typically suffer very specific existential breakdowns. They find their beliefs in various Master Signifiers (religion, capitalism, the ego, civilisation itself etc) collapsing, and so can no longer define themselves in relation to the various fixed points - what are essentially Gods - which humans, in their delusions, rabidly construct. Thrown into a tailspin, and freed from the psychoses inherent to humanity, Herzog's heroes then undergo subjective destitution and so find themselves confronting a horrific, lawless "Nature". Some collapse when confronted with Nature, others become empowered and try to take the universe on. All become unanchored, unthether themselves from society, and become "crazy", though in a sense their pathologies are not ungrounded but a perfectly "correct" and "rational" reaction.With "Diamond", though, Herzog gives us one of his sanest adventurers. Dorrington's been traumatically scarred by jungles in the past, and has both a burning desire and a very clear quest, but he never loses himself completely in his "eccentricities". Cacooned in high tech gear and modern safety equipment, Dorrington's an adventurer typical of Herzog's later documentaries, which tend to focus on humble inventors, scientists and modern explorers, rather than madcap madmen.Perhaps bored by Dorrington, Herzog quickly runs off in other directions. He eventually meets Marc Anthony Yhap, a local man who adores his pet rooster. From Yhap's personal story Herzog then fashions "Diamond's" meta-story. So here you have the tale of a simple man (Yhap) trapped in a jungle, with a flightless bird as a pet and a lost family living far away whom he can never meet unless he harnesses flight and so escapes the jungle's "gravity". Mirrored to this is Dorrington's oppositional journey, his desire to fly so that his cameras can penetrate the canopies and peer down into the jungles. These contrasting, oppositional motions crystallise during the film's second half, where Dorrington's camera desires to stare into a mysterious cave behind the Kaiteur Falls, a sacrilegious act which the local men feel should not be executed. To see into the caves is to demythologise the caves, they believe, shattering the legends that have sprung from these cavernous depths. Dorrington's camera peers into the caves, of course, but Herzog denies us this footage. The implication is that Dorrington's air ship demythologises the forest, ruptures a mystery that should be preserved, drearily observing all with its ubiquitous cameras. At the same time, his airship is itself an almost divine object, as sublime as the jungles, a machine-God which Marc Yhap romanticises and exalts as his (impossible) salvation. Maybe one day it will lift him out of the jungles. Maybe one day...Herzog admits he makes films to get only at their transcendent final shots. Here his last sequence crystallises his film's twin, conflicting motions, with white tipped swifts flying upwards as the Kaieteur Falls tumble, loudly, downwards; gravity and flight, man's drive to soar dwarfed by beautiful Lucifer himself. Unsurprisingly, one of the film's subplots involves the inability of man's balloons to overcome the powerful suction of the waterfall. Nature's pull always wins in the end.So like many of Herzog's later films, "Diamond" is implicitly concerned about technology's abilities and inabilities to dethrone God (where Herzog's "God" is not a literal deity but a wholly, malevolent, Schopenhaueren Nature), and, ironically, the necessity of technology and madcap star children like Dorringer to lift us out of the jungles. In this way, Herzog's trio of recent science fiction films play like messy, German rifts on Kubrick's own operatic "Space Odyssey".Like most of Herzog's supposed "documentaries", "Diamond" is also mostly fictional. Many of its scenes and conversations are staged, Dorrington's "dramas" are cooked up by Dorrington and Herzog, and the Marc Yhap character received heavy instructions. Though most see him as a chilled, somewhat romanticised native, Marc is perhaps just another shifty Guyanese local who knows how to sell himself to foreigners.Thankfully Herzog's whims are frequently hilarious. Unlike most film-makers, Herzog's more interested in a guy's pet rooster ("His name is Red. He has five wives. Yeah, my rooster's good"), and has no qualms nonchalantly interrupting his film to show a guy moon-walking before the Kaieteur Falls, an absurd moment which recalls the moon men in Kubrick's "2001", mockingly posing for photos before the divine.Herzog's distrust of both "realism" and the documentary format is itself a stance adopted by many film-makers. In Godard's "La Chinoise", for example, a character argues that Lumiere was a stylised, fictional filmmaker because he tried to pass off his "actualities" and "documentarian style" as "reality", and that George Melies was the realist of the two because he made it obvious that his films were fictional. Director's like Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Wajda, Jancso, Kieslowski etc, all of whom adopt a more metaphysical tone, have all made similar comments. In Herzog's case, the desire is to reach some invisible essence, what he calls "the ecstatic truth"; the reality beyond our visible, quotidian world, which is of course the opposite of what Dorrington seeks.As far as "documentaries" go, "Diamond" isn't particularly well shot, but Herzog's lines of enquiry are always interesting, his yearnings achingly human and his voice over narrations always funny in a droll, faux-serious way. Watching Herzog drift off into unplanned territory - little, sublime, stumbled-upon moments which pepper all his films - is also always fascinating, if not profound.8.5/10 – Interesting.

Werner Herzog follows a scientist down to South America to test a balloon, but when they get there, he encounters changing circumstances. He finds other things to film as well as his original subject, and so the film meanders along a satisfying route of nature, falling water, interesting humans (and birds), and pure visual joy.The sheer courage of Herzog in following this approach makes for a fascinating film. I saw it a few years ago, but my lingering impression is of a gorgeous, sensitively put together piece of film-making that made me feel like I had somehow become a little better for having seen it. As if Herzog had captured optimism itself on film, perhaps, simply by following inspiration wherever it leads...

This film starts with an overview of the history of flight, especially the non-mechanical sort, and, of course, ends with scenes of the Hindenburg disaster in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, which kyboshed the dream of lighter than air vehicles as practical instruments of travel. Then, the film follows the obsessive modern flotative folly of aeronautical engineer, Dr. Graham Dorrington, of St. Mary's College in London, England, and his attempt to use a miniature blimp (which is diamond shaped and white) to circumnavigate the forest canopy in Guyana, in order to a) vindicate the death of a friend of his, documentary cinematographer Dieter Plage a decade before when an earlier blimp got tangled in Sumatran trees, and the man fell to his death trying to free himself from it during a storm, as well as b) ostensibly find out much about the canopy's resources for commercial development. Dorrington is a bit of a nutty guy, albeit rather tame by Herzogian standards. He lost two fingers on his left hand when, as a teen, he forgot to let go of a small rocket he was testing. Like most Herzog 'documentaries,' though, the term must be loosely applied, for Herzog is not merely recording Dorrington's obsession, but financing the expedition. This is made clear when, on the mini-blimp's maiden flight, Herzog insists that he take his camera along for the ride, in case it is the only flight the vehicle makes, and chides Dorrington's desire to test it alone, first, as stupid, and the worst sort of stupid. His rationale: 'I cannot ask a cinematographer to get in an airship before I test it myself.' It has been reported that much of that scene was scripted, but so what? Herzog has never been a literalist, no more than his pal Kinski was.The White Diamond is a minor film in Herzog's oeuvre, and much too digressive, even if a far better film than any other filmmaker could do with the materials at hand, but one wishes the DVD company, Wellspring, would have included some extra features, like a commentary by Herzog. All we get are a Herzog filmography, and some trailers- labeled as both Trailers and Coming Attractions. We don't even get this film's trailer in the bargain. But, why be grounded when this film is dedicated to the very antipodes?