by Paul Cronin
Did Signs of Life have a smooth production?
As a filmmaker, dependent on so many things outside my control, making Signs of Life was an important lesson for me. Things never go exactly as you hope. Whatever potentially can go wrong will eventually go wrong, and there’s no point in fuming about it. I quickly learnt that this was the very nature of filmmaking, something that hit me harder and earlier than it did most of my colleagues. Throughout the shoot it became clear that I – as a filmmaker – attract certain troubles. It was as if a curse weighed on me. There were problems during the making of Signs of Life that paved the way for what happened later with Fata Morgana and Fitzcarraldo.
I secured permission to shoot where I wanted to, but three weeks before we were due to start filming a military coup d’état took place in Greece. It was a dramatic moment, with multiple arrests of politicians, the immediate suppression of civil rights and suspension of the constitution. I was unable to contact anyone; telephone lines were down, airports were closed and trains were stopped at the border. I drove by car non-stop to Athens and discovered I wasn’t allowed to shoot on Kos because the authorities were afraid of the military. My filming permits had become invalid overnight. The problems eventually died down, but then, well into the shoot, the lead actor, Peter Brogle, had an absurd accident and broke his heel bone. He had originally been a tightrope walker, so I suggested we shoot a sequence in the fortress where he walks from one wall to a small tower. He fixed the rope himself but fell about eight feet, and we were forced to suspend shooting for five months. It was unclear whether we would ever finish the film. When we all returned for a final ten days of filming it wasn’t easy to find our rhythm again, especially because we could shoot Brogle only from the waist up; he had to wear a brace that kept his broken heel off the ground. When it came to the final sequences of the film, the military forbade me to use fireworks, though they were essential to the story. “You’ll be arrested,” an army major told me. “Then arrest me,” I said, “but know that I will not be unarmed tomorrow, and the first man who approaches will drop dead with me.” The next day there were fifty policemen and soldiers standing around watching me work, plus a few hundred people from the town who wanted to see the fireworks. None of them dared come close. My threat to carry a gun was an empty one, of course, but they weren’t to know.
What exactly is it that causes the main character, Stroszek, to go mad?
He can’t find the words to express himself or make himself understood, and is inhibited because of this. His eventual response is shooting fireworks at the sun, meeting absurdity with absurdity, violence with violence. I always felt Stroszek is actually quite sane.
There are some mysterious moments in the film, but I couldn’t really tell you how they explain Stroszek’s actions. In one scene he sits on the quay with some boys, one of whom says – for no apparent reason – “Now that I can talk, what shall I say?” before staring directly into the camera. Another moment is very important to me, when the two soldiers are on a reconnaissance mission. They meet a shepherd who lives in a remote house and gives them some water to drink. A young girl sits in the doorway. The shepherd explains that because her mother is out with the sheep all day and he works through the night, the girl rarely hears spoken words and hardly ever talks. “It’s beautiful up here in the mountains, but there are no children here for her to talk to,” he says. “Sometimes she picks up a few words down in town when she’s with her aunt.” The father then asks her to recite a poem to the soldiers. I wrote a text about ninety-eight sheep wandering around the Lasithi mountains, one of which gets lost, but purposely didn’t give the girl much time to learn it and hid the entire crew behind the camera so she couldn’t look around for help from anyone. As she starts to recite the poem she gets stuck and twists her skirt in despair. On her second attempt she got through the whole text beautifully, but I knew it was the first version that should be in the film.
Never in Signs of Life did I want to concentrate on Stroszek’s psychological state. Before his disintegration, the film is a series of scenes spread over weeks, but once he barricades himself in the fortress, laying siege to an entire town, the story is condensed into only a couple of days. At the moment he might become interesting to psychologists, we see him from a thousand feet away. In fact, we basically don’t see him at all in the last twenty minutes of the film; his explosive responses and actions take over as he fires rockets across the bay, sets a chair on fire and shoots a donkey dead. Everyone – including Peter Brogle – asked me why I didn’t move in for a close-up at this point. He told me it was important he be allowed to express his character’s insanity on screen, then piped up with some drivel about how the human face is the most fascinating landscape on God’s earth. “It is not,” I told him. “You’ll be more fascinating to the audience if they see you as big as an ant in the landscape.” I have always preferred keeping a distance between camera and actors. Moving too close to a face is intrusive, almost a personal violation of whoever is in front of the camera. Close-ups aren’t necessarily the apotheosis of psychological intimacy; you won’t find many in my films. I prefer wide-angle shots because I want audiences to be aware of the physical space the characters inhabit. During the emotional moments in Nosferatu – like the scene when Jonathan says goodbye to his wife – I filmed the actors from behind; we don’t even see their faces. I have never wanted to see an actor weep. I want to make the audience cry instead.
What did the public think of Signs of Life?
