Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin

by Paul Cronin

  Why does Land of Silence and Darkness resonate so strongly?

  In contrast to Even Dwarfs Started Small, there’s a lot of serenity in the film. Land of Silence and Darkness is particularly close to my heart; if it didn’t exist there would be a hole in my life. Fini Straubinger – the fifty-six-year-old deaf and blind woman at the centre of the film – helped me understand something about loneliness to an extent I never had before.

  Fini was outside of society and history. When I asked what she remembered about the Second World War, she explained that because she wasn’t able to hear or see, the destruction barely registered for her. The only thing she perceived was hunger and the physicality of being led down into the cellar during bombing raids to take refuge from the explosions. In her case loneliness was taken to unimaginable limits, and I have the distinct impression that anyone seeing the film asks themselves, “What would be left of my life if I were deaf and blind? How could I live, overcome loneliness, make myself understood?” The question of how we learn concepts and languages is woven deep into Land of Silence and Darkness, with its deaf and blind characters who make visible the difficulty of human communication. The film is about the terror of sometimes not being able to make ourselves understood, and our subsequent isolation. If you were to knock on Fini’s door, she wouldn’t hear you, and if you were to switch on a light, she wouldn’t see it. When you rang her doorbell, a small ventilator turned itself on so that Fini would feel a draught and know there was a visitor. It meant she could prepare herself for the fact that someone was arriving from the outside world and would be laying their hand on her shoulder. She had all these practical ways to prevent fright and shock. Once I rang her bell and nothing happened; it turned out the ventilator was broken. I went in anyway, found her sitting at a table, and asked myself how I should best approach her and make my presence known.

  The film was made by only three people.

  Yes, and the ratio of footage shot to what you see in the final film is probably two to one. The film is an hour and a half, but we shot about three hours of footage in total. Not only that, but the film cost only $30,000. It was me recording sound, Schmidt-Reitwein on camera and Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, who edited the film. We had absolutely nothing, yet came up with a film still watched forty years later. This should be a lesson to filmmakers today with inexpensive digital technology at their disposal. You need only a good story and guts to make a film, the sense that it absolutely has to be made. Every able-bodied filmmaker out there today should be able to raise the pittance needed to make a film like Land of Silence and Darkness. Don’t wait for the system to finance such things. Rob a bank if you need to. Embezzle if necessary.

  There was no preconceived structure before we started shooting; things fell into place very easily, and the resulting film is some of the best work I’ve ever done. Look at the sequence at the end with Herr Fleischmann, the deaf man who became blind when he was thirty-three years old and lived for six years in a cowshed just to experience the warmth of other living beings. I consider him to be one of the most important characters in any of my films. He lived with his mother in a retirement home because she was the only person he wasn’t afraid of. She explained to us that five years before, after a heavy snowstorm, when she opened the window, took his hand and put it into the snow, he said, “Snow.” It was the last word he ever uttered. The shot where Herr Fleischmann walks away from the group of people and approaches a tree, feeling its shape by gently touching – almost embracing – the branches, is unforgettable; it’s an entire human drama played out in two minutes, and one of the deepest moments audiences will ever encounter in a film. If you were to show that scene to someone who hadn’t seen the whole film, it would seem insignificant. What’s happening on screen at that moment is startlingly simple, and anyone who tuned into the film would think, “It’s just a shot of a man touching a tree.” But this is an image that requires the preceding one and a half hours for audiences to be sufficiently receptive to its power. If this were the opening sequence of Land of Silence and Darkness, it would be meaningless, and nor would it make sense if you showed it apart from the rest of the film. As with Little Dieter Needs to Fly and Stroszek, for an hour before the end of the film the inner rhythm inexorably leads us to the final sequence, and as soon as I saw Herr Fleischmann under that tree I knew I had the last scene of the film. It was one of those things that occasionally fall into my lap and that I wonder if I really deserve.

  I had my arm around Schmidt-Reitwein and gently turned him towards Herr Fleischmann. He understood that there was something he hadn’t noticed, turned to pick up on this solitary figure walking slowly away, then zeroed in on him under the tree. You can feel the tender approach we took in the camerawork of Land of Silence and Darkness. I wanted the characters to come across in the most direct way possible, and told Schmidt-Reitwein that if he used a tripod, we would end up with fixed, lifeless images. I wanted him to let the camera beat as if it were part of his own heart, and by extension that of the people he was filming. It was clear that if the camera were sitting on his shoulder – even when he wasn’t moving – it would make a tremendous difference. I told him that wherever possible he shouldn’t use the zoom, but instead move towards people with his whole body.

  How much freedom do you give the cameraman at moments like these?

  I have always had a symbiotic and physical relationship with the cameramen I work with. I move step by step in contact with them; we’re like a pair of ice skaters. From behind, I put one arm around their chest or my hand on their belt, and if I see something unforeseen and interesting I push them towards it with a nudge or whisper. The cameraman’s peripheral vision is restricted when he looks through the lens, so an important part of my job at moments like this is to provide an additional set of eyes and guide him in certain directions. But this is never the sighted leading the blind. The cameraman is always searching with his other eye for the next thing to film.

