Every Night the Trees Disappear

by Alan Greenberg

  “Years ago, I was living in London,” he began, “in the worst sort of tenement building. I was on the top floor, and the only other tenants there were two homosexual men living with a dozen cats down below. A grocery store was on the ground floor, and the woman who ran this store was Death. I am sure of it.

  “Since I never had money for food, I didn’t see her very much, but when I did it would mean something bad. One time she stared at me, and I got frightened. As I went back to my flat all the cats were running away, and I later learned that one of the homosexual men had just been murdered. Another time, months later, she looked at me again. I felt scared like before; when I stepped outside this time, the church across the street was burning down.”

  The Priest asked me a question: “Do you know the way you’d like to die?”

  “Peacefully,” I said.

  “Why?” he responded.

  “Because,” I explained, “I believe in Albert Einstein. Life is nothing but bundles of energy; the stronger the bundle, the stronger the life, and then again the afterlife. But a violent death, I think, would really fuck things up. And you?”

  “It’s not my problem,” said the Priest.

  At midnight, we arrived at the hotel in Thusis. We dropped our bags beneath the Via Mala mural in the lobby, then headed for the lounge. There, a few members of the team were warming up with champagne and schnapps. Sitting at a table in the empty room were the tiny boom man, Peter van Anft, and his partner in sound recording, Haymo Henry Heyder; the cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein; the French psychoanalyst, Claude Chiarini; and the Production Manager, Saxer. The newcomers joined in, and in minutes the team was comfortably drunk.

  Saxer was drunkest. I had hardly begun to speak with the psychoanalyst when Saxer suddenly stepped between us.

  “Talk to me,” he ordered. “Tell me something about yourself. I want to know all about you. I don’t even know who you are.”

  As demanded, I told the Production Manager as much as I could—what I did, where I was from, people I liked, the sports I played—

  “Bullshit,” growled Saxer. “Bull-ull-shit. I don’t give a fucking shit about you. Hear? You can go to hell for all I care. What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “A friend asked me to come.”

  “A friend. What friend?”

  “Werner Herzog.”

  “Werner Herzog. I don’t give a shit about Werner Herzog.”

  The psychoanalyst leaned back for an objective perspective of the developing drama as the soused van Anft groped for his blues harp. The Production Manager continued.

  “You fucking Americans—look at you. Christ. Shit. You come here, you walk around, you talk—you’re all full of shit. I cannot stand Y-O-U. So what do you think about that?”

  “You’re an honest man,” I replied, while somehow thirsting for his accusations. At this point, the diminutive boom man burst forth with a startling riff on his harp.

  “Oh yeah, well, you’re a nuisance,” ranted Saxer, as he would until the psychoanalyst carried him upstairs an hour later. “You come here, you hang around for nothing, nobody wants you—nobody wants you here, do you understand? Why don’t you just leave—what do you think about that?”

  Little van Anft sucked in an enormous breath, put the harp to his lips, lowered his eyes, cupped his pudgy paws, put the harp down, and began to harmonize with Saxer.

  “Ah, what is life, man,” the sound man muttered, sadly shaking his head while pensively stroking his blond goatee. “Life is the blues, only the blues. Yeah, oh yeah. So much pain, man, yeah, got it. So much pain. Even in Holland, man—that’s me, I’m Dutch, man—such pain, it’s so beautiful.” He put the harp to his mouth and blew a mournful peal.

  “Fucking asshole Americans,” spat Saxer. “You stupid ass shit Americans—God knows you won’t slay my soul, you frauds. Don’t you think we know—we hate you. We hate you here.”

  “We got the blues in Holland, man. Oh yeah, yeah. Everyone’s got the blues. Even in the United States, man—even in the United States they got the blues. You gotta have the blues, oh yeah—it’s everything, you know, the blues is everything. I tell you it’s the only thing. It’s never gonna stop, it’s never gonna stop—”

  The Scenario

  VIA MALA

  There is a somber fog, which gradually dissolves: now we behold the most dismal abyss of all. The craggy walls decline dramatically, and, down there, the panic of death is crouching. The rocks exhale a wet coldness. At a point where you can discern a piece of the horizon, two old stone bridges arch across the void; they stand at a nearly imperceptible angle against each other. Why there are two bridges remains a mystery.

