by Paul Cronin
† Translated as “The Mad Veteran of the Fort Ratonneau” in The Blue Flower: Best Stories of the Romanticists, edited by Hermann Kesten (Roy, 1946).
‡ Revolution in Zanzibar (East African Publishing House, 1967).
§ “Vom Ende des Analphabetismus,” Die Zeit, 24 November 1978. In his review, Herzog compares the Taviani brothers’ film to two other recent books published in Germany, all “cases of village illiterates who, through appalling suffering, liberate themselves from backwardness and isolation by their own strength. At the same time these books illuminate something else, the fact that the phenomenon of illiteracy has another side to it. It is a form of experience and intelligence which is necessarily being lost in our civilisation, a cultural asset disappearing from the Earth.” Translated by Martina Lauster.
3
Adequate Imagery
Do you have an ideology, something that drives you beyond mere storytelling?
“Mere storytelling,” as you put it, is enough for a film. Steven Spielberg’s films might be full of special effects, but audiences appreciate them because at the centre of each is a well-crafted story. Spielberg deserves the position he is in because he understands something that those who are concerned only with the fireworks of flashy visuals don’t. If a story in a narrative film doesn’t function, that film won’t function.
My films come to me very much alive, like dreams, without explanation. I never think about what it all means. I think only about telling a story, and however illogical the images, I let them invade me. An idea comes to me, and then, over a period of time – perhaps while driving or walking – this blurred vision becomes clearer in my mind, pulling itself into focus. I see the film before me, as if it were playing on a screen, and it soon becomes so transparent that I can sit and write it all down, describing the images passing through my mind. I don’t write a script if I can’t see and hear the entire film – characters, dialogue, music, locations – in my head. I have never written a screenplay for anyone else because I see my stories in a certain way and don’t want anyone else to touch them. When I write, I sit in front of the computer and pound the keys. I start at the beginning and write fast, leaving out anything that isn’t necessary, aiming at all times for the hard core of the narrative. I can’t write without that urgency. Something is wrong if it takes more than five days to finish a screenplay. A story created this way will always be full of life. I saw the whole of Even Dwarfs Started Small as a continuous nightmare in front of my eyes and was extremely disciplined while typing so I wouldn’t make any mistakes. I just let it all pour out and didn’t make more than five typos in the entire screenplay.
People sense I am well orientated, that I know where I have come from and where I’m headed, so it’s understandable that they search for some guiding ideology behind my work. But no such thing exists as far as I’m concerned. There is never some philosophical idea that guides a film through the veil of a story. All I can say is that I understand the world in my own way and am capable of articulating this understanding through stories and images that are coherent to others. I don’t like to drop names, but what sort of an ideology would you push under the shirt of Conrad or Hemingway or Kafka? Goya or Caspar David Friedrich? Even after watching my films, it bothers some audiences that they are unable to put their finger on what my credo might be. Grasp this with a pair of pliers, but the credo is the films themselves and my ability to make them. This is what troubles those people who have forever viewed my work with tunnel vision, as if they were looking through a straw they picked up at McDonald’s. They keep searching. No wonder they get desperate.
Some of these milkshake-drinkers have located themes running throughout your work.
Apparently so, but don’t ask me to do the same. A film is a projection of light that becomes something else only when it crosses the gaze of the audience, with the viewer able to connect what he is looking at with something deeper within himself. Everyone completes images and stories in a different way because everyone’s perspective is unique, so it’s never been a good idea for me to explain what my films might mean. The opinion of the public, however different from my own, is sacred. Whenever anyone asks me if Stroszek kills himself at the end of Stroszek, I tell them they’re free to choose the ending that best works for them. If anyone is expecting a statement from me on such matters, it would be best if they put this book down right now and poured themselves a glass of wine. Consider this line from Walt Whitman: “Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself.” None of my films were made following deep philosophical contemplation. My way of expressing certain ideas – our deep-rooted hopes and gnawing fears – is by rendering them visible on screen.
Those hordes who write about cinema have often been trained to think in certain ways, to analyse a body of work and investigate apparent connections, to bring certain rigid, fashionable theories to bear and show off everything they know while doing so. They read their own intellectual make-up and approach to life into my films, apparently deciphering things that for me don’t need to be deciphered, and by churning out page after page of unappealing prose actually obscure and confuse. It doesn’t mean they’re right, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They function in their world, and I in mine. I want to appeal to people’s instincts before anything else. When I present an audience with a new film I hope they bring only their hearts and minds, plus a little sympathy. I ask for no more than that. Film isn’t the art of scholars but of illiterates. It should be looked at straight on, without any prefabricated ideas, which is something Henri Langlois knew all too well. At the Cinémathèque Française he would screen films from around the world – in Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese – without subtitles. It means audiences had to cultivate a kind of intelligence and intensity of vision that has little to do with rational thought. They almost developed their own sense of illiteracy, tapping into an innate but usually long-dormant facility.
