Every Night the Trees Disappear

by Alan Greenberg

  “The situation in the shooting—and I don’t want to minimize this—will be primarily an experimental one, even if we make some preparatory experiments for the sake of security.”

  His tone darkened. He wanted to be understood. “The film is meant to convey an atmosphere of hallucination, of prophecy, of the visionary, and of collective madness, which coalesces toward the end. Hypnosis is actually an ordinary phenomenon, but it’s surrounded by an aura of mystery because science hasn’t furnished us with sufficient explanations for it. Hypnosis is practicable, similar to, let’s say, acupuncture, but we don’t know enough about the physiological dynamics of the brain involved in both phenomena.

  “Hypnosis has nothing to do with demoniacal power that’s given to the hypnotist—even if the hypnotists at county fairs would have us believe that—but, rather, it deals generally with self-hypnosis, which hypnotists aid by way of mind fixations and speech rituals. One can only get out of the person what has earlier been programmed into him. It’s true that we can observe astounding physical achievements, but such achievements would be possible also with extreme mobilization of the will, with no hypnosis. Beyond that, nothing is possible.

  “We have, for instance, suggested to several persons under hypnosis that they were uncommonly endowed actors and that they would recite a memorized text in brilliant dramatic fashion. The result in all cases was amateurism.

  “During our tests up to now, we noted the following fundamental conditions: well-hypnotizable people remain in their hypnotic sleep even with their eyes open. They can orient themselves in the room. They can establish contact with other people who are also under hypnosis . This often gives a very strange and unreal effect. Under hypnosis, they are able to perform scenes and recollect dialogue that have been memorized beforehand. They can feel a nonexistent heat so intensely that they break into a sweat. One hypnotized person can talk to an imaginary second person, and two hypnotized persons can talk to an imaginary third person. The timing of movements and speech is often very peculiar.

  “Are you getting all this?”

  I nodded and showed him my notes.

  “Good. We are within a historical context here. You, too, will be held accountable.”

  He had more to say. “Hypnotized people can sing and play musical instruments. You could also think of an entire orchestra with imaginary instruments. What’s more, it’s an established fact that a film can be shot with hypnotized people; they don’t wake up because of lights or reflectors or because of the activity around them. Afterward there’s generally a vague remembrance of the happenings under hypnosis, much like people can more or less remember the dreams of the night.

  “So, then, what is all of this good for? There is the groping for new images—windmills in Signs of Life, dream visions in Kaspar Hauser, living mirages in Fata Morgana—and the groping for new knowledge about ourselves. This attempt to make inner states transparent from a definite perspective is realized in a kind of nightmarish horror vision in Even Dwarfs Started Small—there, the dwarves are an essence, a concentrated form of that which constitutes man—in ecstatic states, like in The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner; and in the state of nonparticipation in social activity, such as children born deaf, dumb, and blind in Land of Silence and Darkness and an orphan who had to live in a stable for years—Bruno S. as Kaspar Hauser—in Every Man for Himself and God Against All.

  “It must be mentioned that in all instances none of the people in these films is deformed, not even the dwarves. It’s the objects that are monstrous—the forms of suppression, the education models, the table manners. In none of the persons is the identity maimed—they merely present themselves on a stylized level. Thus it should also be in this new film: the identities must not be touched. I do not deform; I stylize for the sake of a new perspective.”

  Seventy people had seated themselves in the back room of the restaurant. They had all volunteered for the session, having answered the classified ad that had said nothing but the barest minimum: that a hypnosis experiment would be held for the purpose of selecting actors to partake in the making of a film. Herzog’s name had not been given.

  A broad spectrum of personality types was present. There were old and young people, students and retirees, Bavarians, Hessians, Saxons, and Semites. A tall, gangly guy with straight hair, a straight nose, and dull eyes. A soft young woman seated solemnly like a Perugian Madonna in her long skirt, muslin blouse, and white shawl. A middle-aged man wearing oversized spectacles who looked like an eighteenth-century relic with beady eyes, a long gaunt face, a honed nose, and a shock of hair that flopped back like a failed pompadour. Another anachronism: an angelic student from Cologne, a handsome youth with a princely, round forehead crowned by a netting of golden hair. And, in the front, seated beneath Herzog, a dark, fleshy woman, probably Italian, her eyes seductive, her lips more so; her breasts ample and flaunted, her figure voluptuous. She was a movie actress looking for a job.

