by Paul Cronin
Had something occurred that had been announced on the radio? Had a war broken out and people taken flight? Was I, walking and without a television set, the only one not in the know? Then it struck me that heavy curtains had been drawn everywhere and indoors, in the houses, all the furniture – tables, chairs, sofas – had been covered up with sheets to protect them against dust, the light and the elements. Then I realised something else. What was lying there motionless under the sheets, without ever a hope of change or liberation, was not the furniture at all, but the people themselves.
The last thing to be done was that a group of ladies resolved at a ripe old age to learn collectively the butcher’s trade. In order to demonstrate that their intentions were serious, they set fire to a moped outside the nearest inn. Schoolchildren walked by, talking in low voices as if something had happened, about which I was the only person to know nothing. A girl was cautiously carrying a plastic cup filled with a Madeira cake. In the dry bark of a pine tree a fishing hook was sticking, together with a neatly coiled-up line, but there is no water to fish in for miles around here. With expert skill, one of the schoolchildren squashed a large beetle underfoot. Somebody was trying out a power saw. Someone else was looking for a station on the radio. One was smoking, one sleeping, one sharpening a scythe. Pine needles are blowing down out of the trees. Even when reflecting upon it, I wasn’t at all clear why a rope should have been stretched in a dramatically tight diagonal between two trees. When a bird abruptly stopped singing, a profound silence struck me like a heavy blow. There it lay totally silent, the country. Germany was holding its breath, for a terribly long while. A black bird fluttered away between the trees, sounding like a badly reproduced sound effect in the cinema, so unreal was it, but this was because the silence was so bottomless. With the most horrific of silences, the whole universe had alighted gently and lethally on Germany. From the border on which I was standing, I looked to my right across the hills, that’s to say on Germany, which seemed to be suffering the silence as in a fit of cramps and painful convulsions. To my left, I listened across the border, longing deeply to be able to hear at least the snorting of invaders or the frenzy of heathen hordes. I could not manage to walk any further; I was rooted to the spot on the line of the border. Yes, there were things there worth recording: the horror of the silence, the heat of the summer in the extensive pine woods, the smell of resin, the dried-out needles. At night, the stars are too many in number. And one could also mention the word “bliss,” the word “yolk,” no-man’s-land, kicking the bucket, ninety-one. Today, the refugees are no more than part of a bill to be paid. A schoolchild who had painted a watch on their wrist with a biro wrenched me from my stupor. And with that, my Germany started to move again too.
*
I then almost reached the North Sea, but fell ill and made my way back from there. This is now the last journal entry. At night the moon ought to have risen, but it did not appear again. The nocturnal earth grew large, gigantic when measured against its usual dimensions. In fear, by the light of my cigarette lighter, I wrote my name on the inside of my wristwatch’s strap. In the dawn light, when the mist slowly lifted, Germany lay there before me as in a haze like an unwritten novel. Right by a fence there lay a torn-open bag of cement. It had been left there heedlessly for a long time in the rain and had now turned into a grey lump of stone with cracks in it. A pig was standing there, sniffing in a baffled manner for a long time at the chunk of cement, and not moving. I raised my eyes. I knew, I had to admit to myself that I couldn’t go on, that I had fallen ill and had to go home. But where was that? To move back, I had to get away from the border, go diagonally through the interior of the country. Looking to the south, I saw Germany lying there, just as a tall woman may lie, beautifully and peacefully, her right leg stretched out, her left slightly bent at the knee, her head and body in a pool of bright-red blood, her face looking up at the sky, eyes wide open. Both her hands were stretched out, palms turned upwards, as if she wanted the whole universe to fall on her like a gentle rain. For the rest of the day, Germany lay there like that, as though the blood had been drained from it. I didn’t go home, I stood guard. So it – Germany, the country – lay there in orderly fashion, its facial features composed, totally at peace, all its inner storms having blown themselves out. Everything nasty and hateful, all the detritus and terrible fear that the universe is filled with, are now at an end as far as Germany is concerned. It lies there before me, its fields ripped open, gazing at the universe above it and only tentatively hoping for its rebirth. Everything has dissolved, producing the most pointless state of affairs imaginable: a void frozen in symmetries. Into the outstretched, upturned hands, into the meadows and fields, into exhausted nature and into the opened eyes there now fell a light rain. Then I saw the blades of grass straighten up as the rain dripped from them. Against my better knowledge, something forced its way inside me. Very carefully, I ran my fingers over it. It felt like a ray of hope.
Translated by David Horrocks
Originally published in Frankfurter Rundschau
22 December 1984
The Minnesota Declaration
Truth and fact in documentary cinema
LESSONS OF DARKNESS
by Werner Herzog
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinéma Vérité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the nightwatchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.” Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinéma Vérité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylisation.
6. Filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.”
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota
30 April 1999
Shooting on the Lam
by Herbert Golder
I. THE LAST NOMADS
My first experience of working with Werner Herzog was on his short film Les Gauloises, about the champion French rugby squad. We drove from Bayreuth to Frankfurt, where Werner wanted to record the cry of hammer throwers at the German National Athletic Championships for the soundtrack of the film. He wasn’t satisfied with the sounds of rugby players that he had originally captured on the playing field. Despite their fierce combat, the roars of the combatants did not express the real inner force of their struggle, their true inner life. He wanted something deeper than the grunting, groaning and panting he had reco
rded, something more like the bellow of a bull, the kind of deep exhalations that mark strenuous athletic competition as a true test of life. He waxed enthusiastically about these rugby players, who were men, he said, like the heroes in Homer. They are much too proud to play for money. They play as a matter of pride. They perform fierce rituals through which they prepare themselves for their matches, exercising and taking meals and drinking large quantities of beer together, like warriors preparing for a battle.
For Les Gauloises, Werner wanted a sound worthy of the men he knew. He was looking for a sound he had once heard that had made a deep and indelible impression on him: the cry of the hammer thrower, the roar emitted by these leonine creatures at the moment they burst out of their wind-up spin and the iron hammer leaves their hands with thousands of pounds of pressure behind it. Later, as the television producers were preparing our passes so we could be on the field close to the competitors, Werner told them that they miss something essential in their coverage of live sports when they omit the vital in- and exhalations of human breathing, which, he said, express the inner spirit and strength of a man. He pronounced their sports coverage sterile and inadequate, that they scanted something fundamental about such competitions: the inner sounds of powerful exertion, struggle and pain that signal athletics as a true test of life.
Before we left for Frankfurt, Werner and I paused in the small parking area to watch a ceremony being performed by an ancient shooting club, men in traditional Bavarian costumes armed with rifles and sporting colourful sashes and assorted badges signifying their various accomplishments. They were honouring a young man who had proven the best marksman. The whole procedure was highly ritualised. Werner – who at the time was directing a production of Wagner’s Lohengrin at Bayreuth – told me I was witnessing something absolutely authentic and indeed very ancient, as such confraternities of marksmen had protected Bavaria for centuries. These ceremonies, he told me, reinforced an ancient code of conduct and values essential to survival. By contrast, he found the whole bourgeois, touristic culture of Bayreuth – the pretentiousness of the aesthetes drawn to the world of opera and the cult-like worship at the shrine of Wagner – suffocating and oppressive. I sensed he felt relieved and liberated to get away. The ancient ceremony somehow augured a rite of passage to something more real.
As we drove off, he insisted we first stop in town and pick up a few essentials. I was, of course, keen to know what Werner Herzog considered essential. First, he needed a part for the exhaust of his van, as it had started making strange noises. After we took care of that, he insisted we make one more stop, at a bookstore. As we entered he asked me pointedly if I had read Büchner’s Lenz – this, he said emphatically, I must read – the short stories of Kleist, the poetry of Hölderlin, the Nibelungenlied, the Icelandic Eddas, the Götterlieder, but more importantly the Heldenlieder, and above all, The Saga of Grettir the Strong. Before I could answer (some I knew, some I didn’t), he pulled several volumes off the shelves (those compact little German Reclam editions), bought them for me, and we were on our way. As we drove off he told me he regretted he had so little time to read, but that when he did it was things like books about lion taming.
It was a grey day, and it started to rain as we drove through the Bavarian countryside, hilly greenswards dotted with villages, with more distant and formidable mountains always in view. Because The Saga of Grettir the Strong did not appear to be in the little volume of Eddas he had purchased for me, Werner told me the story, one of his favourites. Set in the eleventh century, Grettir’s story is that of an Icelandic strongman who lived on into a newly Christianised era, where a rugged individual like him increasingly had no place. He carried on the brave fight against ogres and ghouls and revenants and monsters, even as the rest of the world was on the verge of “enlightenment” and believed its salvation lay in the laws of civil society and faith in Christ. Grettir, of course, knew otherwise. He knew the beast didn’t just go away, it merely assumed other forms. To this day I remember the way Werner told the story, with his particular emphases. More sinned against than sinning, Grettir’s fate was to become an outcast and an outlaw, a man whose strength was so great that his good deeds often backfired on him. He would shake someone’s hand and rip it from his socket. He scratched his father’s back and tore off the skin. He would slap a man on the shoulder and kill him. A man whom no one could control, and who naturally fell afoul of those who endeavoured to do so, they made him an outlaw and hunted him down like some kind of beast. He was forced to live in remote mountains and caves, driven to ever lonelier and more desolate places. Sometimes he even took in bounty hunters, men whom he knew were there to kill him, just to ease his loneliness. Although stronger than any twenty men and afraid of nothing, human or supernatural, Grettir was nonetheless afraid to be alone in the dark, where he was haunted by the eyes of Glam, the most terrible monster he had slain. Living atop the isolated isle of Drang, a rocky crag in a deep fjord opening up into the Northern Sea, he died treacherously, murdered by his enemies. Werner told me that a line in Aguirre – “Long arrows are coming back into fashion,” spoken by one of the doomed Spaniards on Aguirre’s fleet of rafts as he is struck in the chest, just before pitching into the water – is taken from Grettir. Pierced through the stomach by one of Grettir’s enemies, his brother Atli utters the words “Broad spears are the fashion these days” as he dies.
