by Paul Cronin
You might not understand irony, but you do have a sense of humour.
Of course. A magazine in Germany once ran an article on me with the headline “This Man Never Laughs” under a photo of me looking as serious as some people expect. “Laugh! Laugh!” the photographer said. “Why don’t you ever laugh?” I was feeling more and more uncomfortable, and eventually told him, “I never laugh once a camera is pointed at me.” Naturally they left out the second part of what I said.
There’s a big difference between irony and humour. I can understand humour and laugh at jokes, even if I’ve never been very good at telling them myself; my face just isn’t made for laughing. Often overlooked is the humour in my films, from Even Dwarfs Started Small to Bad Lieutenant. My audiences laugh all the time, and an audience that laughs is always in the right; that’s a law of nature. They even chuckle at Aguirre, when one of the soldiers is hit by an arrow and says, “Long arrows are coming back into fashion,” before falling down dead. Seeing audiences laugh at my films has always been important to me, though being unable to comprehend irony is an obvious defect of mine.
An endearing defect.
Not if you saw me sitting in a Parisian cafe.
* Blockade (2005), directed by Sergei Loznitsa.
† Rosenheim (birthplace of Hermann Göring) burnt on the night of 18 April 1945, less than two weeks before Hitler killed himself in Berlin. Herzog was about two and a half years old. That evening, in an attempt to destroy enemy transport systems, 148 American B-17s dropped more than 400 tonnes of bombs on the town’s marshalling yards.
‡ From December 1963 to August 1964, P. Adams Sitney was curator of the International Exposition of American Independent Film, which travelled to several cities including Munich (January 1964), Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, London and Vienna. The trip was organised by Lithuanian-American filmmaker and curator Jonas Mekas, who later established Anthology Film Archives, one of America’s leading venues for non-mainstream cinema.
§ “Rebellen in Amerika,” Filmstudio, May 1964. In this essay, Herzog describes a screening in Munich of films by Robert Breer, Dick Higgins, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacob, Ed Emshwiller and Kenneth Anger. “Tellingly,” he writes, “German film reviewers – alarmed by the implications of such an event or, conversely, so fossilized as to be incapable of any sort of arousal – have until now virtually ignored the intensive efforts, evolving over the past decade, of the American avant garde, those filmmakers who have continued rigorously where Surrealist experiments left off.”
¶ See “Ten Poems,” p. 439.
2
Blasphemy and Mirages
You benefited from the film-subsidy system in West Germany.
I belonged to a generation of post-war Germans many of whom were attempting to express themselves in new ways cinematically, which isn’t surprising when you think of West German cinema in the fifties. There were production companies in existence when we started out, but none of us wanted to have anything to do with them. Almost everything they produced was somehow tainted with Nazism, like the Heimat films, steeped in blood and soil; none of it felt right to my contemporaries and me. Even an acclaimed film like Die Brücke seemed outdated and old-fashioned, though it is anti-Nazi in spirit.
What was clear by the early sixties was that we West German filmmakers needed to grow up and take our destiny into our own hands. This went further than just production; I’m talking about creating our own festivals and distribution systems, and establishing relations with television stations willing to fund our work. I consider Alexander Kluge to be the spiritual and ideological force behind West German cinema of the period, including the film-subsidy laws that created an environment within which many of us were able to work, and the Oberhausen Manifesto, issued in 1962, the year after the Berlin Wall went up, declaring the arrival of a new generation of West German filmmakers. Kluge and Edgar Reitz – both ten years older than me – saw some of my early films and asked if I wanted to work through their company and the film school in Ulm they had founded [Institut für Filmgestaltung]. When I told them I was going to be my own producer, they offered me the use of their equipment, and I spent time on their machinery transferring various recordings I had made. Kluge and Reitz’s support was important to me because at the time I was an absolute unknown. It was through Reitz that I met Thomas Mauch, who was the cameraman on several of my films, including Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo.