  The presiding hypnotist’s name was Thorwald Dethlessen. He stepped forward and requested silence and attention. Then he lifted his hand, and he told everyone that they were feeling very relaxed, as if afloat on a cloud, and that everything was like the sweetest dream. The hypnotist sounded a rhythmic chant, the words pulsing in subtle and repetitive rhyme, similar to old, orthodox religious practices or to the proper pronouncement of poems.

  Dethlessen nodded toward Herzog that the hypnosis had taken hold. At this time, the filmmaker ordered the entranced subjects to look into each other’s eyes and gaze over the landscape that they would find there. He asked that they tell him what they were seeing.

  The Madonna spoke first. “I see a most lovely forest,” she whispered, “with every sort of plant and tree and every type of bird that ever flew, and every day the trees change their places, so the forest is never the same. And every night the trees disappear altogether, and only the sleeping birds remain. And the sleeping birds are protected by the most wonderful animals, which prowl all around and are incredibly kind.” She smiled, only to smile.

  The young man from Cologne was next. “I see a large valley. It is scooped, with a big river rushing through the bottom. And the edges of this valley are connected by a graceful bridge, a bridge that can raise and lower itself according to need, such as when the fog rolls in and hovers low and people try to cross the valley to the other side, or when a rainbow darkens some of the sky.”

  When the gangly dullard was approached for his vision, he sought to respond, then paused. After several long minutes of silence, it became clear that he had nothing to say. Herzog asked him to raise his arm, telling him it was weightless and capable of hovering in the air. Promptly the subject’s arm ascended and hung by his ear.

  The hypnotist stepped forward and resumed his chant in order to reinforce the spell. Of all the people attending to his suggestions, approximately two-thirds were hypnotized. The chant proceeded in an easy, rolling cadence, with persuasive rhythms that scattered, then gathered, gaining a positive momentum. The tones of the words he uttered were basically dependent upon the hard a sound and the hard e sound, alternating with a rolled r and a guttural ooo.

  When the lights were put out, the subjects were told that the film about to be shown was unlike anything they had seen before. It would be an exquisite, magical vision of life, with music rare and sublime. A projector sputtered, and Herzog’s Fata Morgana appeared on the screen. First, the static opening shot of a monstrous airliner landing in slow motion on a distant runway, seen telescopically through gaseous vapors, with a vigilant wren perched on a fence in the foreground. Again and again, the same image replayed; over and over the airliner slowly, and mesmerically, descended. Then the desert: a long tracking shot across the most sensual sand dunes imaginable. A Mozart mass swelled up. In the first row, a housewife gasped in awe, her hands clasped to her breast. Behind her a young man from Lebanon strained wide-eyed, leaning forward, leaning some more, trying to get inside the image.

  For the fi
nal exercise, Herzog assumed the role of hypnotist. He assured the subjects that they felt very, very well, then asked them to propose whatever invention they could possibly imagine. Herzog grabbed me and pointed to the guy with the pompadour, who was on the floor, his hands outstretched an inch above its surface. He spoke with absolute wonder.

  “I have invented a marvelous device that can utilize the infinite tension between our bodies and the earth,” he revealed.

  Herzog muttered that this man once studied to become a priest but now attended drama school. At last he rose from the floor and glared at his hypnotist, his thin lips twisted into a hideous smirk.

  Herzog brought his subjects out of their spell. They grinned self-consciously, stretched their arms, and rubbed their eyes. Then they gave their names and phone numbers and left. The last person in the room was the Italian movie actress, her face wet with tears and smeared with mascara.

  “I am so sad,” she moaned in a breathy whisper. “My life is so sad, so sad. I do not want to live this way.”

  Walking to a nearby café for a beer, Herzog was uplifted by the hypnosis session. He declared that now he was certain that hypnosis would work for him in directing the film. In fact, he had decided to handle the hypnosis procedure throughout the filming itself, without Dr. Dethlessen or any other hypnotist present.