  In the foreground we notice Hias, sitting heavily on a stone terrace, almost in the pit of the abyss, brooding. We realize that he has been sunken in brooding for hours. Hias is stout and heavy, possessing enormous physical strength, but everything about him seems to be of an introverted nature. His heavily inclined torso rests upon an elbow, which he supports on his knee.

  And now we realize that something is stirring inside him. His hands move slightly, like gestures in an imaginary conversation; his gaze is completely away and adrift in dream. A spell passes over his big, heavy-boned farmer’s face.

  HIAS

  Come over—come!

  He doesn’t turn; throughout the scene he will not turn around. His gaze persists in the imaginary.

  HIAS

  Come down I said!

  To the side, behind him, where the stone-hewn steps of the path lead down into the abyss, down to Hias, four timid farmers appear from behind a rock. As none of them dares to be first, they are shoving themselves along. Their hats are drawn; respectfully they stand two steps behind Hias in a posture of devotion. The farmers are very poor and awkward fellows, and we can guess that they are dressed in their Sunday clothes. Hias, who is conscious of the four behind him, keeps staring straight ahead.

  HIAS

  So, what?

  The farmers shove one man in front, who seems to be their appointed speaker. After some hesitation, it bursts out of him:

  FARMER

  The village lives in fear. Ruepp says he’s seen a Giant. The time of the Giants is coming back.

  A second farmer musters some courage.

  SECOND FARMER

  The Giant breaks the trees and beats our cattle. He tears out our bowels whenever he sees us.

  The stupid young farmer with a sheep’s face steps forward.

  YOUNG FARMER

  He is licking our brains out.

  Hias has listened, motionless, without turning toward the four. He is struck by enlightenment.

  HIAS

  Tell Ruepp that there is no Giant. Next time he should pay attention to the angle of the sun. The sun had set; the Giant was just the shadow of a dwarf.

  The four farmers are overcome by ineffable happiness.

  HIAS

  And I’ll tell you something else. Look up at the bridges. One shall soon be crossed by a liar and the other by a thief.

  At the nauseating height we observe the bridges. Over one of them a spectral figure with a long black billowing cape hastens along, loping like the villain in a play; a breath later, a second one crosses the other bridge, likewise a gloomy figure.

  We see Hias closely as he is overcome by a deep trance. The farmers turn around in dumb happiness, and they withdraw with maniacally hollow and rhythmic steps, as if they were folk dancing.

  HIAS

  If nothing changes, take that as a blessing. But I see something with the glass factory coming on.

  The farmers stop listening. They stomp the rocky ground with their feet.

  Suddenly music swells up, in the same precise rhythm in which the farmers move. The rocks cry out a twofold echo toward the men—yodeling sounds in the damp-chilled chasm.

  The music grows louder. We see the bridges against the sky, and on one of them a procession of farmers moves with ecstatic spasms and with the same dancing st
eps. The flag carried in front swings rhythmically in the air.

  Superimposed across the procession, at the nauseating height and against the dismal sky, we see the opening titles. Then night falls into the abyss.

  THE GLOOM OF GLOOM

  At seven o’clock in the chilled, wet morning, sixteen people came to Via Mala to film the opening sequence for Heart of Glass. They unloaded their gear from the automobiles and climbed over the railing, then began to descend into the abyss. Herzog went first.

  “To me, filmmaking is as much body work as it is mental,” he commented as he took the heavy Arriflex camera down the side of the cliff. “There is nothing more important for me, I think, than fulfilling a task with physical work, with the body, especially to create my films. And this I know is true: a man who is a coward with his body is a coward with his mind as well.”

