by Paul Cronin
Did you go to the desert with a script for Fata Morgana or was your plan just to document whatever you found?
I never look for stories to tell; instead they assail me, and I knew there was something I needed to film in Africa. To me, those primordial and archetypal desert landscapes, strewn with debris, look completely unreal, as if from another planet; they had fascinated me since my first visit to the continent. But Fata Morgana soon became an extremely difficult ordeal, something that rubbed off on the general feel of Even Dwarfs Started Small, which was made almost immediately afterwards. Although I was cautious in Africa, things always went wrong for me there. I’m not one of those Hemingway Kilimanjaro nostalgia types who tracks animals through the underbrush with an elephant gun while being fanned by natives. Africa is a place that has always left me nervous, a feeling I will probably never be able to shake off due to my experiences there as a young man. What I experienced on the shoot of Fata Morgana was no different.
We shot the film in bursts, starting at the end of 1968, then returned in the middle of 1969 and December of that year, and finally went back the following year during the summer. At no point was there a script; we filmed with no coherent sense of what we might do with the footage once we got home. My original idea was to go to the southern Sahara and shoot a science-fiction story involving aliens and ancient astronauts from the planet Uxmal in the Andromeda Nebula who arrive on Earth with a camera and film the planet and its inhabitants. They want to prepare a report for folks back home, but their spacecraft crashes. In the debris we humans discover their footage and edit the material into a kind of investigative film, a report of a strange, unknown planet, which enables us to see how aliens perceive us and our world.
On the first day of shooting I decided to scrap this idea. The visionary aspects of the desert landscape that had taken hold of me were much more powerful than any ideas I had brought with me, so I junked the story, opened my eyes and ears, and filmed the desert mirages. I asked no questions; I just let it happen. My reactions to what I was seeing around me were like those of an eighteen-month-old baby exploring the world for the first time. The film is like those moments when you are half asleep in the early morning and a series of wild, uncontrollable things flow through your mind. These are rarely orderly thoughts and images, yet they belong to you and have a mysterious coherence to them. It was as if I had woken up after a night of drunkenness and experienced a moment of real clarity. All I had to do was capture what I was seeing and I would have my film. Every night when I slept in the desert, I forgot about what I had shot the previous day. I worked as if in a dream or hallucination, never asking myself questions during the shoot or thinking about how to structure the material I was gathering. I went to sleep in the sand without the faintest idea of what I was going to film the following day. Interestingly, there does remain in Fata Morgana a distant echo of science fiction, with its imagery of the beauty, harmony and horror of a world that is obviously our own, even though it seems like a distant alien planet.
What is a Fata Morgana?
A mirage, one which you can actually film in the desert. You can’t capture hallucinations – which are only in your own mind – on celluloid, but mirages are something different. A mirage is a mirror reflection of an object that exists and that you can see. It’s similar to you taking a photograph of yourself in the bathroom mirror. You aren’t really there in the reflection, but you can still capture the image of yourself on celluloid. The best example is the sequence of the bus on the horizon, which was shot with a long telephoto lens. The vehicle seems to be almost floating on water, and it looks as if the people are gliding alone. We filmed much of Fata Morgana in the afternoon, when the heat – which that day was truly beyond belief – creates a strange hallucinatory quality. We were extremely thirsty and knew some of the buses had supplies of ice and cooled water on board, so immediately after filming we all rushed over there. From a distance the bus looked as if it were no more than a mile away, but we couldn’t find a single trace of anything. No tyre tracks, no tracks at all. There was nothing there, nor had there ever been anything there, and yet we had been able to film it. There must have been a bus somewhere – maybe twenty or a hundred or three hundred miles away – which was visible to us because of the heated strata of air that reflected the image of this vehicle.
