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

by Paul Cronin

  Is it clear what purpose the paintings serve?

  There are configurations of crouching bison in different caves, so perhaps travelling artists moved from cave to cave. But we don’t even know if they were meant as art; perhaps they were used for target practice. The mysteries of Chauvet will likely linger for ever. We can only take an educated guess by looking at cultures that until recently were living a Stone Age existence, like Australian Aborigines or Kalahari bushmen. Through carbon dating we know that twenty-eight thousand years ago a torch was swiped against the cave wall to rekindle the flame. But when we see an altar-like rock that has a bear skull carefully placed upon it, nobody can definitively explain its meaning. Everything points to a religious ceremony, though it might just have been a child playing with a bear skull. When we see palm prints at different points on the walls, all clearly made by someone with a crooked little finger, we assume it’s the work of the same person.

  Much is known to us because of the modern-day archaeological instruments that we have at our disposal; every grain of sand on the cave floor has been measured with laser mapping. But even so, with no full and definitive answers to our questions about the cave paintings, we’re forced to use our intelligence and capacity for vision. I admire the scientists working inside the cave; they are cautious in their declarations about Chauvet and have no time for spiritual, New Age interpretations. At the same time I appreciate people like Julien Monney, who tells us in the film that scientists are working to present a new understanding of the cave through scientific methods, but adds that their main goal – or at least his main goal – is to formulate stories about what happened in the cave thousands of years ago. Like me, Julien has a tremendous respect for both empirical science and the human imagination, and I was intrigued by him from the start of our conversations, not least because he was a circus performer before he became an archaeologist, someone able to walk parallel paths.

  These aren’t primitive scribblings on the cave walls, like the first attempts of young children. Art emerged fully accomplished, tens of thousands of years ago; Greek, Roman, Renaissance and modern art never got any better. This is the true origin of art, even of the modern human soul, and there is something wonderfully confident about it. At a time when most of Europe was covered with glaciers and ice, when the sea level was three hundred feet lower than it is today, we have on the wall of a cave in France the figurative and symbolic representation of the world. What’s fascinating is the distant cultural echo of several cave images resonating through time, those innate visual conventions stretching from Chauvet until today, many millennia later. The only human representation in the cave is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. We should ask ourselves why Picasso – who at the time had no knowledge of Chauvet – used the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman. Another visual convention that has somehow lived through the ages is the galloping bison on the cave wall. In Norse mythology, Odin’s horse Sleipnir is able to run so fast because it has eight legs, the same number as the Chauvet bison.

  In the film you talk about the “proto-cinematic” elements in the cave.

  There is charcoal evidence that fires burned on the cave floor, but no humans ever lived in the cave, and among the four thousand bones found inside there are no human remains. It means the fires were probably used for illumination, not cooking. There might have been light penetrating into the recesses before the cataclysmic rockslide hermetically sealed the cave for tens of thousands of years, but the paintings start some distance from the entrance, which means people must have stepped in front of a flickering fire to create and then look at the images on the walls. In doing so, their shadows would have become part of those images, and with a fire burning in the middle of the cave the animals on the walls would have appeared to move. All this brought to mind one of my favourite sequences in all of film history: Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadow in Swing Time. Three huge shadows are cast on the white wall behind him and mischievously become independent, dancing without him, before Fred eventually catches up with them. When you guess how the sequence was done, it becomes even more awesome. They must have filmed Fred earlier, created the shadow image, projected it on the wall, then had him dance with the utmost precision to match it. Today this would all be created digitally.

  How did the French feel about a Bavarian making a film inside their cave?

  I did wonder how I could hope to gain access to the cave. After all, the French are rather territorial when it comes to their patrimony. As I see it, the cave belongs to the French, but at the same time to the entire human race. I had the feeling that I – and no one else – should make this film, and was fortunate because when I met with the French minister of culture he insisted on having the first word, and spent ten minutes explaining how much my films meant to him. It turned out that decades before, as a young journalist, he had even interviewed me once for French television, though I had no memory of this. Additional permits were needed from both the regional government where the cave is situated and the council of French scientists involved. What probably won them over was the fire burning within me.

  Once the permits had been issued, I asked if I could see the cave before the shoot and explore the technical possibilities, and two months before we made the film I was allowed inside for one hour. When I got the green light I felt like an impoverished little girl in a fairy tale who wanders out into the cold, starry night, holds open her apron, and stands there as gold coins rain into it. I might be the first person to have gone into the cave who wasn’t strictly a scientist. I went in as a poet, hoping to activate the audience’s imagination. If Cave of Forgotten Dreams were full only of scientific facts, it would be instantly forgettable. My idea was always to step aside and let the art do the talking. Of all my films, Cave of Forgotten Dreams probably comes closest to the definition of a documentary as we are accustomed to using the word. It was my duty to document as clearly as possible the work of people who lived thirty two thousand years ago.