You must be able to see some connections between your films.
People say I’m an outsider, but even if everyone finds me eccentric, I know I’m standing at the centre. There is nothing eccentric about my films; it’s everything else that’s eccentric. I never felt that Kaspar Hauser, for example, was an outsider. He might have been continually forced to the sidelines, he might have stood apart from everyone, but he’s at the true heart of things. Everyone around him, with their deformed souls, transformed into domesticated pigs and members of bourgeois society, they are the bizarre ones. Aguirre, Fini Straubinger and Stroszek all fit into this pattern. So do Walter Steiner, Hias in Heart of Glass, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, the Aborigines of Where the Green Ants Dream and the desert people of Fata Morgana. Look at Reinhold Messner, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Nosferatu and even Kinski himself, or Vladimir Kokol, the young deaf and blind man in Land of Silence and Darkness who connects with the world only by bouncing a ball off his head and clutching a radio to his chest, much like Kaspar, who plays with his wooden horse. None of these people are pathologically mad. It’s the society they find themselves in that’s demented. Whether dwarfs, hallucinating soldiers or indigenous peoples, these individuals are not freaks.
I have always felt that my characters – fictional or non-fictional – all belong to the same family. It isn’t easy to put my finger on exactly what binds them together, but if a member of the clan were walking about town, you would intuitively and instantly recognise them. If you were to sit and watch all my films in one go, you would see the cross-references, the relationships and similarities between characters. They have no shadows, they emerge from the darkness without a past, they are misunderstood and humiliated. If you turned on the television and saw ten seconds of something, you would immediately know it must be one of mine. I look at my films as one big story, a vast, interconnected work I have been concentrating on for fifty years. Like the separate bricks that make up a building, taken together they constitute something bigger than their individual parts.
Does inves
tigation of these individuals tell us anything about their surroundings?
We learn more about the buildings, streets and structures of an unknown city by climbing to the top of an overlooking hill than by standing in its central square. Looking in from the outskirts, we come to understand the environments in which these characters live.
How close do you feel to the characters in your films?
I have a great deal of sympathy for these people, to the point where Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein joked that I should play everyone in my films myself. I function pretty well as an actor and in several of my films could have played the leading character if necessary. I could never make a film – fiction or non-fiction – about someone for whom I have no empathy, who fails to arouse some level of appreciation and curiosity. In fact, when it comes to Fini Straubinger in Land of Silence and Darkness, Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser or Dieter Dengler, these people are points of reference not just for my work, but also my life. I learnt so much from my time with them. The radical dignity they radiate is clearly visible in the films. There is something of what constitutes them inside me.
Do you watch television?
One of the great achievements of communal life is our ability to create narratives, something we have been doing since Neanderthal times. We should cherish this flame we all have inside of us and get on our knees to thank the Creator for having endowed us with the gift of storytelling, something cavemen huddled around campfires understood and appreciated. Instead, today, with television and its incessant commercials, our consumer culture has destroyed any semblance of dignity we might have once had. We are fragmenting and fracturing stories for the sake of business. We grow up enveloped by fifteen-second storytelling and are conditioned by filmmaking at breakneck pace. Decades from now, our great-great-grandchildren will look back with amazement at how we could have allowed a precious achievement of human culture like storytelling to be so disrespected, infected, then shredded by advertisements. It will be the same amazement we feel today when we look at our ancestors, for whom slavery, capital punishment, the burning of witches and the Inquisition were acceptable everyday events. We will be blamed for having not thrown hand grenades into television stations and laying waste to their institutionalised cowardice, for not taking up arms and occupying such debased places which venerate that single, pernicious god: the Einschaltquote, the ratings. It has always been their Golden Calf. It has nothing to do with me or my films.
Our culture today, especially television, infantilises us. The indignity of it kills our imagination. May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world. Those who watch television lose it. Sitting at home on your own, in front of the screen, is a very different experience from being in the communal spaces of the world, those centres of collective dreaming. Television creates loneliness. This is why sitcoms have added laughter tracks which try to cheat you out of your solitude. Television is a reflection of the world in which we live, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It kills spontaneous imagination and destroys our ability to entertain ourselves, painfully erasing our patience and sensitivity to significant detail.