The opening sequence was filmed at Munich airport one hot summer’s day and is comprised of eight shots of eight different aeroplanes landing one after the other, starting early in the morning. The hotter the air became, the more the heat shimmered and distorted the images. Eventually something visionary sets in – like fever dreams – and it remains for the rest of the film. The more aeroplanes that land, the stronger the sense of unreality. I had the feeling that audiences who were still watching by the sixth or seventh landing would stay to the end of the film; the opening sequence lays out the challenge of what is to come. The first three minutes allow viewers to acclimatise themselves to Fata Morgana’s unusual tone. They divide the audience into those who walk out, those who fall asleep and those whose eyes remain affixed.
You filmed in the Sahara.
Deserts are mysterious places. The Sahara is so unreal it’s like being in a perpetual dream or on another planet. It isn’t merely a landscape, it’s a way of life. The solitude is the most overwhelming thing; a hushed quality envelops everything. At night the stars are so close that you can harvest them with your outstretched hands. Although we were driving, the spirit of our journey was like one made on foot, something only people who have travelled through the desert can truly understand. My time there was part of an ongoing quest.
There were four of us: me; Hans Dieter Sauer, a mountain climber who had studied geophysics and had already crossed the Sahara several times; photographer Gunther Freyse; and cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. The whole thing started rather unfortunately. On our first day, barely out of Munich, I accidentally banged the hood of one of the cars down on Schmidt-Reitwein’s hand. The bones in one of his fingers were smashed and he needed special steel wire to fix everything in place. We drove down to Marseilles in two cars, which we also slept in because we couldn’t afford hotels, and from there to Africa. Once we reached the desert there were real technical problems. The emulsion on raw stock doesn’t take heat well, and at one point it was more than 120ºF in the shade. During sandstorms it was impossible to keep the cameras totally sealed and free of sand; we spent days cleaning them and finding ways to keep the raw stock cool. You don’t notice how much you sweat in the desert – particularly a salt desert – because it evaporates immediately, so drinking a minimum of eight litres of water is imperative. Freyse was so thirsty he started fantasising about wells and declared he was going to jump, ass first, into the next one we found. Fortunately I checked before he leapt. It was more than two hundred feet deep, and empty.
I looked at various books beforehand and had a vague idea of where I wanted to go. We visited the salt flats of Chott el Djerid, before heading south to the Hoggar mountains in the Algerian desert, then to the Republic of Niger, where we ran straight into a sandstorm that took several days to recover from. By the time we reached the southern Sahara it was the start of the rainy season, and the sudden flash floods became the most serious problem. More people die in the Sahara from flooding than from dehydration. I still remember the thunderstorms and lightning that lit up the sky with such intensity that you could have stood outside, in the middle of the night, and read a newspaper. We planned to arrive during the hottest time of year because that was the best moment to film mirages, so we had no choice but to accept these fierce challenges of nature and particularly difficult conditions. After that we drove to Côte d’Ivoire to film in a lagoon, which is where the procession and chants I used in Even Dwarfs Started Small were shot. I wanted to go back to Uganda to film up in the Ruwenzori mountains – where there is a kind of prehistoric landscape with unusually mysterious and luxurious vegetation ten thousand feet up – but we weren’t able to c
ross Nigeria because of the raging civil war. Eventually we decided to head to the Congo, and ended up travelling to Cameroon by boat, then heading northeast overland.
Almost immediately after arriving in Cameroon, things got completely out of hand. There had been an abortive coup d’état in the country a few weeks before we arrived. All four of us were arrested because Schmidt-Reitwein had the bad luck of having a name similar to that of a German mercenary the authorities were looking for and who had been sentenced to death in absentia. They were convinced they had caught a wanted man, so we were thrown into a narrow cell with no water, food or light and sixty other men. For many it was standing room only, and someone in there was close to death after having been badly beaten. Whenever anyone used the toilet bucket in the corner, everyone would shout and sing obscene songs, but when I sat on the bucket the whole place went dead silent. I fervently prayed for them to make noise. I don’t want to go into details, but we were no longer in control of the situation. Schmidt-Reitwein and I both contracted malaria and bilharzia, a blood parasite. We were unable to contact the German embassy, and when we finally got out, quite ill, there was still a warrant out for us – either on purpose or because the slovenly officials had forgotten to withdraw it – so we were arrested again. We stopped shooting only when we were too sick to continue. On arrival in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, we took an aeroplane back to Germany. We had been in the desert for three months.