  Peter Zeitlinger, with whom I have worked for the past few years, is the only cameraman ever to put the camera down in the middle of a take and say, “Werner, this scene has no rhythm.” In his youth Peter played ice hockey for Sparta Prague, which means in his hands a camera is more fluid than a Steadicam. Along the slopes of Mount Erebus in Antarctica, steam has created a series of bizarre ice corridors and chimneys, some reaching two storeys in height. During production on Encounters at the End of the World, Peter and I descended down into the ice and moved along a fumarole, which is a long tunnel, at points only twenty inches high. There is a beautiful shot in the film where you see me crawling, as if exploring the unknown. Then, suddenly, the tunnel opens out into a blue grotto of pure fantasy, with intense light shining through the ice. Peter was on his belly behind me, and with extraordinary agility was holding the camera stretched out with one hand in front of him. He has always understood how physical his job is, and in one sequence for Encounters managed to control a moving snowmobile with one hand while filming with the other. In Little Dieter Needs to Fly, when Dieter is tied up and runs through the jungle with his captors, Peter was running after everyone, the camera to his eye, skilfully avoiding the trees and roots that covered the path. At one point he crossed a creek using a fallen tree as a narrow bridge. Watch the scene again and you’ll notice that a third of the way across is a wooden branch sticking up out of the mud. Peter had placed it there himself in preparation for being able to balance his body so that he could get a smooth shot as he moved from one side of the creek to the other. I never liked the system in America where a distinction is made between the cinematographer and camera operator. A real cinematographer operates his own camera.

  Where did you first meet Fini Straubinger?

  I was asked to make a film about victims of the West German equivalent of thalidomide, and produced a film called Handicapped Future. The film isn’t as stylised as some of my other documentaries because, like The Flying Doctors of East Africa, it was proposed by someone else, in this case by a yo
ung man whose friend was in a wheelchair. The initial suggestion was that I do a film on him alone, but after some investigation I felt there was more to the subject, so I made Handicapped Future, an attempt to tackle basic issues about how physically disabled people functioned in West Germany. I gave the film – which is another example of a “utility” work – to several institutions that took care of the physically handicapped, and they used it to raise public awareness of their cause.

  Beyond the fundamental practicalities – like the lack of ramps in public spaces and sidewalks inaccessible to wheelchairs – the more deep-rooted problem was that many handicapped people felt isolated from society. There were more than four million of them in West Germany at the time, including nearly half a million of school age, but the treatment of these people was mediaeval, and according to surveys the majority of Germans didn’t want to live anywhere near them. What opportunities could their communities and government usefully offer them? I became interested in the community facility that was built in Munich in 1968 where, for the first time, handicapped people could live with their families in specially furnished apartments instead of being isolated in institutions, as was mostly the case; it was the equivalent to assisted-living facilities for the elderly. There were two schools, medical amenities and a gym where physical training could take place, including the balancing exercises you see in the film. People with no arms have different perceptions of balance and their bodies than everyone else. Handicapped Future is probably my most politically aware film because I wanted to explore the development of legislation emerging from the United States that was providing assistance to the handicapped and which later trickled across to West Germany and other European countries. I went out to the UCLA campus in California and filmed with Adolph Ratzka, a young German university student who some years before had been paralysed by polio. He spoke of the “pompous stairways” common in German buildings, compared to the mandatory facilities for wheelchair users in public buildings in California.

  I don’t know if I like the film today. It tries to maintain some kind of friendly attitude, and seems dangerously conventional and well behaved. If I were to work on a similar project today, it would have a harsher tone when it came to the lack of acceptance of disabled people in general. Still, the film was one of the first voices to let it be known that changes were needed in West Germany, and it helped trigger a shift in awareness of these issues, eventually leading to new legislation. More importantly, it was somehow a predecessor to Land of Silence and Darkness and led directly to that project. During filming, Schmidt-Reitwein and I went to hear a speech by Gustav Heinemann, the president of West Germany, which is where I met Fini. The first time I encountered her was captured on film; it’s the scene about halfway through Land of Silence and Darkness, when she is at Heinemann’s talk, sitting with a companion who is describing to her what is being said by use of an extraordinary tactile language. We were filming the president when I turned and saw this man tapping with his fingers onto the hand of the woman sitting next to him. I immediately sensed this was something big and that I should take note, so I gently nudged Schmidt-Reitwein, who slowly moved his camera around and filmed the two of them.

  I was instantly fascinated by Fini. As a nine-year-old child she had fallen down a staircase and landed heavily on her head, but because she was worried about her mother being angry, she kept quiet about it and felt sick for months. The doctor thought it was because she was growing, but after one or two years she became blind, then as a nineteen-year-old became deaf. Adding to this misfortune she was addicted to morphine – prescribed to alleviate her constant pain – and was bedridden for thirty years. Because she couldn’t hear herself, Fini talked very slowly and carefully. For her, history stopped around 1920 because she had lived for so many years surrounded by pious nuns in a convent and spoke an anachronistic German from the previous century. The day I saw Fini for the first time was the day I decided to make a film about her.

  How easy was it to persuade her to be filmed?