  Then he reflected on his involvement with hypnosis. “It’s an anthropological interest of mine. Under hypnosis, things become more obvious about a person—not due to my power, but to the power of the person. He goes much deeper into his conditioning. As an actor, he doesn’t use his mask.

  “My goal is always to find out more about man himself, and film is my means. According to its nature, film doesn’t have so much to do with reality as it does with our collective dreams—film chronicles our state of mind. The filmmaker’s purpose is to record and guide, as chroniclers did in past centuries. My task involves a kind of alchemy, to get to the very real life, to keep open to signs or signals of life. And what I chronicle is often the conformity that deforms the soul.”

  The subject of Shakespeare’s Hamlet arose. Finishing off a dark brew, Herzog said he knew of an actor who spoke so fast that he could recite the play’s famous soliloquy in eleven seconds. He leaned forward and, with full conviction, asserted that a new version of the play should be done, using an actual troupe of actors in the Midlands who can talk so fast that a staged performance of Hamlet would last less than fifteen minutes. He was serious—it would make a good film, he said.

  While we headed back to the van, in an alleyway a stray dog leaped and lurched violently in the snow. It yelped stridently and bared its teeth, snapping viciously at its foe. But it was unmindful of us, and there was no other animal or human around.

  Driving homeward, Herzog bemoaned the amount of beer he’d consumed, saying that one glass was enough to souse him.

  “I would never try marijuana,” he allowed. “The results would be terrifying.”

  THE SIGN AT THUSIS

  It was April 1, and Herzog was ready to head for Switzerland and the work in Via Mala. There he would shoot the opening images for Heart of Glass, which he said would be the film’s turning point.

  A letter waited in the red box that hung from the iron gate in front of his house. It had been mailed from New York City on the twenty-seventh of March. The plain white envelope contained two slips of paper. The first was a handwritten note that read:

  PLEASE GIVE THE ENCLOSED LETTER TO WERNER HERZOG.

  The second was a facsimile of a message inscribed by the same hand on legal paper. It read:

  HERZOG—

  UPON YOU HAS BEEN PLACED THE ONUS OF SECURING THE TIMELY RELEASE OF BRUNO S., AND OF HOMBRECITO UNTO YOU HAS BEEN GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO REDEEM YOUR PEOPLE, AND HELP RESTORE THEIR LOST GRACE. THERE IS NOT MUCH TIME. THE FAMILIARES OF BRUNO S. ARE GATHERING IN THEIR AQUELLARE, AT THE PRADO DE CABRÓN. THE INCANTATIONS OF OYAMBURU HAVE BEEN COMMENCED, AND GAIDHEAL ANNATHAIR HAS BEEN INVOKED AGAINST NAIMHDEAS.

  Following this were four additional lines of text, penned in an imaginary language or code. The message closed with the inscription NAUJSOIDNEAREPSE. Translated from the backwards Spanish, it read HOPE IN GOD JOHN.

  Herzog was mystified by the message and its sender. Every letter of every word written on the paper had been rendered with a particular care.

  Herzog walked to his white van and jumped in. He folded the message into its envelope and tucked it under the knife inside the glove compartment. After fixing one of the side mirrors, Herzog turned the ignition key to the right, shifted gears, and drove away.

  His destination was Thusis, a small Swiss Alpine town just down the road from the crack in the earth called Via Mala. There, amid rocky cliffs and perilous torrents, Herzog had chosen to begin his film. A faceless place, Thusis was mainly a ski resort and the site of a Swiss infantry training base. The hotel was a cozy one, with a slender black dog prowling around. A likeness of Via Mala was painted on the front wall downstairs. Herzog liked the hotel because of the painting, and he planned to spend his nights there after the daily shooting in Via Mala.

  Before leaving Munich, Herzog had been having some disquieting fears about Thusis. The fears were not so much about the town, in fact, but about a road sign posted on the edge of the town. The sign was blue and said THUSIS. Whenever it entered his mind, the sign would grip him somehow and often shake him into a state of terror. At times he would awake in bed trembling, and he had begun to dread the idea of reaching this sign on the edge of town.