They were unimpressed. The film won the annual Bundesfilmpreis [National Film Award] in West Germany, which meant money for my next production plus a trophy and handshake from the Minister of the Interior, and was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Word spread, so there was some level of public awareness. I was invited to a screening in Wiesbaden after a local newspaper published an article about the film, and got to the place to find only nine people in the auditorium. It’s the kind of shock I still feel in my bones. I have forever struggled to get audiences’ attention in Germany; my films have never been as well received there as they have almost everywhere else in the world, by both reviewers and audiences. The fact is that Germany has never been a nation of film-goers; it’s full of passive television viewers instead. For decades there has been insecurity among audiences, which is understandable as Germany was the cause of the two biggest catastrophes of humanity of the past hundred years. This has continued to make post-war generations very cautious. Whenever somebody sticks their head out too far from any kind of obscure or marginal trench – trying to draw attention to themselves or show their work to the world – the rest of the country is immediately suspicious.
The Germans have never liked their poets, at least not the living ones. Compare this to Ireland. I once stayed at a tiny guesthouse in Ballinskelligs, on the southwest coast. The landlady asked me what I did, and off the top of my head – I don’t know why – I said, “I’m a poet.” She opened her doors and gave me the room for half price. In Germany they would have thrown me out into the street. Years ago I had the good fortune to be able to descend eight floors into a nuclear-proof bunker under the state bank in Reykjavik, where the Codex Regius is stored, a piece of literature that defines the Icelandic soul, similar in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls for Israel. For three hundred years the Danes had owned this little wrinkled parchment, until it was returned to Iceland by Denmark’s largest warship, accompanied by a submarine. Half of Iceland’s population celebrated for five days and nights. When they discovered I had held the actual manuscript in my hands, I was treated like a king. Such things are inconceivable in Germany. Around the time of Aguirre I was at a press conference in Cannes talking about the renaissance of West German cinema when I heard a laugh from the corner of the room where the Germans were sitting. People don’t believe me when I tell them the ratings board hated Aguirre and refused to acknowledge it had any cultural value, which meant there were no tax incentives for cinemas in West Germany to
screen the film and it was treated like a hardcore porno. Years later it stunned me when My Best Fiend was embraced by both the German press and audiences. I felt it was the first time they had truly accepted my work.
How did the short Last Words come about?
The film was a departure into unknown terrain, as if there were no history of cinema preceding it. It has an utter disregard for the narrative “laws” that traditional cinema uses to tell stories. Signs of Life, by comparison, is conventional indeed. Without Last Words I don’t think Fata Morgana would have happened, nor would I have developed subsequent narrative stylisations in my work. I shot the film on Spinalonga, a little island off the coast of Crete, in two days and edited it in one. Everything about it was so evident and clear-cut to me that it has been a source of encouragement ever since.
The idea behind Last Words is of a decaying island that has been evacuated because of an outbreak of leprosy. Bizarre stories are told about its former inhabitants, like the man with no legs and the woman with no arms who marry each other out of necessity. One man who has clearly lost his mind and believes himself to be king refuses to leave the island. He is forcibly brought to the mainland by the police, but remains defiant of the forces of society, even of the rules of language. Back living a so-called respectable life, the man continues to fight against the world and refuses to speak or go out, except at night, when he plays on his lyre. Not all of this is explained in the film; we get only glimpses and compulsive repetitions – for example, the man who tells the tale of the last Turk’s last footprint. He jumped from a cliff into the sea and left a footprint behind him in the rock, and the Greeks have constructed a chapel on the spot. The man has scarcely finished telling this tale when he starts it again from the beginning, then retells it a third time. There are also the two policemen, to whom I said, “When you make a film you always do a scene over and over again, so please repeat the words ten times and I’ll use the best version.” They stand there together, in front of the camera, saying the same thing over and over again: “We got him from over there, we saved him,” and “Hello, how are you doing?” By hearing these stories – again and again in quick succession – the language of these people takes on a strange quality, and despite the compulsion they are locked into, through their torment you get an inkling of who these people are. The lyre player was fascinating to me. All he recites for minutes on end is, “No, I’m not saying a word. Not a single word. Absolutely nothing. I won’t even say no. You won’t hear a word from me. I’m saying nothing. If you tell me to say no, I’ll refuse to do even that.”
Precautions Against Fanatics is set at a racetrack where various individuals feel it necessary to protect the animals from various “fanatics.”
I went to the racetrack on the outskirts of Munich, where a number of prominent media figures and actors were taking part in an annual race, and when I saw them in training immediately decided to make a film. Like Last Words, it’s a bold short in its narrative structure and has a strange humour to it, though that might not be immediately evident to those who don’t understand German. At the time audiences roared with laughter because all the people in the film are celebrities, like director Peter Schamoni, actor Mario Adorf and the sensational Serbian goalkeeper Petar Radenković, who played for Die Löwen [The Lions], a team from Munich. He was a loose cannon, a real eccentric who during a game would spot a duck at the side of the field and run after it. He was also known to dash out of his area and sprint towards the ball if a player got through the defence. The crowd would go wild whenever he made his way into the opponents’ half of the pitch.