  I asked him if his filmmaking would change at all with the luxury of a big-budget production.

  “A large amount of money for a film production makes me very suspicious,” he answered. “There is something basically bad about that. These are what you need to make a beautiful film,” he declared, his hands up, palms open.

  So the work commenced. The two sound men lugged the tables and audio equipment to the pit of the gorge. The two costume women carried the bundles of clothing and the boxes of makeup. The script girl managed a crate filled with lens filters, the clapboard, and her notebooks. The lighting man, Huck, struggled with the awkward reflectors. And so forth, down the two hundred steps.

  Meanwhile, Herzog contemplated his burden. He gasped, “I am in love with this camera—it is the real star of the film. Do you know that there are only six others like it anywhere? That is true; the camera is unique. I have insisted that anyone who handles it must use these,” he added, displaying a pair of white surgical gloves.

  Herzog first met the psychoanalyst Claude Chiarini in the African desert, during the filming of Fata Morgana. Claude had come to Africa as a gunner with the French Foreign Legion. He saw action in Algeria, got shot in the stomach, bought a wife in Cameroon, and returned to Paris, taking a position with a psychiatric institute on the outer fringe of the city.

  “It gives me hope that Claude is mixed in with the other ones,” said Herzog, referring to psychoanalysts. He had asked his friend to work on Heart of Glass as a supervisor of the hypnosis procedure and to assist in the event of any difficulties with the actors during or after the spell activity.

  Down in the pit, Claude watched the procession descend. Herzog jumped a railing and rushed to the edge of a precipice. He lifted a huge rock and flung it into the void; seconds later it crashed into the far wall, then splashed into the whirling cataract way below with a thunderous echo that reverberated all around. He found a larger rock and did the same thing. Then he did it again.

  I asked the psychoanalyst for his general impressions.

  “Herzog makes films,” he stated. “He does that the only way he knows how. He turns himself into an instrument—the man disappears. This instrument is what is necessary to run the machine that constructs the film. It is all very plain to see.”

  Now the Production Manager, Saxer, took his turn. Choosing a modest boulder, he somehow managed to haul it to the verge, where he began to totter, causing his burly Hungarian assistant, Joschi, to dash over and grab him. Saxer, annoyed, shook him off and sent the rock crashing into the earth.

  “Looking at it from a more human standpoint,” the psychoanalyst continued, “Herzog is a Bavarian. To him, the making of a film becomes a challenge of strength. He becomes aggressive; but unlike the normal Bavarian, he becomes elegantly aggressive, not stupidly so.

  “You can see the Bavarian traits all over this production. For one thing, they always work in pairs. You see two costume women, two set designers, two cameramen, two soundmen—no more, no less. And in each case, each one is almost identical to his or her mate. But with Herzog himself, he cannot have a mate like the others; an assistant director is impossible for him. He can only be alone. He chooses his isolation. He disappears, but with someone watching.

  “Werner Herzog is a hunter; that is all you need to know. He is a hunter who hunts with his eyes.”

  As the cameraman Jörg conferred with Herzog about the camera placement for the opening shots, Hias and the four farmers came down the steps. The Bavarian stage and film actor Sepp Bierbichler was playing the part of Hias, and he would be the only actor in Heart of Glass to perform without having been hypnotized. Of the four farmers, just one, a quivering reed named Fritz Steinhauer—once known professionally as Françoise Steinhauer—had legitimate acting experience. The other farmers were Helmuth Kossick, the aforementioned man with the failed pompadour and hideous smirk; Ahmad Ibn Ghassem Nadij, the seventeen-year-old Lebanese youth last seen trying to climb into the opening image of Fata Morgana; and Bernhard Schabel, a kindly old man whom Herzog also met at a hypnosis session.

