by Paul Cronin
Two films encouraged me to push on with my ideas. One was The Tragic Diary of Zero the Fool,§ featuring a theatre group from a lunatic asylum in Canada; the other was Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres fous, shot in Ghana and featuring the annual ceremonies of the Hauka tribe, who – while in trance and heavily under the influence of drugs – enact the arrival of the English governor and his entourage. Rouch’s boldness and depth of insight into human nature have forever stayed with me; I consider Les Maîtres fous one of the greatest films ever made. It virtually stopped my heart the first time I saw it, and has forever inspired me to venture into the abyss of the human soul in ways most people would never dare.
Did you do the hypnosis yourself?
During pre-production I put an ad in a newspaper asking for people who wanted to take part in a film project involving hypnosis, and about six hundred people responded. I spent more time on casting Heart of Glass than for any other film I’ve made, before or after; there were sessions once a week for six months. We selected about forty people according to the types needed for the story, and also, crucially, based on their receptivity to hypnosis. We were careful to choose individuals who were emotionally stable and genuinely interested in what we were doing. Being hypnotised isn’t about just sinking into the unconscious, it’s about concentration. There is a certain proclivity for being hypnotised; just as some people can ride a bicycle without any training, some are able to be hypnotised very easily. Everyone’s susceptibility is different. Some people immediately slip into an apathetic state and become wholly disorientated; they lose much of their ability to control themselves physically, so obviously we didn’t select them. Others are so normal in their reactions that you can hardly distinguish them from the non-hypnotised. Everyone is different, and one of the actors we selected – the old man playing the factory owner who laughs throughout the film – had no interest in waking up once he had been hypnotised, resisting whenever I tried to bring him out of it.
We had a hypnotist who was supposed to act as some kind of assistant director, but he turned out to be a New Age creep who claimed hypnosis was a cosmic aura that only he, with his special powers, could attract and radiate. His whole approach disgusted me; he would babble on about how hypnosis was a direct link to the supernatural. Years later I put some of these more ridiculous ideas into the script of Invincible, when Hanussen is performing on stage. The neurological difference between being awake and being asleep, and being asleep and being under hypnosis, is more or less the same. Hypnosis is surrounded by an aura of mystery, but it’s really an ordinary phenomenon; science just hasn’t yet furnished us with a sufficient explanation of the exact physiological processes at work when someone is under hypnosis. It has nothing to do with metaphysics or any kind of evil power, even if the country-fair hypnotist has forever tried to convince his audience otherwise. The way hypnosis works is by the hypnotist giving life to the act of self-hypnosis via mind and speech rituals. It’s all about auto-suggestion. The fact is that anyone with natural authority and a certain intensity of suggestion can become a hypnotist, and after two rehearsal sessions I ended up doing it all myself.
Did some people suspect it was just a gimmick?
Of course, but there was a very clear purpose to it. The potential for visionary and poetic language is revealed through hypnosis. I wanted to provoke poetic language from people who had never before been in touch with such things, just as the nightmarish Even Dwarfs Started Small, the ecstatic Woodcarver Steiner and the films I made with Bruno S. and Fini Straubinger were attempts to render on screen, for everyone to see and experience, certain inner states.
The aim of rehearsals was to work out a catalogue of suggestions that would result in the kind of stylised somnambulism you see in the film. What counted was the way things were suggested to the actors, and soon they were able to feel non-existent heat so intensely they would break out in a sweat. They could hold conversations with imaginary people, and two hypnotised actors could even talk coherently to a third imaginary person. I hypnotised one woman and told her she was no longer able to speak. When I woke her she had such difficulty talking, even asking for a glass of water, that I hypnotised her again and told her, “You are slowly regaining the gift of speech. When you wake up, you will be able to speak like a great orator.” She immediately began to talk with great eloquence. The timing of the movements and speech of the actors was often very peculiar, and once they had been brought out of their states many had only a vague recollection of what they had been doing. If there were a pause of more than two minutes between takes, I would wake them up because it isn’t healthy to keep someone under hypnosis for very long. After working with the actors for several weeks, it usually took only ten or fifteen seconds to put them back under again.