I talked Kodak into giving me some raw colour stock for free; it had been returned to them after apparently having been exposed to extreme heat in Africa and was also long beyond its expiration date. Under no circumstances can raw stock like this be sold, though apparently Kodak were interested in discovering if it could survive such disadvantageous conditions. They gave me about ten rolls only after I signed a letter of indemnity stating they had warned me it was unusable and weren’t responsible for the results. I gladly took the stock and shot the film not knowing if I would end up with anything. I figured that if decades after Scott had died near the South Pole his negatives had been successfully developed, then this Kodak film was bound to be okay. We lost not a single frame, though the colours are a little off, which gives the images a strange quality. Sometimes I think about getting my hands on all the out-of-date stock out there and making a film or two.
You went to Africa, where you interwove the filming of Fata Morgana, Even Dwarfs Started Small and The Flying Doctors of East Africa.
The Flying Doctors, filmed in Tanzania and Kenya, is what I call a Gebrauchsfilm, a “utility” film. It’s more a Bericht – a report – made as a gift to the doctors than a film, and it earned them a fair amount of money, enough to purchase two small aeroplanes. I was asked to work on the project by a woman who raised funds for the doctors, and went with them into the field where they performed surgery, to places where people had never seen doctors before. While I was out with the flying doctors, they were primarily doing preventative medicine, in particular vaccinations and lectures, in this case against trachoma. Prevention is cheap and easy; the disease is caused by a lack of hygiene. I was allowed to fly on their tiny aeroplanes and shoot things I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to film, material that was later incorporated into Fata Morgana, like the beautiful aerial footage of Lake Nakuru, full of millions of pink flamingos.
Though I made Flying Doctors with a specific purpose, it does offer some unusual observations. The most interesting scenes stem from my interest in vision and perception, the process of recognising images and how the brain sorts through and makes sense of them. One of the doctors in the film talks of showing a poster of a fly to the villagers, who had never seen photographs or images of any sort. “We don’t have that problem,” they said. “Our flies aren’t that big.” It was a response that fascinated me, so we took the posters – one of a man, one of a human eye that filled an entire piece of paper, another of a hut – and conducted an experiment. I asked if they could identify the human eye, and most of the villagers couldn’t; the images were just abstract compositions to them. One man thought the window of the hut was an eye, and another pointed to the eye and said, “This is the rising sun.” It was clear that certain elements of visual perception are in some way culturally conditioned, that these people were processing images differently to how Westerners might. There were other things that emerged, like the fact that – perhaps because of some ancient taboo – members of the Maasai tribe were extremely reluctant to enter the mobile medical unit. The trailer was elevated just two feet off the ground, but only a few eventually braved this obstacle and climbed the steps.
In The White Diamond, decades later, Graham Dorrington tells Marc Anthony Yhap that when he first landed his airship, he had the feeling that local Amerindian children weren’t able to see it, as if the airship was so inconceivable to them that it was invisible. He explains that when Captain Cook first landed on a Pacific island, the native Maoris apparently didn’t see the boats because the concept of such a thing was beyond their bounds of perception. They couldn’t comprehend the existence of such a thing. It’s a wonderful idea, but doesn’t sound very likely. After all, the Aztecs could clearly see the Spanish fleet of Cortés, and in the Florentine Codex there are accurate descriptions and illustrations of a sighting of distant galleons and the landing of ships. However unfamiliar the concept of a galleon was to them, the Aztecs could still see them. Human figures in ancient Egyptian art are shown only in profile, but the fact that the Egyptians didn’t represent perspective doesn’t mean they couldn’t recognise and understand it in real life.
There is an image in The Flying Doctors of East Africa of five Irish doctors.
We see them from head to toe, staring into the lens, as they surreptitiously start to shuffle about as a group. “I don’t want to move the camera towards you because I don’t h
ave a dolly and the shot would be too shaky,” I explained, “but perhaps you can move imperceptibly towards me, as if you’re floating.” They were half embarrassed and half bemused, but as they start edging forward, an instantaneous empathy develops between them and us.
During the filming of Flying Doctors I shot some sequences for Fata Morgana in Tanzania and Kenya with cameraman Thomas Mauch. Then we went to Uganda with the intention of filming with John Okello, the man who a few years before had staged a rebellion in Zanzibar and declared himself field marshal and president. I had read wild stories about him in various newspapers; he was also the mastermind behind the atrocities committed against the Arab population there. I never did find Okello, though I corresponded with him for a time because he wanted me to translate his book into German and publish it,‡ something I never did, though a couple of years later I named a character in Aguirre, the Wrath of God after him because the film owes something to his hysterical and atrocious fantasies. He would deliver incredible speeches from his aeroplane directly through to the radio, things like, “I, your field marshal, am about to land. Anyone stealing so much as a piece of soap will be slung into prison for 225 years.” The tone of Okello’s rants was a strong influence on the language that Aguirre uses. Near the end of his journey through the jungle, he warns his troops that anyone who eats so much as a single extra grain of corn will be locked up for 155 years, and whoever thinks about deserting will be cut into 198 pieces, then trampled on until his body can be used to paint walls.