by Paul Cronin
While almost everything about romanticism is foreign to me, Caspar David Friedrich is someone I do have great affinity for. In his paintings Der Mönch am Meer [The Monk by the Sea] and Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer [The Wanderer Before the Sea of Fog] a man stands alone, looking out over the landscape. Compared to the grandeur of the environment surrounding him, he is small and insignificant. Friedrich didn’t paint landscapes per se, he revealed inner landscapes to us, ones that exist only in our dreams. It’s something I have always tried to do with my films.
What art has been most influential on you?
Matthias Grünewald, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel come to mind, alongside Caspar David Friedrich. There is also a seventeenth-century Dutch artist I feel close to, a virtual unknown called Hercules Segers. He was one of those clairvoyant and independent figures hundreds of years ahead of his time. Little is known about his life, and only a few of his works have survived. The man was an alcoholic and considered insane by those around him; he was so poor he printed on anything he could find – including tablecloths and bed sheets – and when he died many of his prints were used for wrapping buttered bread. Rembrandt was one of the few who took him seriously; he owned at least eight Segers prints. He also bought one of Segers’s oil canvases and immediately “improved” it by adding some clouds and, in the foreground, an ox cart. It isn’t unintelligently improved, but the resulting painting – which can be found in the Uffizi in Florence – is very much like the conventional paintings of the period. Segers’s prints, on the other hand, feel far ahead of his time, outside of history itself. Encountering these images was as if someone had reached out with his hand across time and touched my shoulder. His landscapes aren’t landscapes at all; they are states of mind, dream-like visions full of angst, desolation and solitude. Things emanate from deep underground and rocks that aren’t physically there, yet seem present nonetheless. Hardly anything is recognisable; his work is so surreal it looks like an alien descended to our planet. Human figures rarely appear, and when they do show up are tiny specks, like sleepwalkers. Entire mountaintops – flying in the atmosphere – seem not to comply with gravity. Segers’s images are hearsay of the soul. They are like flashlights, held in our uncertain hands, giving off a frightened beam that opens breaches into the recesses of a place only partially known to us: our selves. It’s an outrage that I haven’t met a single art student who has even heard of Segers.
Musical influences?
These have always been strong, maybe the strongest. People might think it strange that music could make such an impact on a filmmaker, but it’s quite natural to me. I like the early composers, like Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Heinrich Schütz and Orlando di Lasso. Or let’s go back even further, to Johannes Ciconia, the troubadour Martim Codax, Francesco Landini and Pierre Abelard, before we arrive at Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer.
Literature.
I find great consolation when moving through the dark with certain poets. There are works of German literature upon which I can only gaze in awe, like Büchner’s Woyzeck, Kleist’s short stories, the poetry of Hölderlin, who explored the outer limits of language. He became insane after travelling on foot from Bordeaux to Stuttgart, and spent the last thirty-five years of his life locked in a tower. He understood language to the point of self-destruction, and I find his attempts to use poetry to hold himself together deeply moving. When I read Hölderlin, I have the sensation of the Hubble telescope probing the depths of the universe. Johann Christian Günther, Andreas Gryphius, Friedrich Spee and Angelus Silesius, poets of the baroque epoch, are also important to me. I appreciate work by Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard – though they are both Austrians – and Swiss author Robert Walser. I would rather read the 1545 Bible translation of Martin Luther than any of the German Romantics, and who can walk past Joseph Conrad’s short stories or Hemingway’s first forty-nine stories – especially “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” – without experiencing something phenomenal? The first real modern writer in English is Laurence Sterne, particularly his wonderful Sentimental Journey, though I also recommend Tristram Shandy, which is such a thoroughly modern novel. The narrative – with its wondrous jumps and contradictions and wild ranting – still feels fresh today, two hundred and fifty years later. If I were caught on a desert island, without a doubt I would want all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary to keep me company. Such an incredible achievement of human ingenuity, one of the greatest cultural monuments the human race has created. Thousands of scholars have contributed to it over one hundred and fifty years.
Film.
I think about what an extraordinary cultural upheaval would have taken place throughout the world if cinema had been discovered a few hundred years earlier, if Segers, Kleist, Hölderlin and Büchner had expressed themselves through film. Of the filmmakers with whom I feel some kinship, Griffith – especially his Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms – Murnau, Buñuel, Kurosawa and Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, which isn’t so beholden to his theories of montage, all come to mind. I always saw Griffith as the Shakespeare of cinema, though everything these men did has a touch of greatness. I like Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia and Dovzhenko’s Earth, while Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari contains wonderful poetry, and no one who appreciates film can fail to recognise Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room. The opening sequence, with a wealthy aristocrat surveying his land from the roof of his crumbling palace, is astonishing. The film – completely lacking in sentimentality – could end after four minutes and we would already know everything about this character. Figures like Tarkovsky have made some striking films, but he is, I fear, too much the darling of French intellectuals, something I suspect he worked towards. I also like the aesthetic and political cinema of Cuba, especially Humberto Solás’s Lucía, and always felt that the Cine Nõvo movement in Brazil, with directors like Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Ruy Guerra and Glauber Rocha, was important. I knew Rocha slightly and spent a few weeks with him in California in the early seventies. We were both staying at the home of Tom Luddy, the co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival, where he would knock on my bedroom door at three in the morning and rave about some wild idea of his.