Rather than give specific directions per se, it was more important to get the actors into the right mood. Instead of asking them to walk across a room, I said something like, “You move as if in slow motion because the whole room is filled with water. You can breathe easily, like a scuba diver. You are drifting, floating.” Or, “You see your partner but look through him, as you look through a window,” and “You are an inventor of great genius working on an insane, beautiful invention. When I put my hand on your shoulder, tell me what this thing is and how it works.” I wanted each actor to write a poem, but what they came out with depended on the quality of the suggestion, so I never asked someone just to write a poem. Instead I told them, “You’re the first one for centuries who has set foot on a foreign island. It’s overgrown with jungle and full of strange birds. You come across a gigantic cliff, and on closer inspection discover the rock is actually green emerald. Hundreds of years ago a monk took a chisel and hammer and engraved a poem into the wall. You open your eyes and are the first one to see it. Read out loud what you see.” One actor with no formal education whose day job was tending the horse stables of a Munich police squad stood there and apologised. “I didn’t bring my glasses,” he said. I told him to move closer, then everything would be in focus. He stepped forward and in a strange voice said, “Why can we not drink the moon? Why is there no vessel to hold it?” On it went, a very beautiful reading. Sometimes, of course, hypnosis triggers only banalities. I told the same story to one young man – a law student who had dropped out of his studies – who took one look at the wall and said, “Dear Mother, I’m doing fine. Everything is all right. I’m looking to the future now. Hugs and kisses, Your Son.”
The only actor in the film not put into trance was Josef Bierbichler, who played Hias, the only clairvoyant among the townsfolk. The workers in the glass factory, who were all authentic, professional glassblowers, also weren’t under hypnosis because it would have been too dangerous, as liquid glass has a temperature of more than a thousand degrees. They were also drinking a fair amount of beer because of the heat. It’s intensive work; they literally have no tools except a long pipe and a pair of pliers. Certain things they do could never be achieved with mechanical devices. One particular shot – a glassblower creating a figurine of a horse – is truly extraordinary to watch. I have never met anyone who understands physical materials as these people do. Nothing is more rewarding than observing real artists working at close quarters.
During the scene in the bar, with all the men sitting around, every time I told the cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein to take one step to the left, all the actors did too. I ended up using two voices with different intonations during shooting: one for the technical crew, the other for everyone in front of the camera. Years later, on the set of Invincible, I trained Tim Roth in hypnosis for the part of Hanussen. At one point during filming I looked up and saw camera man Peter Zeitlinger staggering backwards. He was so close to Tim – who in the film has a wonderful demonic quality to him and was speaking almost into the lens of the camera – that he had become semi-hypnotised himself.
Was it important for audiences to know the actors were hypnotised?
I never made a fuss about it and hoped the whole thin
g could be done as unobtrusively as possible; it was only the media who dug their teeth in. They made certain statements I felt I should respond to, and at one point a journalist showed up at a rehearsal without making himself known to me and proved to be a disruptive force. It was suggested by the press that I was using hypnosis because I wanted more control over the actors, but I certainly wasn’t looking for a bunch of performing puppets for the film. It’s a common mistake to assume that someone under hypnosis can be manipulated in certain ways, but this absolutely isn’t the case because their hard core remains untouched. Murder under hypnosis is a myth; if I ask a hypnotised person to take a knife and kill his mother, he would refuse. Hypnotised people also have a tendency to lie, which means my plans had nothing to do with a desire for control. Another misconception about the power of hypnosis is that it can reconnect people to their former lives. During the first few days of casting, the creepy hypnotist put some of the participants into a trance and told them they lived in ancient Egypt. Some of them spoke in a strange language about their former lives in eras long ago; one woman even described living in Alexandria as a dancer on a high platform from which she could see the Nile. But it was all obvious nonsense. No branch of the river’s delta passed near Alexandria at the time, and the language she spoke was meaningless babble, not unlike what you hear in Southern Baptist churches, with people speaking in tongues.
