by Paul Cronin
The final scene of Echoes from a Sombre Empire is set in a decrepit zoo, where we were searching for the lions that had lived in Bokassa’s court. When someone was sentenced to death they were often thrown either to the lions or crocodiles. By the time we got there, almost every animal in the zoo had starved to death; we found only a leopard, a hyena and – the saddest thing I have ever seen – a chimpanzee addicted to cigarettes, thanks to the drunken soldiers who had taught it to smoke. In the film you see Goldsmith looking at this creature. He says something like, “I can’t take this any longer,” then asks me to turn off the camera. “Michael, I think this is one of the shots I should hold,” I answer back from behind the camera. “Only if you promise this will be the last shot in the film,” he says. The nicotine-addicted animal was real, but this dialogue and my use of the animal was a scripted invention. The scene – which we shot six times – was carefully planned. There was something momentous and mysterious about the chimp, and filming it in the way I did elevates Echoes from a Sombre Empire to a deeper level of truth. To call the film a documentary is like saying Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans is a document about tomato soup.
The opening quote at the start of Lessons of Darkness is from Blaise Pascal: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like Creation – in grandiose splendour.” This may sound like Pascal, but it was invented by me. Even some scholars don’t know the quote is a fake, but I would rather see people dig around and read Pascal than ask me where I found these lines. I tell everyone it comes from an obscure essay published in a journal of the period which has never been included in his complete works. This means they keep searching, which is good news for me. I have a joy of invention, and this Pascalian pseudo-quote helps elevate audiences to a higher, almost sublime level before they have even seen the first image of the film. We’re immediately in the realm of poetry, which inevitably strikes a more profound chord than mere reportage. Audiences have been lifted to a level that prepares them for something momentous; they are instantaneously immersed in the cosmic. Pascal himself couldn’t have said it better. Shakespeare thought the same way: “the truest poetry is the most feigning.” My purpose is never to deceive or mislead. Does Michelangelo deceive us with his Pietà, one of the most beautiful sculptures on God’s wide earth? Jesus is correctly portrayed as a thirty-three-year-old man, but his mother is sculpted as a girl of seventeen. In this context my Pascal invention is legitimate. Following the quote, Lessons of Darkness continues with a voiceover that speaks of “A planet in our solar system with wide mountain ranges enshrouded in mist.” What I actually filmed were little heaps of dust and soil created by trucks as they drove through the desert. Those mountain ranges were no more than a foot high. Like many things in my films this isn’t a lie, just an intensified form of truth.
You made Lessons of Darkness soon after the end of the Gulf War.
The world had been saturated night and day with images of the burning oil wells in Kuwait, but through the filter of television news. I remember watching those broadcasts and knowing I was witnessing a momentous event that had to be recorded, but in a unique way for the memory of mankind. The networks and cable channels had filmed it all wrong; that tabloid style of reporting, with its eight-second snippets, quickly inured audiences to the horrors, and all too soon everyone had forgotten about those spectacular fields of serene, pitch-black burning oil that covered the landscape. I was seeking images of another kind, something very different, something longer lasting. I wanted to see these shots play out in long, almost endless takes. Only then could the images reveal their true power.
The stylisation of horror in Lessons of Darkness means the images penetrate deeper than regular television news footage ever could, something that bothered audiences in Germany. When the film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival, nearly two thousand people rose up with a single voice in an angry roar. They accused me of “aestheticising” the horror, and so hated the film that when I walked down the aisle after the screening, people spat at me. I was told that Lessons of Darkness was dangerously authoritarian, and so – finding all this hostility rather invigorating – I decided to be authoritarian at my very best. I stood before them and said, “Mr Dante did the same in his inferno, and Mr Goya did it in his paintings. Brueghel and Bosch too. You cretins are all wrong.” You should have heard the tornado of disgust. The German press found the film to be a dangerous attack on everyone’s decency, though it received tremendous reviews around the world. After all, I’m hardly the first filmmaker to show this kind of stylisation on screen. Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, with its beautifully blossoming atomic explosions, is one of the most painful films I have ever seen. Sitting here twenty years later I would dare an assumption: if I showed Lessons of Darkness to audiences at the Berlin Film Festival today, they would like it.