  You filmed in 3D.

  When I saw photos of the cave, it looked as if the walls were flat or maybe gently undulating. Fortunately I made that trip inside before filming because the walls actually have dramatic concave niches, which were skilfully and expressively utilised by the artists for their paintings; for example, a protruding bulge of rock as the neck of a bison. It was instantly clear that the film had to be in 3D, especially because I knew we would be the only filmmakers ever allowed inside. 3D doesn’t really interest me; I hadn’t used it in the sixty films I had already made and have no plans to use it again. But shooting inside the cave in 3D was beyond legitimate. It was imperative. “We should be completely casual with 3D,” I told Peter Zeitlinger, “as if we weren’t trying to impress everyone with its scope.” The intensity of the paintings comes through in the film because of the 3D imagery, and when audiences emerge they rarely speak about having seen a film. They talk instead about having actually been inside the cave.

  From the minute Chauvet was located, the authorities understood the importance of this time capsule and did everything they could to preserve it. Today it’s categorically closed to everyone, with the exception of a few scientists. None of this was a caprice on the part of the French. Scientists went in with great caution because at Lascaux in the Dordogne and Altamira in Spain the tourists’ breath has caused irrevocable damage in the form of mould. I was allowed in the cave for four hours a day, for six days of shooting, with a crew of three people. Every minute counted. No matter what happened, we had to perform. We were permitted to bring only what we could carry in our hands, which meant no heavy equipment and only lights that emitted no heat. We weren’t allowed to step off the two-foot-wide metal walkway, and at times I would hold Peter by his belt so he could lean over as far as possible, with the camera in his outstretched arm, and shoot into a dark corner. There is a fairly high level of gas in the cave at all times – both carbon dioxide and radon – and there
was always a guard with us to measure levels. As if that weren’t enough, 3D cameras are large and clumsy, full of high-precision mechanics, and have to be specifically reconfigured for different shots – close-ups, for example – so we were forced to piece the camera together on this walkway, in semi-darkness and with no technical support from outside, since the doors were always closed behind us to preserve the cave’s atmosphere. We weren’t even allowed to sneeze in there. One time our digital data recorder stopped working the minute we got inside, so we tore our battery belts apart and within fifteen minutes had created a special battery for this machine.

  Some of the scientists told me that when they heard the sound of a beating heart inside the cave, they couldn’t be sure if it was their own they were hearing. Several spoke of feeling eyes upon them, as if they were being observed from the darkest recesses. People ask me if being at Chauvet was like a religious experience. The answer is no; we were too busy being professionals. But once, after everyone else had left, I stood there for a few seconds in the darkness. It was truly awesome.

  Tell me about the crocodiles.

  In the postscript to the film I explain how I stumbled across some mutant albino crocodiles. My voiceover tells us they live a few miles from Chauvet in enormous greenhouses, vast tropical biospheres warmed by coolant water pumped in from a nuclear power plant, one of the largest in France. I avoid explicitly saying they had mutated because of radioactivity, but audiences can draw their own conclusions. I wanted to speculate on how these animals might perceive the world around them and look upon the paintings on the walls at Chauvet if they ever escaped from the greenhouse and made their way inside the cave. The crocs have nothing to do with the rest of the film, but this epilogue wasn’t explicitly for the sake of invention; it has to do with perception, about how our great-great-grandchildren might look back on our present-day civilisation. We obviously bring a different cultural context to Chauvet than that of the people who created the paintings. I’m curious about how we perceive the images on the walls of the cave more than thirty thousand years after they were created, and how they will appear to people a hundred generations from now. Perhaps we’re the albino crocodiles of today. They fit beautifully in the film, even though, had I proposed to a Hollywood studio that I include albino crocodiles in a film about Palaeolithic cave paintings, I would have been escorted from the premises by security guards. I just really wanted to film some crocodiles, though it turns out I got it wrong. Months later someone told me they aren’t crocodiles. Those are actually alligators.

  You re-edited some found footage about Siberian hunters into Happy People …

  While driving in Los Angeles one day I noticed how close I was to a friend’s place. Usually it’s impossible to park outside his house, but that day there was a space, so I knocked on his door. When I walked in, he went to switch off his gigantic plasma screen, but I noticed something that interested me immediately. It turned out to be four one-hour-long films made by Dmitry Vasyukov, a young Russian filmmaker. They were about hunters and professional trappers in the forests of the Siberian taiga. Dmitry had shot his films over a full year, with each segment representing a single season. I found the images quite extraordinary; to my eyes these men looked almost prehistoric. But as a whole the films were too long and the music was poorly done, so I casually mentioned there should be an international version with a new soundtrack and a fresh voiceover, and suggested the film should be no longer than ninety minutes. Dmitry was delighted, and within a few weeks I had edited the material down, written and recorded a commentary, and incorporated Klaus Badelt’s new score. I can’t say much more about the project other than that I love these Russians and their dogs, the way they survive by living off the land in their tiny cabins miles from anywhere. They are truly free and happy people, unencumbered by rules, taxes, government, law, bureaucracy, telephones and radios. Whether making a set of skis or carving a dugout canoe from a tree, these are men equipped only with their expert survival skills and individual values, standards of conduct and rules. They live according to the dignity of nature, and despise commercial hunters who arrive in their territory and over-hunt and over-fish. One of the men in the film got a message to me saying he was worried that audiences would feel pity for him and his colleagues. But these are clearly proud people, and I respect and envy them. My ideal would be to spend a whole year out there, in the solitude of Siberia, a territory one and a half times the size of the continental United States.