When I talk to people who have no idea I used hypnosis on the actors, they speak of the film’s “dreamy atmosphere.” The opening images of the waterfall are there almost to help put audiences into a trance. Staring directly into the moving water and listening intensely to the suggestions of the voice in German – reading the English subtitles doesn’t really do the job – makes you feel as if the waterfall is standing still and it’s you who are floating upwards. The experience isn’t unlike staring from a bridge down into a fast-flowing river. All of a sudden the river seems to stop moving, and you start to float. There’s a line from one of Hölderlin’s poems: “Man kann auch in die Höhe fallen” [“One can even fall upwards”]. I once showed Aguirre to a hypnotised audience. To keep everyone under hypnosis for an hour and a half, I played a piece of music by the band Popol Vuh – one that appears in the film – before the screening. I told the audience that whenever they heard this music, they would sink into a deep hypnotic state. I spoke to some of them afterwards. One man believed himself to have been in a helicopter, flying around Aguirre, evading his gaze. A handful of people had fallen asleep, though when I questioned them about this they insisted they had seen the entire film. When I asked them to tell the story back to me, they embellished what they had missed in very imaginative ways.
It’s actually possible to hypnotise someone from a screen. The original idea was for me to appear in a prologue to Heart of Glass explaining, directly into the camera, that if the audience wanted to, they could experience the film under hypnosis. “If you follow my voice now and look at the object I’m holding and focus on it, you can become hypnotised and be able to see this film on a different level.” At the end of the film I would reappear and softly wake them up without any anxieties. I would have advised anyone in the audience who didn’t want to participate to avert their eyes from the start. “Don’t listen, don’t follow my advice.” I dropped the idea when I started studying more about hypnotism. A newsreader could conceivably hypnotise part of his audience every evening just by speaking to them, but clearly there are potential dangers. An audience should never be left unattended in a hypnotic state. Such things have to be done responsibly.
Heart of Glass was filmed amidst archetypal Herzog locations.
With its indefinable landscapes, the film seems to be set in something like the late eighteenth century. This is a loosely defined, pre-industrial past. We shot in Bavaria, close to where I grew up, Switzerland and Alaska, near Glacier Bay. It was all familiar-looking terrain, and in the film I declare all these landscapes Bavarian. One of the finest images I have ever created appears at the start of the film: a river of clouds floating through a valley. We filmed it in Bavaria, near the Czech border, and since we had no machine to do the job automatically, everyone sat around together on the mountaintop for hours, singing and taking turns to click frame by frame, by hand, every ten seconds, adjusting the aperture according to the changing light.
The final sequence of the film might be the best thing I have ever done; it’s so powerful that I can’t breathe when I watch it. We filmed amidst the ecstatic landscape of Skellig Michael, a massive slab of rock a few miles off the southwest coast of Ireland. It rises like a pyramid more than seven hundred feet out of the ferocious Atlantic, where in the eighth century a group of monks built a tiny monastery so they could get a good view of the impending apocalypse. Marauding Norsemen plundered the place for years, throwing some of the monks into the sea and selling the rest into slavery. You can get to Skellig only during good weather because otherwise it’s too windswept; the breakers rise a hundred feet and crash down onto the rock face. It wasn’t easy getting the shots of the rowing men because of the violent waves and torrential rains. Whenever the cameraman Thomas Mauch was ready to shoot, the actors were vomiting over the sides, and whenever they were ready to shoot, Mauch was wretching. I was busy throwing pieces of bread into the air to attract the gannets. The locals told us we were the first people for years to make the journey in such small boats. You can still visit the original thousand-year-old monastery at the top, comprised of several buildings all in excellent condition and accessible thanks to the staircase of six hundred stone steps, expertly carved by monks.