There were criticisms about you not identifying Kuwait.
There was never a need to name Saddam Hussein and the country he attacked. If people watch Lessons of Darkness in three hundred years’ time, it still wouldn’t be necessary for them to know the historical facts behind the film. War has no fascination for me beyond its absurdity and insanity, and Lessons of Darkness consciously transcends the topical and the particular; this could be any war and any country. The film is about the evil that human beings are capable of, which is why it will never age. It is precisely because Iraq and Kuwait aren’t named that humanity will always respond to these sounds and images.
I located the people I filmed through various organisations that were working with torture victims, and specifically set out to find individuals who had lost the power of speech after being tortured. There’s an imbalance to the film because I wanted to speak with more of these victims, but the Kuwaiti authorities were constantly scrutinising what I was doing and eventually expelled me from the country. From the start they hoped I would make a film that showed the positive, optimistic reconstruction of the country, with the cleaning up of the oil wells and an apparently heroic fresh start. What the Kuwaitis wanted to portray on film and broadcast to the rest of the world consisted only of heroic firefighters and rescuers, not the scarred victims. They objected to me going into the deepest wounds the war had inflicted on some people, and one afternoon I was handed a letter by the Ministry of Information stating very plainly that we were being wished a pleasant flight out of the country early the next morning. It was obviously an expulsion order. If I had insisted on continuing filming, they would have confiscated my footage, so I wrapped things up and left.
You show both the landscape from afar and the firefighters on the ground.
Lessons of Darkness belongs as much to British cameraman and co-producer Paul Berriff as me. There was the danger of two cooks preparing one meal, but Paul is a man of such calibre that our collaboration worked very well; ultimately I owe the film to him. I knew after watching CNN that I wanted to go to Kuwait, and found Paul by searching for someone – anyone – with a shooting permit. The massive oil fires were being extinguished unexpectedly fast, so I had to hurry. I met Paul in a hotel in Vienna. It turned out that although he had all the required paperwork, he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to film. We talked for only twenty minutes before I said, “Do you have the nerve to step back as director of this film and be just the cameraman?” Paul stood up and bowed. “It would be an honour,” he said. A courageous man, very physical, dogged in everything he does. He had already made several daring films about people such as sea rescuers, who pluck drowning people from the North Sea as they dangle down on a cable from a helicopter, and throughout the seventies shot several films for the BBC about the unrest in Northern Ireland. Paul himself has risked his life to save people in trouble and has received numerous awards for bravery.
A skilled helicopter pilot was imperative, and fortunately Paul had already contacted Jerry Grayson, an expert pilot who had worked on several Hollywood films. He understood the terrain and airflows around the burning oil wells, and was able to establish a pattern o
f flight that facilitated a sequence of travelling shots. I was lucky he had a true narrative intelligence and knew intuitively where to move next in terms of the story being told. I was never in the helicopter; the footage was shot two days before I arrived in the country. The cameraman, Simon Werry, is an expert aerial photographer who knew I wanted as many unbroken travelling shots of the landscape as possible. I would never have been able to direct every one of the shots even if I had been up there, where temperatures reached over a thousand degrees. If Jerry had flown across an area into which the heat might be suddenly blown, the helicopter would have exploded. When flying over the burning oil fields he had to make his own choices for safety reasons, and did an outstanding job in allowing Simon to hold the shots for as long as he possibly could.