  I was able to establish an immediate trust with her and learnt the tactile language fairly quickly; it takes about as long as it does to learn how to type. I was eventually tapping onto Fini’s toes and the sole of her foot, and using her left hand instead of her right, which is like writing in reverse. I would speak to Fini as straight-forwardly as I would to anyone else, and once told her that the sweater she was wearing didn’t match her skirt, suggesting she put on a different one instead. Nobody had ever told her anything like that before, and she immediately went to change. Fini allowed me to make Land of Silence and Darkness because she understood that the film wouldn’t be just about her, but also the community in which she lived and the people she surrounded herself with. Happiness or unhappiness never played a role in Fini’s existence. She experienced complete isolation having been bedridden for so many years, unable to see and hear, but there were things that were more important to her. She knew her life had meaning because she was such a support for other deaf and blind people. We filmed, on and off, for more than a year, following her to various events, meetings and special occasions.

  For her birthday one year I organised a ride in an aeroplane, the first time she had ever flown; she loved feeling the jolts and shifts of air as the aircraft bounced along. I knew Fini had always wanted to go to the zoo and that the other deaf and blind people she spent time with had also never been there, so I persuaded the director of the local zoo to let them feed the elephants and hold the chimpanzees. We also went to a local arboretum, where they handled various cacti. Away from the cameras I did things with Fini that nobody else would ever do, like have her cook me a meal. She had been prevented from making mischief for such a long time, so I took her out into the countryside on my motorcycle to poach pheasants. It was exhilarating for Fini when she fired my small-calibre rifle, which she would hide under her coat because I had no hunting licence. Later, when she plucked the pheasants, Fini was still delighting in the mischief we had made together, and the bird tasted twice as good. When I would have her over for dinner, she could tell whether my roast was ready just by the smell. It was one sensual, visceral experience after another. I even asked Fini to babysit for my son Rudolph, who was only a year old; nobody had ever entrusted her with such responsibility. My mother became close to Fini and learnt the tactile language so they could communicate with each other. For my mother and me, our contact with Fini went far beyond the film.

  You filmed with children born deaf and blind.

  I thought it was important to show another side to the story, and these sequences came naturally. Fini became deaf and blind when she was a teenager, which makes a difference to the kind of contact she had with the outside world. She knew language and what things looked like. There are well-known cases, like the American Helen Keller, who became deaf and blind at an early age and wrote several books; her story raises questions about innate human emotions and how these children think about abstract concepts. But it isn’t easy to know what children born deaf and blind think about the environment they inhabit because there is no easy way to communicate with them. Contact rarely surpasses the palpable essentials, things like, “This is heat. Do you need food?” It seems certain they feel and understand emotions like anger and fear as anyone else would, but how do they cope with their anonymous fears within? Although their brains are normal, they have no conception of language or their environment. Without the ability to see and hear, it’s difficult for their minds to be fully awakened. The children we filmed seemed to experience moments of deep fear that related only to what was happening inside their own heads.

  We discovered some other extraordinary cases. Else Fährer was a deaf and blind woman, about fifty years old. The only person she was able to communicate with was her mother, but she had died and no institution in Germany would accept Else, so she was placed in a psychiatric hospital where the nurses had no idea how to look after her. Else knew she didn’t belong in this place, surrounded by such unstable peo
ple. She could read Braille and was able to speak and write, but after her experience in this psychiatric institution she retreated into herself so much that she wasn’t able to communicate with anyone. There is a scene in the film where Fini goes to meet Else. She tried to make contact in any number of ways, but was never able to. Words appear on screen: “When you let go of my hand, it is as if we were a thousand miles apart.”

  Land of Silence and Darkness was rejected by television stations for more than two years, so I threatened the executives by telling them I would buy their stations in twenty years’ time, when I was rich, then fire everyone. Eventually they tested the waters by screening the film late at night, and it got such a favourable response from the public that it was repeated twice shortly afterwards and became a great success. Some reviewers – primarily in Germany – accused me of exploitation. Thankfully several people jumped to the film’s defence and gave it the backing it needed, including Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of Awakenings, who loved the film. Somehow word spread that it was a worthy project.

  Aguirre, the Wrath of God was your first international success, a film regarded as one of the great achievements of post-war German cinema.

  Perhaps, but hardly anyone wanted to see the film when it got its first limited release, and it was difficult to find money to even make it. The budget came from the small amount of revenue I had received from my previous films, plus a loan from my brother Tilbert, plus money from Hessischer Rundfunk, a German television station, which had the right to screen the film the very evening it was released in cinemas, so naturally it was hardly a box-office success. This was before the Film/Fernsehen Abkommen [Film/Television Agreement, 1974], which opened up opportunities for co-productions with the networks and put in place a rule that films released theatrically wouldn’t be screened on television for at least two years. When I made The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser a couple of years later I made sure the contract stipulated there would be a substantial delay between the film’s cinema release and its television premiere. We struggled to sell Aguirre at first, but it was finally picked up by a small French distribution company and sold out a couple of Paris cinemas of about a hundred seats each for more than two years. Eventually the rest of the world took notice.