For a time the country had probably the most subsidised film industry in Europe, if not the world, but it was still never easy to make films there. There was an organisation called the Kuratorium junger deutscher Film [Committee of New German Cinema], devised and created by filmmakers, which gave a first start to many young West German directors.* You had to submit your script and see if your film would be one of the few they decided to give money to. It was a decent amount of cash – about 300,000 DM for each film, around $200,000 – though you had to have the rest of the funding in place before they accepted your application. I had made three short films, each of which in some way caught the attention of the media and film festivals, and the screenplay for Signs of Life had won the award a couple of years earlier. Although I already had some money to make Signs of Life and felt myself to be an ideal candidate, I was denied Kuratorium money for two years, probably because at the time there was nobody at the age of twenty-two who had produced and directed a feature film. I was just too young and inexperienced.
I did eventually benefit from the subsidy system, and acknowledge that the money it generated served as the cornerstone for several of my films, but I never felt it was the healthiest way to run things. It was decision-making by committee, some kind of artificial respiration, which has certain inbuilt weaknesses. Too many people were slaves to handouts, forever trying to fulfil the wishes of the boardroom, which is why so many of them made only one film, then gave up. They were too busy filling out paperwork. As soon as it became more difficult to qualify for subsidy money, many of these people dropped away; they weren’t able to stand on their own two feet. When it comes to the kind of filmmaking I do, the free market is a harsher but more vibrant structure to function within. It’s where the real battle is fought. If you can leave the respirator and submit yourself to the roughness of the market, you should. At the time I appreciated how lucky I was to be given certain opportunities, but felt I had to learn to walk on my own two feet as quickly as possible.
Around the time of your first feature, Signs of Life, what became known as New German Cinema emerged.
So-called New German Cinema didn’t have much significance for me because I started making films before the Oberhausen Manifesto was issued. There was a real culture of short films at the time, and I showed some of my work at the Oberhausen Film Festival, but never involved myself with the manifesto, which I was asked to sign. I found the whole thing too derivative of the French New Wave and considered the signatories a bunch of mediocre and insignificant epigones. Look at the list and you’ll see that apart from Kluge and Reitz, only a tiny handful made any lasting impact as filmmakers. Most disappeared completely. Even experts in German cinema would have to dig deep into their encyclopaedias to find reference to these people. There was undoubtedly a rebirth of German cinema in the late sixties and into the seventies, but it’s a myth that we were a coherent group, either stylistically or in terms of subject matter and theme. Everyone was producing very different films, and a few of us barely knew each other. I had loyalties to no one and felt distinctly alienated from some of my contemporaries and their work, like those doctrinaire political films that endlessly and stupidly postulated world revolution. They never had any mass appeal to audiences in West Germany, and rightly so. By the late sixties I had already produced a handful of films, and from my earliest days had spent time outside of Germany, so I could never realistically be seen as a spokesman for New German Cinema, which more than anything was a convenient construct of American and perhaps French journalists. Today I have no problems about b
eing included because there was enough good work being done for me not to be embarrassed by it all. But I know I don’t truly belong.
We were individuals making films independently of the mainstream industry in the country; that was the one crucial thing uniting us, not the films themselves. There was a highly active, collective excitement of the mind, a pragmatic solidarity between filmmakers, and several of us would assist each other logistically if we were able to. Having said that, when Schlöndorff and I would meet we would usually talk about women, and if I encountered Fassbinder at a film festival, with a glass of champagne in hand, some of his entourage thought I was gay because we gave each other a fleeting, rather shy hug. In public Rainer and I would be discreet about the things that mattered. When journalists expected some profound statement about cinema from either of us, I would point and say, “I like your tie.” Our most intense discussions took place in his kitchen, deep into the night, fuelled by beer. Because he was so unruly – a sweaty, grunting wild boar crashing through the underbrush, leaving gaps wide open for others to walk through – and because of the recklessness of his private life, the media mistakenly labelled him a revolutionary, but I never considered him as such.