I was initially advised to make a film about Red Adair and his efforts to put out the fires, but his working methods involved the heaviest imaginable machinery and every precaution in the book. He was extremely meticulous, cowardly and overly bureaucratic; he wanted the most expensive, state-of-the-art equipment put in place, which would have taken months, and predicted it would take four or five years to put out the fires, which it would have done if Adair had gone about things his own way. Very few people in Kuwait were actually in favour of how he was doing things. The job was eventually done within about six months, though the crews working on the ground were running high risks. The men in the film are, I think, American or Canadian. There were also Iranians, Hungarians and teams from all over the world. The Iranians were the most remarkable because they didn’t have much equipment, so they fought the fires almost with their bare hands, so to speak. Everyone who worked with these men spoke of them with great respect.
One of the reasons my collaboration with Paul worked so well was because of this understanding of hearts we had, something that became obvious when we decided we didn’t want to use long zoom lenses when filming on the ground. If something interested us, we physically moved in together, and wherever possible placed ourselves beside the firefighters. Paul did most of the camerawork himself, and we shot only on film, not video. Sometimes this was a problem because raw stock has to be acclimatised, which meant we couldn’t just unpack the celluloid and expose it in the camera. We had to protect the magazines with aluminium foil and remove the film from the heat as quickly as possible once a roll had been shot. Whenever possible we tried to shoot with the wind from behind, so the heat was blown away from us. We had regular cameras and wore Nomex suits for protection, the kind used by Formula One drivers, which can keep you alive for about half a minute when you’re engulfed in flames. We cut the tips of our flameproof gloves off to operate the camera and were hosed down by firefighters every forty-five seconds; the soles of our shoes would have melted away if we hadn’t been careful. At one point Paul jumped out from behind the barrier where we were taking refuge from the heat because he wanted to film something, and the part of his face not covered by the camera immediately began to redden. I held my two hands over his face for protection, and within ten seconds my thick leather gloves were burning. One of our boom microphones melted away. The sound was actually the most impressive thing; you have to see the film in a cinema with Dolby stereo to really appreciate it. Geysers of fire shooting three hundred feet up into the sky with that kind of pressure sound like four jumbo jets taking off simultaneously. You could scream as loud as you wanted over this noise and still not be heard. There was something cosmic about the experience that went far beyond the politics of the events. It really was like filming on a different planet.
You have described Lessons of Darkness, like Fata Morgana, as a science-fiction film.
Calling Lessons of Darkness a science-fiction film is a way of explaining that it contains not a single frame recognisable as our planet, yet we know it must have been shot here. I used the voiceover to place the film – and the audience – in a darkened planet somewhere in our solar system.
When we talked about Fata Morgana, I spoke of embarrassed landscapes. The landscape you see in Lessons of Darkness isn’t just embarrassed, it’s completely mutilated. I set out to record crimes perpetrated against not just humanity, but Creation itself. Our entire world seems to be burning away, and because of the music I call the film “a requiem for an uninhabitable planet.” Unlike La Soufrière – which tries to document a natural catastrophe – Lessons of Darkness shows a landscape that has been mutilated by a man-made one. The film plays out as if aliens have landed on an unnamed planet and are observing the world around them. There is a line I speak in the voiceover when one of the firefighters makes a signal: “The first creature we encountered tried to communicate something to us.” This idea becomes more explicit with the shot of the firefighter lighting up a plume of gushing oil. The voiceover explains that these men have been seized by madness and are reigniting the flames because they can’t imagine life without fire; having something to extinguish makes them happy again. In reality, the gush of oil had created a lake that was approaching other burning fires. If it had ignited, there would have been an even bigger problem, so there was a practical reason for the lighting of this plume. I asked the firefighters to let us know when they were going to take action so we could be there with a camera.
How did you select the music?
It fell into place very easily. During editing I watched the film and put on a piece of music, and knew within fifteen seconds if it fit. I didn’t need more than two or three attempts for each sequence of the film. The title of Lessons of Darkness comes from a piece of music by François Couperin, Leçons de ténèbres, which was one of my earliest musical discoveries. In Fata Morgana there is a beautiful early recording of the piece performed by Hugues Cuénod, a Swiss tenor. I immediately had the feeling it should be the title of this film.
Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia features an array of characters from Siberia.
I engaged some Russian collaborators and asked them to scour the land for the most impressive Jesus Christ they could find; there were about a hundred of them roaming Siberia at the time, competing with each other. Eventually they came up with Vissarion, an ex-policeman who one day realised he was, in fact, Jesus. He lived an ascetic life in a tiny apartment in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and actually had an agent in Moscow, but this didn’t bother me because I had the feeling there was real depth to him. The faith healer in the film, Alan Chumack, used to be a well-known media figure on Russian television who would re-enact alien abductions. One day, after discovering he was wildly popular with audiences, Chumack decided he had psychic powers himself.
My favourite character in the film is Yuri Yurevitch Yurieff, the orphaned bell ringer who used to be a cinema projectionist. I flew out of the country the day after we filmed him tolling the bells. It was only months later, while I was editing, that the cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein said, “After you left we had dinner with Yuri and he told us his life story. He’s an orphan and went in search of his lost family.” I rushed back to Russia, brushed the snow away from the church tower, put Yuri in the same costume, framed the camera so we couldn’t see the frozen landscape, and asked him to tell us his story. He spoke about his search for his parents, a story that mirrors the tragedy of Russia, with the Stalinist repressions and Hitler’s invasion, when so many people died or disappeared. When he was found as a child and asked for his name – first, middle and family – all he would say was “Yuri.” For me the man is a true musician; the way he strung up the ropes in the tower is incredible and the sound he gets from tolling the bells has real depth to it. My plan was to start the film at a monastery with a single monk playing a single bell, then show bigger and bigger bell-ringing orgies throughout. Yuri would have been somewhere in the middle. I also spent time looking for a hermit. Advertising for such people probably isn’t the most useful way of going about things, but I did eventually find one. He wasn’t actually a textbook hermit, just a convicted murderer who had built himself a small monastery within a prison compound near St Peter
sburg, next to the football pitch, where he lived a monastic life. I looked hard for a genuine hermit and had so many knowledgeable people engaged in the search that I can’t imagine there are any left. Very few anyway, and well hidden at that.
Do you speak Russian?
I understand some words and more or less the subject of a conversation. The key to Bells from the Deep was Viktor Danilov, an interpreter I met during the shooting of Peter Fleischmann’s Hard to Be a God, in which I played a small role. Viktor helped with the on-camera conversations and always knew in which direction I wanted the encounters with these people to move. Sometimes, when I would sense things were going off topic, he would look at me and signal with his face, as if to say, “Don’t interrupt!” I wouldn’t have made the film without him.
Is anything invented?
It depends on what you mean by “invented.” A woman stands on a hilltop explaining that the locals call it “The Seventh Hill of Jerusalem,” that the hill once opened up and revealed to visiting pilgrims a singing choir and cathedral consecrated to the fourteen thousand children killed in Bethlehem by Herod. Then she crawls on her hands and knees and touches the stump of a pine tree a man once chopped down, after which he immediately went blind and died. “Nobody is allowed to chop trees down on this sacred hill or harm them in any way,” she explains, adding that the stump has miraculous powers and can heal the sick. Then she turns to me and asks if she should crawl around some more. I nodded from behind the camera. There is another old woman in the film – the one with a bandaged hand – who told me about her pig that had escaped from the sty. It went berserk and attacked a cow, so she grabbed a stick and yelled at it, at which point the animal turned on her and bit her hand. What does any of this have to do with “faith and superstition”? It’s like in school, when I would write essays on German literature and apparently totally miss the point. “You were meant to write an essay about Hölderlin,” the teachers would tell me, “but what you wrote is completely off topic.” Today, having left school behind me, I can now take these apparent liberties and include the story of this rabid pig, which obviously has to do with faith and superstition. It’s in the film, after all.