Hias has a vision of a man standing up there, someone who still believes the Earth is a flat disc ending in an abyss somewhere far out in the ocean. For years he has stood staring out over the sea, until several men – who have also yet to learn we live on a spherical planet – join him. One day they resolve to take the ultimate risk and row out to sea in a small, fragile boat. These men are some of the few who have the courage to explore; they need to see where the world ends. They voyage into grey, open waters, battling against the waves, in search of the truth. In the last shot of the film, as music from Martim Codax plays, we see the ocean growing dark under heavy clouds.
Words appear: “It may have seemed like a sign of hope that the birds followed them out into the vastness of the sea.” Did you write that?
I did. And somehow, maybe, I want to be that man seen from a distance, looking to the horizon, staring beyond the raging ocean into the unknown, who decides to set out and discover the shape of the earth for himself.
* Adapted from the last lines of Walser’s “Helblings Geschichte” (1914): “Ich sollte eigentlich ganz allein auf der Welt sein, ich, Helbling, und sonst kein anderes lebendes Wesen. Keine Sonne, keine Kultur, ich nackt auf einem hohen Stein, kein Sturm, nicht einmal eine Welle, kein Wasser, kein Wind, keine Strassen, keine Banken, kein Geld, keine Zeit und kein Atem. Ich würde dann jedenfalls nicht mehr Angst haben.”
† On Aguirre’s photography, for example, which “never transcends mere adequacy,” Simon wrote: “If this was a matter of insufficient funding, my condolences to Herzog; if a deliberate notion of minimal art, the back of my hand to him.” “German and Gimcrack,” in Something to Declare, p. 334.
‡ Kaspar Hauser (1996), written and directed by Peter Sehr.
§ The Tragic Diary of Zero the Fool (Canada, 1969), directed by Morley Markson, who describes the film as “an experimental improvisation. I remember entering it into the Toronto Film Festival but it failed to qualify for entry because, they said, it’s simply ‘not a movie.’ I liked that a lot.” See Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1971.
5
Legitimacy
You claim not to be part of the German Romantic tradition.
Years ago I was in Paris shortly after an exhibition of the work of German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Every journalist I spoke to seemed to have seen the exhibition and insisted on viewing my films – especially Heart of G
lass and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser – within the context of this knowledge they had suddenly acquired. Then, after a similar exhibition of German expressionism a few years later, everyone told me how many elements of expressionism could be found in my work. One year it was inconceivable to them I hadn’t imbued my films from start to finish with elements of German romanticism, the next they were even more incredulous that there was no preconceived notion of expressionism in my work. Those are the only two movements in German art the French have ever heard of, so I must have been influenced by one or the other. It’s a fire I have never been able to extinguish. When it comes to Americans, who have generally been good to my films over the years but have little knowledge of either romanticism or expressionism, for them the only question is, “Is this film in line with Nazism or not?” Or, occasionally, “Does this film relate in any way to Brecht’s theories and principles?”
You can’t get a more contrary position towards the Romantic point of view than mine. Go back and listen to what I say in Burden of Dreams – the film Les Blank made on the set of Fitzcarraldo – about nature being vile and base, lacking in harmony, full of creatures constantly fighting for survival.* Anyone who understands such things knows those could never be the words of a Romantic. If you’re interested in what I think about nature, take a look up into the night sky and consider that it’s a complete mess, full of recalcitrant chaos. The overwhelming quality of the universe is monumental indifference and lack of order. It’s a statistical improbability we’re even on the planet, this miniscule speck surrounded by a myriad of uninhabitable, hostile and lethal stars that boil in nuclear rage. Look at the solar system from a satellite and see how utterly insignificant Earth looks. The universe couldn’t care less about us, and I hope I never have to call upon it for assistance. What do they care, these stars out there, ten thousand times larger than Earth, billions of miles away? In Timothy Treadwell’s footage, as seen in Grizzly Man, we are witness to his sentimentalising of wild nature and his idyllic portrayal of bears living in perfect harmony with their environment, something that doesn’t go uncontested for a second. “Here I differ with Treadwell,” says my voiceover, as I explain my views on the subject, which are diametrically opposed to his pseudo-romanticism.