Fata Morgana was a difficult film to make, but I learnt how to wrestle something creative from a bad set of circumstances and come up with something clear, transparent and pure. Two months later I was in Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, to start work on Even Dwarfs Started Small, which is where I finished shooting Fata Morgana.
Who are the people in the film?
We stumbled across them, including the woman on the piano and the guy with goggles playing the drums who play some of the saddest music I have ever heard. I gave him the goggles and stuck black paper over them so he couldn’t see anything. We shot that scene in a brothel in Lanzarote during production on Even Dwarfs Started Small; she’s actually the madam and he’s a pimp. He was in charge of discipline and would beat any prostitute who hadn’t pleased her client. In some way the film is about ruined people in ruined places, and that sequence spoke of a terrible sadness and despair. There is one rather strange image in the film which I shot on Lanzarote, amidst its bizarre rock formations, where grapes for Malvasia wine are grown. We encountered a busload of Western tourists, who I asked to climb down into the holes in the ground and go as crazy as they could, flailing about. I think it was in the Republic of Niger where we met the nurse who stands in the puddle with the children, teaching them to say “Blitzkrieg ist Wahnsinn” [“War is madness”]. I found a boy with a pet fennec fox and asked him to hold it up to the camera. I promised he would be well paid if he didn’t move or blink. He stood absolutely still for ten minutes, then walked away.
To this day I find the man who reads the letter he takes from his pocket very moving. He was a German who lived in great poverty in Algeria, a former foreign legionnaire who fought on the side of the French against the Algerian revolutionaries, but at one point during the war he had deserted and switched sides. I liked the attitude of the villagers who took care of him; the Muslim world deals with people like this with great dignity. By the time we met him he had basically lost his mind and was carrying a letter that had been written by his mother probably fifteen years before. You can see it’s in tatters; he had kept it under his shirt all this time. He proudly read the letter to us on camera, but I always felt that he wasn’t actually reading it, just inventing something. I think he had forgotten how to read and write. There is great sadness here; it’s obvious he’ll never get home again. The man wearing goggles with the reptiles was from Switzerland and had clearly been out in the sun too long. He owned the little hotel where we stayed during the shooting of Even Dwarfs Started Small; at the time it was the only one on the island, inconceivable now when you see what the place has become after the infection of tourism. Under the cliffs of Bandiagara in Mali we filmed an old man with his medals – probably awarded for his service with the French army – standing next to a boy carrying a radio, then walking slowly towards the camera. He spoke to us in a Dogon dialect. To this day I have never asked anyone to translate it.
The long tracking shot of the sand dunes was done from the roof of our VW van. It took real work because we spent days smoothing out the terrain before we filmed. Vast areas needed to be cleared up – something we did ourselves under incredible heat – because I felt that one six-minute shot would be more interesting than a series of short shots. Schmidt-Reitwein was on the roof of the car with the camera, and I was driving, with one eye on the dunes. It was important to understand how to move with the rhythm and sensuousness of the landscape, so I was constantly slowing down and speeding up. All the strange machinery you see in the film, these absurd and desolate fragments of civilisation simmering under the sun, was part of an abandoned Algerian army depot. We would find things lying in the middle of the desert – a cement mixer or something like that – a thousand miles from the nearest major settlement or town. Was it ancient astronauts who placed these things there? Were they man-made? If so, what purpose could they possibly serve? These are the embarrassed landscapes of our planet, the kinds of images that appear throughout my work, from Fata Morgana to Lessons of Darkness and beyond.