  … then made a short film called Ode to the Dawn of Man during the recording of the music for Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

  I was in a seventeenth-century Lutheran church in Haarlem, a few miles outside of Amsterdam, recording the soundtrack with Ernst Reijseger and the Netherlands National Choir, when I suddenly realised the session had to be filmed. I was about to run out and buy a camera when someone handed me a rather unsophisticated single-chip one. There is no narrative, no commentary; it’s just music, plus Ernst describing the new cello he recently had made. I used a seven-minute shot of him from Ode to the Dawn of Man in “Hearsay of the Soul,” my fourteen-minute multi-screen installation first seen at the 2012 Biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York, which features images by Hercules Segers. I was initially reluctant to participate in a contemporary-art event, but it turns out there are a few things in me that go beyond my regular work and that I’m unable to express through cinema or literature alone.

  What made you produce the feature-length Into the Abyss and the eight-part On Death Row, which contain conversations with men and women all of whom have been sentenced to death?

  Into the Abyss could have been the title of several of my films. Walter Steiner, Fini Straubinger, Reinhold Messner, Timothy Treadwell and the men on death row are somehow all part of the same family. They belong together. Wherever I look I seem to be peering into a dizzying, dark abyss, whether that of the human condition or, as with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the recesses of human prehistory. By doing so, I’ve always tried to give audiences short flickering moments of illumination, some kind of understanding of who we are. When James Barnes tells us in On Death Row that he dreams about washing the filth from his body and spends most of the time wishing for things he doesn’t have – like swimming in the ocean on a hot day and the sensation of rain on his face – we learn something about human beings everywhere. When Hank Skinner describes the ecstasy of a washing machine because for seventeen years he has washed his clothes in a sink, leaving both his little fingers permanently crooked, and when Blaine Milam talks of how he was caught fermenting prunes in his cell to make what he calls wine, we learn something about ourselves.

  What interested you about the crime you detail in Into the Abyss?

  The murderer Jason Burkett might be intimidating, but he never frightened me. However, I have met some dangerous people in dangerous situations, and though he looks like a pleasant, friendly young man, even a lost kid, no one – according to my instincts – was as deadly as the other perpetrator, Michael Perry. He’s the last person I would want to meet at night under murky circumstances. When Perry and Burkett knocked at the door of their friend’s mother, they had no plan beyond stealing her car and taking off. Then they realised she was alone, baking cookies, and Perry spontaneously decided it would be easier to kill her. They dumped the body in a pond before discovering they couldn’t get the car beyond the gates of this private residential community, so waited until the woman’s son returned home, lured him and his friend into nearby woods, shot both teenagers and used the electronic key to escape with the car, which was in their possession for only seventy-two hours. The fact that they ended up on death row is irrelevant, because even if both men had gotten away with life in prison, I would still have been intrigued by their crimes.

  The story of Into the Abyss was so incomprehensible that I knew it was the basis of a full-length film, not just an hour-long television programme. The utter nihilism of this triple homicide, with all its ramifications and resulting emptine
ss and pain, was so staggering that it caught my eye. A bank robber shooting a teller for cash is within the boundaries of comprehension, but the facts of this case were mind-boggling, and I felt there was an epic film to be made, the story of a group of people – perpetrators and victims – that touched on the deepest, darkest recesses of what lies inside us all. The killings were the epicentre, after which came numerous aftershocks that caused profound damage to many people in the community. The programmes I made as On Death Row are different from Into the Abyss in that they focus on individual perpetrators rather than a complex crime involving two perpetrators, three murder victims and four crime scenes. With Into the Abyss, my interest spread to the chaplain, the former captain of the tie-down team, whose job it was to strap down the inmates for execution, and the victims’ families. I quickly realised an entire tapestry could be woven around these senseless murders. Who are the perpetrators and the survivors? Who were the victims? What were the responses of the homicide detectives and lawyers? What did the crime scenes look like? How did the families react? When I started to investigate, all kinds of people on the periphery of the story edged towards the centre, and it became clear this was an American gothic tale of major proportions.