When I was doing pre-production for Aguirre in Peru, without Fassbinder knowing I took his film Katzelmacher down along with some of my own – and prints of Jean-Marie Straub’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Werner Schroeter’s Eika Katappa and Peter Fleischmann’s Hunting Scenes from Bavaria, all of which I had subtitled into Spanish – and held a mini-retrospective in Lima. These screenings, in a cinema I rented, were a big success, though at the time West German cinema was completely unknown down there. Later, when Fassbinder learnt that I had grabbed a print of his film and taken it with me, he was appreciative. I had the feeling that two or three of his films in a row weren’t so good and I would lose heart; he made them so quickly, sometimes three or four a year. But then he would come out with a great one – like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or The Merchant of Four Seasons – and I would tell myself not to lose faith in the man.
German filmmakers came in waves. The first was the Oberhausen Manifesto people, who were generally older than people like Fassbinder, Wenders and me; I was part of the early second wave. Actually, Fassbinder and Wenders came a little later; they are almost the third wave. There were others who came after us with some fine films but who never persevered. They either dropped away entirely or started working exclusively in television, where there was more security.
It took a while for the rest of the world to catch on to West German cinema.
You might say that by the time most people outside the country realised there was good work being done in Germany, New German Cinema was subsiding. For a brief moment a small number of West German filmmakers were able to screen their films internationally. You could see some Fassbinder, Schlöndorff and Wenders abroad, but never anything of Achternbusch or Werner Schroeter, who was one of the truly important filmmakers working in West Germany at the time. He had an extraordinarily innovative mind, though he was desperately underappreciated at home and elsewhere. In 1969, as a jury member at the Mannheim Film Festival, I insisted that his Eika Katappa be given an award, against much cowardly opposition from the other jurors. The problem was that West German cinema had a tendency to be too provincial; it never occurred to some directors that they should try reaching international audiences. From my beginnings as a filmmaker I looked further than Germany’s borders and was always hopeful my work would be distributed and appreciated overseas. It’s gratifying to me that Aguirre, the Wrath of God and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser can be screened to audiences in London, Kiev and São Paulo, or to Native Indians in Peru, and be appreciated. I quickly realised that West German cinema wouldn’t survive if it remained so insular.
Years ago I pulled up to a gas station in America’s Deep South driving a car with Pennsylvania plates. The mechanic at the pump called me a Yankee and flatly refused to sell me any gas. A century and a half after the end of the Civil War, northerners still smell bad to southerners. Some people feel the same way about Germany today. Starting in 1945 there were two jobs of reconstruction: the cities had to be rebuilt physically, but just as important was the need to rebuild Germany’s legitimacy as a civilised nation. The slow pace at which the collective consciousness changes is maybe one reason why recent German filmmakers had such a hard time exhibiting work outside their country so many years after the war. It isn’t easy to say when German writers, painters and filmmakers will be able to retake their place, fully and freely, within international culture.
Did you have any contact with the distribution company Filmverlag der Autoren?
I was invited to be a part of the group when it started in 1971, but turned them down. The concept was good: filmmakers who had no access to distribution companies would create their own. But I didn’t like the concoction of personalities at Filmverlag; there was something disparate about it that didn’t feel right to me. If it had been just Fassbinder and a couple of others and me, then perhaps I would have trusted the operation, but there were some people involved who had an agenda and seemed disunited in their work. Later they distributed some of my early films, but I’m usually wary of collectives. They get watered down when mediocre people climb on board and the ship inevitably sinks. My advice is to find the best people and keep it exclusive.
Signs of Life, inspired by a short story by Achim von Arnim, was your first feature film.