The structure of the film was conceived during editing.
There were no opportunities to look at rushes while we were shooting, and once we finished filming I had no clear idea what had been shot, so the editing of Fata Morgana was a more important process to me than it had been on my work up to that point, though in a strange way the film’s rhythm was still established during shooting. We brought the footage home and ploughed through everything. The film has a three-part structure: “Creation,” “Paradise” and “The Golden Age.” During editing I looked at every shot and said, “This belongs to the first part and this to the last.” Some of the images I organised, some organised themselves.
As I sat watching the footage, I felt that a Mayan text I had stumbled across when living in Mexico – the sacred book of the Quiché Indians, Popol Vuh, one of the most beautiful things I have ever read – corresponded to the images I was looking at. Popol Vuh consists of long passages on the heroic exploits of the first migrations, and I decided to adapt the Creation myths at the beginning of the book for the voiceover of “Creation,” the film’s first third, in which we see a wrecked aeroplane, piles of machinery, empty oil drums, the flames of a refinery and the carcasses of rotting animals. In Popol Vuh we learn that the initial creation of the earth was such a failure that the gods started again – I think it was four times – and by the end they had entirely wiped out the people they had originally created. I found all this particularly interesting because I never felt connected to the Christian concept of Creation I had grown up with, one that culminates in a planet of equilibrium and beauty. There is something primordial and anarchic about Mayan myths that goes beyond our Western way of thinking. They remind me of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in the first part of which he shows us Paradise, in which something dark and ominous, almost cannibalistic, lurks; we see a creature that has caught something in its mouth, but Adam and Eve are oblivious. Murder and disaster are implanted in part one of the painting and inevitably spread into the other two panels. According to Bosch, Hell – on the right side of the triptych – is inevitable because during Creation, on the left side, God made so many mistakes. The other two sections of the film – “Paradise” and “The Golden Age” – use texts that I mostly wrote myself. “Paradise,” in which the voiceover announces that “The gates of Paradise are open to everybody,” is full of damaged people, like the impoverished quarry workers covered head to toe in slaked lime. There is also a bizarre, unfinished factory being constructed in the middle of the desert, hundreds of m
iles from any human habitation. No one could tell us what it was for or who was building it.
Fata Morgana remains close to my heart because two remarkable people assisted me with the film. One was Lotte Eisner, who did the original German voiceover and about whom I will talk later. I travelled to her Paris apartment with a Nagra and recorded it in a single take, with no rehearsals. The other was historian Amos Vogel, who refined the English translation I did of the voiceover. Amos was a remarkable man, a true visionary and great film scholar who was a mentor to me for decades. He grew up in Vienna and escaped with his family from Austria before the Holocaust, eventually arriving in New York, where he established the film club Cinema 16. Later he was instrumental in creating the New York Film Festival, which he ran for several years. I first met Amos at the Oberhausen Film Festival in the mid-sixties, where he stood up for a film of mine that had been derided by the crowd. “Do whatever you want,” he said. “Boo and hiss as loud as you can. This film will outlive us all.” He was a deeply impressive man, the person who one day, out of the blue, said to me, “You look like someone who should have children.” I named my first son after him: Rudolph Amos Ahmed Herzog. The name Ahmed comes from the last surviving workman from my grandfather’s excavation on Kos; he was seven years old when my grandfather took him in and gave him a job. Ahmed was overjoyed that I made the journey to Kos, at the age of fifteen, so many decades later, and took me on a tour of the site where my grandfather had worked. He opened all the empty drawers and cupboards in his house, proclaiming, “This is all yours!” Ahmed appears briefly in Signs of Life, and even today I find seeing his dignified presence on screen a moving experience. The Greek children would make fun of him because he was a Muslim who prayed so many times a day. He even wanted me to marry his granddaughter. I politely declined, but promised I would have children one day and name the first of them after him. So my first son ended up with three names.