Just when I think television can’t get any more sordid and unadventurous, it does. Years ago the executive from the station that paid for Little Dieter Needs to Fly saw the film for the first time, and immediately asked where the men’s room was because he said he needed to vomit. “This is unquestionably the worst film I have ever seen in my life,” he said, before shifting it from a prime-time slot and burying it late at night, when hardly anyone was even awake, let alone watching his station. When the film won awards and received positive reviews, he told me that perhaps it wasn’t so bad. One of my most recent experiences working with a television station was Encounters at the End of the World, which was a big success with audiences. There is a line in the voiceover where I speak about “the abomination of aerobic studios and yoga classes” down at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The network executives insisted on cutting it because they didn’t want to insult the housewives who might be watching, and washed their hands of the film by selling it for a tenth of what they had originally invested. It might also have been the word “evolution” – which one of the scientists uses in the film – that the network was unhappy with. Darwinism is a concept that’s anathema for half of the United States’ population. I hammer home to the participants of my Rogue Film School that they must brace themselves for such attitudes.
I sound so negative about all this, but fortunately there is another side to it. Television specialises in those early-morning satellite experiences, like the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman fight and the moon landing. I was so excited I almost had a heart attack before those. Over the last decade standards have risen when it comes to storytelling on television. It’s wonderful to see audiences immersing themselves in such intelligent narratives that play out over a period of years. Many of these series are expertly written, acted and directed, with a great sense of pace and long-range timing.
Tell me about what you describe as the “inadequate imagery” of today’s civilisation.
Our inability and lack of desire to seek fresh imagery means we are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements in magazines, or turn on the television, or walk into a travel agency and see huge posters with those same tedious images of the Grand Canyon, I sense that something dangerous is emerging. Just as a person without a memory will struggle to survive in this world, so will someone who lacks images that reflect his inner state.
We are, as a race, aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend that global warming and overcrowding of the planet are real dangers for mankind. We have come to understand that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger, that resources are being wasted at an extraordinary rate. But I believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude, as serious a defect as being without memory. I’ll repeat it again as long as I’m able to: we will die out like dinosaurs if we don’t develop adequate images. We need to learn to adapt our visual language to new and unforeseen situations. If our ingenuity isn’t up to the task, if we aren’t able to create fresh images, we will be stunted in our growth, unable to face the unforeseen challenges charging at us. All too many images are at a standstill, and consequently meaningless. Look at the depiction of Jesus Christ in Western iconography, unchanged since the kitsch of the Nazarene school of painting in the late nineteenth century. Representations like this are sufficient proof that Christianity is moribund. Why doesn’t anyone ever paint a chubby or laughing Jesus? Look at France in the 1870s, by which time the Industrial Revolution had transformed the country, yet its art still depicted the Napoleonic era. The Impressionists weren’t describing the future, they were updating things. You see the same thing with language. In Latin America they speak a lively Spanish compared to formal Castilian Spanish, as if the conquest of the New World paralysed language back home, creating some kind of impasse that has yet to be overcome. When a language becomes immobile, unable to adapt, the culture that created it disappears into the abyss of history.
We need images in accordance with our civilisation and innermost conditioning, which is why I appreciate any film that searches for novelty, no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. Years ago I saw an astonishing four-hour film by Theo Angelopoulos. Everyone said it was too long, but the images awoke new ideas in my mind, so to me it felt much too short. The struggle to find unprocessed imagery is never-ending, but it’s our duty to dig like archaeologists and search our violated landscapes. We live in an era when established values are no longer valid, when prodigious discoveries are being made every year, when catastrophes of unbelievable proportions occur weekly. In ancient Greek the word “chaos” means “gaping void” or “yawning emptiness.” The most effective response to the chaos in our lives
is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.
Who is willing to take the necessary risks?
I would never complain about how difficult it is to get images that belong to the recesses of the human heart, that show unexpected things we have never seen or experienced before, that are clear, pure and transparent. I would go absolutely anywhere; that’s my nature. Down here on Earth it’s hardly possible any more. I wouldn’t hesitate for a second if given the chance to venture out with a camera to another planet in our solar system, even if it were a one-way ticket. It’s frustrating to me that astronauts never take advantage of the photographic possibilities available to them. On one of the Apollo missions they left a camera on the moon, slowly panning from left to right, then right to left, for days. I yearned to grab the damned thing. There are so many possibilities up there for fresh images, and I always thought it would be better to send up a poet instead of an astronaut; I would be the first to volunteer. I did actually once seriously consider applying to NASA to be on one of their missions. Space travel is unfinished business for me, though these days I wouldn’t be allowed. You need a complete set of teeth to get inside a spaceship.
Do you ever tire of travelling?
Jet lag is no friend of mine, believe me, and the cultural shock of moving from one place to the next is hard to absorb. I’ll be at home in Los Angeles one day, then on an island off the coast of Panama the next. From there to Paris, the tropical jungles of Thailand, the desert terrain of North Africa and the mountains of South America, then back to the cold winds of Berlin. Living the way I do, having a real home is vital. It’s essential I can wake up in the middle of the night and know where the light switch is. I would never travel without a book that requires great attention; it becomes my home into which I immerse myself. The truth is I am continually drained by travelling, but never tire of it. It has forever energised me.