His eye always on the horizon and attuned to the landscape, its contours as well as its inner story – which so often becomes an expression of the inner landscape of the characters in his films – Werner told me about the geological and then early history of the region we were passing through, revealing almost matter-of-factly a vast and impressively detailed knowledge. His best stories had to do with men being outwitted by the terrain, the unending undulation of mountains and valleys, as if lost in their own fever dreams. He regaled me with detailed accounts of battles in antiquity and the Middle Ages that never took place because the two armies, on the march and determined to fight, were simply unable to find one another. In the silence that followed the thoughts settled. The road had been mostly empty of traffic. Then at one point, as if out of nowhere, we found ourselves completely surrounded by a German motorcycle gang. Grizzled, broad-backed, rough-looking men, on big bikes in full biker regalia, rode up alongside us, and then finally passed us on either side. They really did look like ancient Vikings or a lost warrior tribe. Werner lit up. “Look at that,” he said. “The last nomads.”
II. KNEES AND THIGHS
My Best Fiend was made in the immediate aftermath of Wings of Hope, as we were already in Peru, even though no budget for the film had been formalised. We were all free to leave if we wished – Werner would understand and pay anyone’s way home – or to pick up the camera and our gear and head straight back into the jungle from which we’d only just emerged to make another film for which none of the details had yet been worked out and nothing was as yet planned. I remember our pre-production meeting at the hotel in Lima. Werner said there was no money yet and thus no contracts of any kind for anyone, and asked who was in. I think everyone assented. I wrote the following in my journal, which gives, I think, something of the flavour of what it is like heading off into the jungle to make an inspired and serendipitously impromptu film with Werner.
At lunch we discussed our options. Werner drew a map and rehearsed the alternatives. First we go to Cusco then Machu Picchu where the opening sequence of Aguirre was shot. Then we can either backtrack to Lima and fly back to Pucallpa, then south to the city nearest Rio Camisea with an airport. Or, part of the team – Werner, someone, either Peter or Eric to operate camera, and possibly me to do sound – might float by raft from Machu Picchu to Rio Camisea where Fitzcarraldo was shot. We would have to pass through the Pongo. It’s dry season, but this could still be quite dangerous. Plus there would be nothing to eat between Machu Picchu and Rio Camisea. We might find a few scattered huts with Indians cooking bananas, but that’s about it. Once through the
Pongo there is no way back, unless the others have met us by boat coming from the south. We would take only a skeleton crew on the raft because there would be no way to feed the whole group. And we don’t even know if we can find rafts or people to make them on the river below Machu Picchu …
And so it went, along these lines, though we ultimately decided to make our way across the Andes first by train, till the tracks ended, then by van, climbing up through winding passes on cliffedge dirt roads to nearly five thousand metres, level with a great glacier. There were three days of travel before we would even reach the river, to places with virtually no way in and no way out, to small towns of only seven huts, vast mountain meadows stretching across the horizon with grazing llamas and alpacas, and finally down into the Urubamba Valley, where the jungle suddenly thickens and takes over, as if swallowing the mountain, getting tangibly deeper with every minute. From this point travel was entirely by river, just as Werner had described, with massive rocks, cascading waterfalls and the jungle seeming to pour itself in steeply from every side. But all this was quite tame and leisurely compared to what Werner must have been up against when making Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo under the most challenging circumstances. In the bustling port of Pucallpa on the Ucayali, which is an unimaginable sight, with the boundless energy of the whole of Amazon life teeming ubiquitously around it – hundreds of shirtless, muscled, sun-baked men loading and unloading ships, carrying heavy loads, even massive wooden crates, up a steep embankment on their backs with a binding strap gripping their foreheads, women cooking chicken and fish and yucca and bananas standing behind small carts, fishmongers and butchers hawking their bloody wares, merchants at makeshift stalls selling everything from high rubber boots to medicinal barks from deep in the jungle to engine parts and electrical equipment, people lazing and in animated conversation and drinking, life everywhere, men, women, strong-featured with powerful expressive eyes – Werner looked out across the port to the Ucayali and then, pointing to the chaotic bustle of virile, sweating, swearing, pulling, hoisting men, turned to me and said, with a feeling of deep fondness for the place, “Imagine trying to organise this into Fitzcarraldo. This is pretty much how it was and how we lived for three years.”