  The camera was placed on a flat rock just above the precipice. Its position was so precise that, except for two instances of experimentation later on, it never had to be moved during the entire sequence of opening shots. For close-ups of the farmers, the actors stepped forward and the lens was changed. To film them across the chasm, the camera rotated on its tripod, leaving the face of Hias, climbing high unto the two bridges hovering distantly, and finally dropping along the cliffs until it found the men standing in a shadowy nook. The director’s topographical instincts were good and saved the production a day’s shooting time.

  Herzog sat Hias down near the precipice, not far from the camera, and gave him his lines. Herzog’s practice is to give the actors their dialogue just prior to filming, not before. As Bierbichler muttered the lines to himself over and over again, Herzog met with the four farmers. He first showed them the prepared dialogue, then advised them that while under hypnosis they would be asked for some spontaneous, improvised remarks. The farmers stood in place facing Hias, nervously whispering to themselves the given lines.

  Herzog faced the quartet and raised his fist. He commenced speaking in a soft, rolling manner, telling the men to relax, to concentrate on his fist and on his words. They were getting sleepy, he said; they were drifting off to a quiet, peaceful rest, and had no one to answer to but Herzog.

  In two minutes, all four farmers were deeply hypnotized. Recognizing this, Herzog gave them their acting directions. He told them that they stood on heavenly ground, but when they opened their eyes they would see a land troubled by terrible Giants. They would be so frightened, he went on, that their lips would twitter and their limbs would shake. But he assured them that no matter how fearsome things might seem, they would be quite safe and well protected and could speak their lines with no trouble whatsoever.

  When the farmers started to tremble, they were ordered to open their eyes. Staring far beyond Herzog and the camera, they looked awestruck, petrified. The costume women removed their cloaks, and soon the frigid morning air made them shiver. Herzog raised the clapboard to begin the scene. The camera was rolling.

  Kossick removed his hat and delivered his lines flawlessly. The old man, Schabel, did likewise, with astounding fervor. Steinhauer, with his body erupting in a great apocalyptic shudder and tears cowering in his eyes, spilled his heart out. But when the camera turned to Ahmad—nothing. He stood there horrified, unable to speak. Cut.

  The actors were assured that all was well, and the camera started rolling once again. Everything proceeded as before. Ahmad remained mute, benumbed. Herzog and Jörg tried again. On the third take, the four actors performed sufficiently well.

  Herzog brought the farmers to their senses and gave them a short rest before the improvisation began. Kossick and Schabel awoke easily, wide smiles gracing their faces, while Steinhauer was speechless but at ease. Ahmad, however, began to faint. Herzog ushered him gently to a flat rock and sat him down. The actor asked for a cigarette and said he was all right. Herzog, satisfied that he was sound, left to attend to business, and I replaced him,
sitting beside the dumbfounded farmer and handing him a cigarette.

  “Jumping Jack Flash, man,” cursed the long-haired Arab. “Jumping Jack Flash—fuck, man, fuck.”

  I leaned over. “You feeling better?”

  “Fucking civil war, man, fucking civil war. Can’t get any hash out of Lebanon, man—goddamn fucking Lebanese.”

  Minutes later, work resumed. Herzog reinstituted the hypnotic spells. The four farmers smiled placidly, then listened to the director inform them of the harrowing circumstances all around. The men reacted exactly as they had earlier, jerking uncontrollably with fear. As the camera started rolling again, they were asked what they were seeing.

  “The Giants!” cried Schabel. “The Giants are attacking! They’re taking the children—stop them! They’re pulling off the tails of our horses! They’re going to kill us all! Stop them! Stop them! There they go! There … they … go,” he concluded.

  Kossick spoke next, his words sounding highly poetic in the original tongue. “The rocks are hovering over our heads,” he warned. “The rocks are gigantic; they collapse and the Giant cannot breathe. He is choking—the cliffs are tumbling—”

  “The Giant is insane,” muttered Ahmad. “He has eyes like millstones and hands like the branches of a tree. His nose is a boulder—”

  Steinhauer’s vision was summoned. Shivering mightily, he couldn’t get the words out for several minutes.