At the time I was reading about the Seven Years’ War and issues of military strategy. I discovered a journal from 1807 that contained a short article about an incident in Marseille during the war in which a man became insane and locked himself up in a tower. It turned out von Arnim had used this same event when writing his story “Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau,” written in the early nineteenth century.† Von Arnim’s story is a wonderful tale about an old colonel sitting by the fireplace who gets so involved in telling a story he fails to notice that his wooden leg has caught fire. It’s one of the few occasions – as with Woyzeck and Cobra Verde – when a piece of literature triggered a screenplay in my mind.
My travels to Greece when I was fifteen were the strongest influences on Signs of Life. I had spent time following in the footsteps of my paternal grandfather, Rudolph, investigating what he had done years before as an epigrapher and archaeologist on Kos. At a young age he ditched everything – he already had a university chair in Classics – and set off to become an archaeologist. He did his life’s work on Kos, starting around 1902, carrying out important excavations for a few years; in the fortress where I shot Signs of Life you can see inscriptions on stones that are the actual ones my grandfather translated and published more than sixty years earlier. Later he became insane, and I only got to know him when he was an old man. It was sad to see someone who had been so intuitively connected to the world suddenly so disorientated. For years, when he would read a book he would underline certain passages, but towards the end of his life he would carefully mark up page after page, until every line in the book was underscored. I loved my grandfather very much, though as children we were sometimes terribly cruel to him. We would hide behind the bushes in the garden and make fun of him by calling out nasty rhymes, like “Herr Professor, Herr Professor, Menschenfresser!” [“Mr Professor, Mr Professor, cannibal!”], before climbing up the nearest tree, where he couldn’t reach us. One time my grandmother used a wooden cooking spoon to give me the hardest spanking of my life.
Every evening my grandfather would pack his belongings into crates and stack up the furniture because he was convinced someone was going to arrive at the house with a truck, pick everything up and have him evicted. My grandmother endured a great deal. Every morning she would unpack his bags and put the table and chairs back in place. I can still hear her saying, “I have lived with him and loved him for so long that only over my dead body will he leave our home.” One night my grandfather dressed for dinner, sat at the table, gently
put his cutlery aside, folded his napkin, stood, bowed and said to my grandmother – who he no longer even recognised – “Madam, if I weren’t already married I would ask you for your hand. How did I come to make your acquaintance?” It’s a line I borrowed for Nosferatu. Although he was drifting into the night, my grandfather would often speak eloquently and coherently of his excavations as an archaeologist. He died when was I ten years old.
While in Greece, riding a donkey on Crete, I stumbled across the Lasithi Plateau. I was travelling over a mountain pass and looked down into a valley. Beneath me lay ten thousand revolving windmills; it was a field of spinning flowers gone mad. The squeaking noise alone was astonishing. My heart stood still and I had to sit down. “I have either gone insane or have seen something very significant,” I said to myself. It turned out these frenzied windmills were real, pumping water for irrigation. I knew as I stood there I would return one day to make a film, and years later this cosmic image became a pivotal one in Signs of Life. My attention has always been drawn to the screams that emanate from certain images, and if something cries out so loudly and insistently, I respond. Had I never seen the windmills, I wouldn’t have made the connection between this unimaginable ecstatic landscape and the von Arnim story, which I read later on.
Signs of Life is set during the Second World War.
The story takes place during the Nazi occupation of Greece, so some people inevitably think it’s an historical drama. But the facts of the occupation never interested me in this context, and there is absolutely nothing in the story that makes any direct reference to the Second World War. If a pedantic historian were to look carefully, doubtless they would find many falsehoods. I used a truck dating from the mid-fifties in the film, which was much cheaper than anything I could find from the forties, and when I show the soldiers they are almost always barefoot or shirtless and they never salute. When the captain has them fall in, one of the soldiers is munching on a roll. This has nothing to do with the Third Reich. How often do you see German soldiers acting as decently as this in a war film? Shakespeare based Hamlet on events that took place hundreds of years before his time, yet the story’s relevance is there not only for his time, but ours as well. Signs of Life concerns itself not with a particular era or military conflict, but with the idea of putting instruments of war into the hands of individuals.