I am a huge Werner Herzog fan. His early films filled me with a wonderful sense of what movies could do and so hooked me at a young age on the most powerful of all drugs, celluloid.

More than his fiction films I am a fan of Herzog's documentaries. There is something about the way he sees a subject that opens your eyes to things other than the subject at hand. Often his documentaries are almost something else, his Lessons in the Darkness about the oil well fires in Kuwait is structured as an aliens arrival on earth. Its a haunting film that is more magical and informative than the similar IMAX film Fires of Kuwait.

The White Diamond, is on the face of it the story of the building of an airship to study the canopy of the rain forests. It is also, as Werner Herzog tells it, the story of the search for absolution for the death of the inventors friend. I will certainly buy the first part, but I highly doubt the second.

This is simply one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. The shots of the balloon in flight, the waterfall, the birds that live by the falls and the life in the canopy make this the first time I ever wanted to own the biggest and best TV ever made just so I could see these images. I doubt that other than on a rare occasion you'll ever have seen anything as beautiful.

Herzog also introduces us to some real characters Dr Dorrington, the inventor of the airship is a man of great passion. Mark Anthony Yhap, a man hired to help porter materials is probably worthy a film himself. Also the rest of the crew are also intriguing characters for the brief period they cross the screen. It is the mix of people and image that make this film work as well as it does.

The trouble is that the film almost doesn't work. As a narrative the film is sloppy and unfocused. We are told about the cave behind the falls where the birds live and where no one has ever gone.We see a camera lowered down to a climber so footage inside the cave can be shot, only to be told we will not be shown the footage. It is only sometime later that we are told why, what is in the cave is a legend and to reveal whats there could up set the belief of the population. Its an odd way round the subject and feels completely backwards. The real trouble with the film is the way Herzog hammers away at Dorrington about the death of a friend some years earlier when a ship he had made got caught up in the trees. Dorrington was in no way responsible for the accident of the death (other than he built the ship that was involved) but Herzog trumpets the point over and over in order to give some dramatic tension to what appeared to be a pretty straight forward test flight of the airship. It adds a false note that almost sinks the film...from which it recovers from when ever we see the ship in flight or get away from the morbid subject.

Definitely worth seeing. Its a flawed masterpiece that's a must in High Definition or on a really good TV.

THE WHITE DIAMOND is another Werner Herzog documentary with the film-maker doing what he does best: chronicling the efforts of a passionate, some might say obsessed, outsider to fulfil his plans in a hostile jungle environment. This one sees a British engineer chasing his lifetime ambition of flying his self-made airship above a huge South American waterfall.

The premise is straightforward but as usual Herzog uses it as a mere basis to explore his true obsessions. Death is a subject which hangs heavy over the production throughout, while the beauty of nature comes to light in some exemplary cinematography. I particularly enjoyed the way that some Guyanan locals become important to the story; their interviews are a highlight. The scenes of the floating airship have an ethereal quality to them, familiar from the likes of FITZCARRALDO. As usual, it's the human interest that makes this documentary so moving, so engrossing to watch, and another feather in the cap of the celebrated director.

I have recently discovered that Werner Herzog's greatest strength as a director isn't his fictionalized films (such as "Fitzcarraldo", "Aguire: The Wrath of God" and his remake of "Nosferatu") but his documentaries. Early in his career and later after he became a well respected filmmaker he mostly made documentaries--and all of them have been very good. In fact, several I have seen blew me away because of the lengths to which he's gone to make these documentaries--every bit as logistically difficult as his fictional films set in South America (which are legendary for their awfulness due to them being made in the middle of no where--such as well within the Amazon rain forest). So far, I've seen Herzog make films in Antarctica, inside French caves, death row and Siberia! He certainly is willing to go just about anywhere or do anything to make these films! In the case of "The White Diamond", Herzog and his crew trek to the middle of nowhere in Guyana, South America. They are going to one of the largest and most difficult to reach waterfalls in the world. And, what makes this unique is that one of the folks will be using an extremely tiny dirigible to go up to the very edge of the falls and film it in a way no one else could.

Now you'd think that this would be THE focus of the movie, but at times the film took huge deviations and spent a lot of time talking about the deaths of film makers in some very dangerous situations--such as the one killed by a gorilla in Central Africa. These stories were very interesting but would have been best to put in their own film. Instead, very little actual footage of the falls and the jungle are in the film compared to what could have been there. Also, there were LOTS of shots that I am sure Herzog loved (such as closeups of lizards, bugs, people philosophizing, etc.) but combined with the discordant music, it just lost me--as did the guy break dancing near the edge of the falls. As I said, I've really enjoyed other documentaries he's made but this one was difficult to enjoy or complete. I respect what he was trying to do--it's just not among his best work. The best thing about this were the shots of the falls--but there wasn't nearly enough of this nor were there shots FROM the dirigible.