I have rarely seen films of such power as those of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, which have left an indelible mark on me. In Where Is the Friend’s Home? a boy has mistakenly taken home with him the exercise book of the lad who sits next to him in class, and does everything he can to return it. He knows the teacher has threatened to throw this other boy out of school for failing to do his homework. The boy has domestic chores to do – like buying bread and keeping an eye on the baby – but in breach of the iron discipline he lives under he runs off and disappears over the hill in search of his classmate. It’s a heartbreaking and arrestingly simple film, though you immediately sense that Kiarostami’s films are rooted in five thousand years of Persian poetry. Take a taxi from the airport into Tehran, and the driver will likely recite Khayyám, Firdusi and Hafez to you. There is a scene in Kiarostami’s Close-up – one of the best films ever made about filmmaking – where all of a sudden the narrative stops for a few seconds as we watch a spray can roll down a hill until it comes to a stop. It’s audacious stuff.
Then there are essential films, things like kung fu, the car chases and smashes of Mad Max, a good porno – more watchable than a pretentious, artsy-fartsy film – and the ingeniousness of Russ Meyer, who captured the vilest and basest instincts of our collective dreams on celluloid. “Movie” movies, so to speak. Fred Astaire might have had the most insipid face, but his dancing is the purest in all of cinema. Buster Keaton was a true acrobat and one of my witnesses when I say that some of the best filmmakers have been athletes; he moves my heart more than anyone of the silent era. The message of all these films comes from how the moving image itself exists on the screen. I love this kind of cinema because it doesn’t have the falseness and phoniness of films that try so hard to pass on a heavy idea t
o the audience, and has nothing to do with the fake emotions of most Hollywood product. Astaire’s emotions were always wonderfully stylised, and compared to a good kung-fu film someone like Jean-Luc Godard is intellectual counterfeit money. Anyone who claims that cinema is “truth twenty-four times a second” hasn’t an ounce of brain. He isn’t even French, but tries to out-French the French.
Animation.
Sometimes at a festival, after five bad films in a row, an audience will rhythmically chant for Woody Woodpecker. At such dire moments I might encourage this kind of behaviour, though I’m not much into animation.
Are you an artist?
Never. All I’ve ever wanted to be is a foot soldier of cinema. My films aren’t art. In fact, I’m ambivalent about the very concept of “the artist.” It just doesn’t feel right to me. King Farouk of Egypt, in exile and completely obese, wolfing down one leg of lamb after another, said something beautiful: “There are no kings left in the world any more, with the exception of four: the King of Hearts, the King of Diamonds, the King of Spades and the King of Clubs.” Just as the notion of royalty is meaningless today, the concept of being an artist is also somehow outdated. There is only one place left where you find such people: the circus, with its trapeze artists, jugglers, even hunger artists. Equally suspicious to me is the concept of “genius,” which has no place in contemporary society. It belongs to centuries gone by, the eras of pistol duels at dawn and damsels in distress fainting onto chaises longues.
What are your films, if not art?
Poetry. I’m a craftsman, and feel closest to the late-mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously – like the master who created the Köln triptych – and never considered themselves artists. To remain anonymous behind what you have created means the work has a stronger life of its own, though today, in our increasingly connected world, it’s an illusion to think you can remain hidden. Along with their apprentices, artisans had a genuine understanding of and feeling for the physical materials they worked with. Every sculptor before Michelangelo considered himself a stonemason; no one thought of himself as an artist until maybe the late fifteenth century. Before that they were master craftsmen with apprentices who produced work on commission for popes or Burgermeisters. Once, after snow had fallen in Florence, a particularly idiotic member of the Medici family asked Michelangelo to build a snowman in the courtyard of the family villa. He had no qualms about stepping outside, without a word, and completing this task. I like this attitude of absolute defiance.
Any thoughts about film festivals?
The financial strictures under which most directors work mean a film isn’t alive unless an audience sees it, and these days one of the only places many films are shown is at a film festival. But be cautious about which ones you submit your work to; there is no wisdom behind the criteria that decide which films are accepted and which win prizes. People always look upon festivals as if they were proof of a film’s quality, but both Aguirre and Nosferatu were rejected by the competition at Cannes. Many filmmakers have a healthy mistrust of the incestuous festival circuit. I was head of the Berlin Film Festival jury one year, which only confirmed my belief that judging films isn’t quite kosher. Out of the twenty films up for awards, fifteen were garbage. Festivals have become self-serving entities, too structured around cliques and – even worse – prizes, which have never had any importance for me, aside from the fact that they are sometimes accompanied by money. A film is never better or worse because it has or hasn’t won an award; those things are best left to dog shows and cattle at agricultural fairs. I wonder if a festival will ever have the nerve to announce that not a single film is good enough to qualify for an award.