  Hours elapsed; discouraged German settlements drifted by. The engine droned deliriously to the rear as the white van climbed quietly. Twilight jiggled the mountain shadows. Herzog looked outside and saw a yellow house sitting on the bottom of a gray valley.

  As he passed the village of Lustenau, then Buchs, Herzog pictured the sign that said THUSIS and realized he’d be seeing it in no time. The image started to jerk about in his mind, and a violent fright set in. Herzog pressed his eye to the slanting road. He held the wheel firmly; he thought to go back. The panic slipped out of control. The town of Cazis flew by.

  Herzog turned the van over to the roadside shoulder and jumped out. He ran through some witchgrass into a frozen field as the fear continued to swirl like butterflies swarming about his skull. He slowed to a walk. He stopped, then returned to the van. The sign awaited a thousand meters ahead—THUSIS, it said. The butterflies were gone. The awful fear remained.

  One week later, a crowd gathered in the Herzog home, and a dinner of pork and potatoes was served. Present in the cramped kitchen were the film’s two cameramen; the lighting man, Huck; the script girl, Regina; Martje; their four-year-old boy, Burro; and Herzog’s mother, Elizabeth, who handled the cooking. After some time had passed, Herzog sat in a corner by the tape machine and played a very sacred music, Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater. Then he told me what had happened to him near Thusis.

  “What should I do?” he begged of no one. “I don’t think it’s very healthy.”

  The crew members were caught helplessly off guard. In the embarrassed hush, Herzog lowered his head.

  “This will come to a bad end,” he said.

  Everyone finished eating and began to get soft with wine. The sad, majestic music stilled the air. As the cameramen and the lighting man listened to it, they grew self-conscious and started to laugh. Then they left to go dancing at a disco.

  Concerned for Herzog’s wellness, Regina departed moments later. She rushed out the door and stopped by a wall across the way. On the other side of the wall, the sound of someone digging a hole in the ground could be heard. The man began to speak. The vexed woman strained to hear what he was saying, but the voice was low and the words unintelligible. He continued to shovel the dirt as she hurried home.

  The Scenario: A Summary

  The inventor of Ruby glass has died with his secret. After a master glassblower’s unsuccessful effort to produce this magical glass, the owner of the glass factory tries to find th
e secret by scouring old books, but to no avail. Next he sends for the shepherd, Hias, who is known for his prophetic gifts. The factory owner presses Hias for the precious information, but he fails to get it.

  Madness speaks out of the factory owner when he proclaims that he is in possession of the secret. The people willingly believe him, for among the glassblowers, madness is rampant.

  The factory owner determines that the blood of a virgin is essential to the formula for Ruby glass. He stabs his servant girl—Hias’s girl-friend—in a ritual accompanied by music from a harp. As always, he is aided by his aged servant, Adalbert.

  Meanwhile, a euphoric celebration ensues at the inn. Hias is haunted by a vision of the future that breaks out of him. As long as the vision lasts, nothing at all can interrupt it. Although the Fool dances naked on his table, and the glass factory erupts in flames by the hand of the factory owner himself, and the news of his girlfriend’s gruesome murder arrives, Hias’s vision unfolds intact.

  The glassblowers search for a culprit, and they mistake the prediction of evil with its origin. Hias is delivered up to justice.

  BLUES

  The film’s Priest and I were en route to Thusis, where we would join Herzog and the Heart of Glass production team. As the car hummed over the winding road in the heavy German night, commercial filmmaking was on my mind.

  “How can things be taken at face value anymore,” I said to the Priest, “if, with all the duplicitous images around, you can no longer tell what the face really is?”

  “You have a mind like an onion,” the Priest replied. “I’m hungry.”

  We stopped at a roadside café for some food. The Priest began telling me a bit about himself. He was from Brittany, he said, displaying his French passport. I liked the photograph of him in the passport; it showed the Priest with his chin uplifted, eyes withdrawn, and jugular vein exposed. Then the Priest said he was making a documentary film about Herzog, whom he compared to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luis Buñuel as the greatest of directors. His ultimate goal was to direct his own films, and at the moment he was preparing a screenplay, hoping, perhaps, to sell one of its images—something about an old woman by the sea—to Herzog. Then he told me a story.