These days I find the culture of festivals irritating, especially when some young filmmaker buttonholes me and puts on a show about how exceptional they and their work are. At Sundance one year, in the middle of a conversation, the young woman I was talking to pulled out her cellphone to take a call while introducing me to her business manager and agent. I had to flee. The startling proliferation of festivals in recent years means there is an ever-growing arena for the mediocre, mundane and undeserving. There are four thousand film festivals out there and in a good year four films worth seeing. The imbalance is stunning; it’s a vicious discrepancy. Don’t trust in festivals and agents or reviewers, only in your own abilities. Be wary of praise offered on someone else’s terms.
Even back in 1968, the first time I was at the Berlin Film Festival with one of my films, I found it ossified and suffocating. I felt the festival should be opened up to everyone and screen work in other cinemas around the city, so I took the initiative, got hold of some prints by young filmmakers and rented a cinema for a few days in Neukölln, a working-class suburb of Berlin, which at the time was populated largely by immigrants and students. The free screenings at this parallel venue were a big success and generated intense discussions between audiences and filmmakers, which were exciting to witness. The whole thing was my rebellious moment against the Establishment, which I saw as being unnecessarily exclusive. I told the festival organisers they needed to have more free screenings and open the festival up to the wider public, which shortly afterwards they did. Having said all that, I can’t deny that some festivals – like Venice and Cannes – are important platforms, where it’s possible to present a film on a worldwide stage and thereby overnight generate publicity that might otherwise take months. In the early years I met people at festivals who became lifelong friends. There is usually a good man behind a good film.
Do you ever go to the theatre?
Theatre has been so disappointing for me that I stopped going a long time ago. The few productions I have seen were an affront to the human spirit. I find stage acting – all that yelling and door-banging – completely unbelievable, not credible at all, somehow dead to the world. It pains me to watch the overdramatic forms and fake passion of actors on a stage, and when I watch a film I can immediately tell if an actor hails from the theatre. I always prefer to read plays – especially the work of hard-drinking Irish author Brendan Behan – than see them performed because it means I can create everything in my mind. I did once translate a play into German, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. My sister is a theatre director and wanted to stage the play in Germany, though it’s almost impossible to translate because at times Ondaatje seems to destroy grammar. Carl Hanser Verlag wanted to publish the Ondaatje novel of the same name and, because there was overlap between that text and the stage play, asked me to translate it. I asked Ondaatje what certain things meant, but in some cases even he didn’t know, so like him I invented words. After watching a production of Uncle Vanya, I once thought about directing a play in which the actors would stand with their backs to the audience throughout the entire performance. Let me say it even more drastically: the time of theatre is over; it has exhausted itself. Theatre audiences think and function in a different way to me; you would get me watching WrestleMania before you could drag me into a theatre. I’m much more comfortable with the vulgarity of that crowd. There is more honesty in WrestleMania’s fakery than in traditional theatre.
In 1992 I staged a variety performance at the Hebbel-Theater in Berlin. The composer Mauricio Kagel was celebrating his birthday and decided he wanted to have his music performed, with him conducting and various acts staged in parallel. He asked me to create a series of vaudeville performances – which included Bablu Mallick, the Indian shadow puppeteer – that corresponded to the rhythms and characteristics of the compositions. The following year some of these acts appeared in a show I staged in Vienna called Specialitäten. I brought together a group of phenomenal performers, the best of the best – and many with extraordinary physical agility – like British mime artist Les Bubb, whose signature act is pretending there is a balloon stuck in mid-air that he can’t dislodge by even a single millimetre. I loved what Les did so much that a few years later I cast him in Invincible. Other acts included the Russian comedy magicians
Buba and Buka, ventriloquist André Astor, the young German juggler Oliver Groszer, South African trapeze artists the Ayak Brothers and Borra, “King of Pickpockets.” He pretended to be an usher as the audience entered the auditorium, and then suddenly, in the middle of his act while he was on stage, would say, “Mr Wilson. Yes, you in row N, seat 23. I believe it’s your birthday in three days. How would I know that? Perhaps you should check your wallet.” Mr Wilson would search around and discover that it had been removed from his pocket before the show had even started. “Would you like it back?” Borra would ask. Mr Wilson would walk up on stage, and while he was being handed his wallet, Borra would take Mr Wilson’s wristwatch and necktie. He could steal suspenders, shoes and the glasses from someone’s face without them noticing. The most ingenious performer I have ever worked with.