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

by Paul Cronin

  The music in Fata Morgana always fits the images.

  The tracking shot of the dunes felt like a feminine landscape, and by playing a recording of a women’s choir singing Mozart’s Coronation Mass audiences are seized more powerfully by the shot. Some images become clearer and more understandable when a particular piece of music is playing behind them. They don’t physically change, but their inner qualities are exposed and new perspectives opened up. Music is able to make visible what is latent; it reveals new things to us, helps shift our perception and enables us to see deeper into things. We perceive what we would otherwise be oblivious to. An image might not be logical in a narrative sense, but when music is added – even if it somehow disrupts and undermines that image – certain qualities might all of a sudden become transparent that were previously unknown. This can work the other way round, when a piece of music is transformed and resonates with new meaning if juxtaposed with a specific image.

  Look at the opening moments of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser with the boat, the tower and the washerwoman. Some of those shots were filmed with a telephoto lens, on top of which I mounted a wide-angle lens, which gives an eerie quality. These images might not make strict sense in terms of the story, but they acquire a dynamic internal logic when accompanied by an aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Listen carefully to the soundtrack during the lengthy shot of the windmills in Signs of Life, which is as important as the imagery. I started by taking the recording of nearly a thousand people clapping at the end of a concert, then distorting it electronically until it sounded like pieces of wood clacking together. I added another sound, what you hear when you put your ear on a telegraph pole and the wind passes through the wires. As children we called it “angel song.” This constructed soundtrack doesn’t physically alter the thousands of windmills or the landscape, but it does change the way we look at them. This is what I have always tried to render in my films: a new perspective, one that touches us deeper than realistic sounds and images. Such things are beyond verbal explanation; combining images with music is a wholly intuitive process. The point is that there is no such thing as background music in my films. It’s always an integral part of the whole.

  There are very few directors who truly understand the possibilities of music in cinema. Two exceptions come to mind, both of whom are extraordinarily lucid in their use of music: Satyajit Ray and the Taviani brothers. I doff my hat to them. In the Taviani brothers’ Padre Padrone the music suddenly starts up and builds until an entire landscape appears to be in mourning. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but the television network in West Germany that co-produced the film said it wasn’t going to release it theatrically and would screen it only on television. “No matter what your contract might say,” I told the television executives, “this film will be released in cinemas.” The next day Volker Schlöndorff and I, along with several other filmmakers and my young son, chained ourselves to the gates of a cinema in Munich in protest. The film is about a shepherd, so we brought a sheep with us. The press reports of this stunt somehow triggered various people to ask the fundamental question: why can’t we see Padre Padrone on the big screen? Eventually the film – which remains one of my favourites – was released in cinemas, and I reviewed it for a newspaper.§

  You chose not to release Fata Morgana.

  Today I can see elements of the film in my more recent work, like The Wild Blue Yonder and Encounters at the End of the World, with the images of the Ross Ice Shelf and tunnels under the South Pole and the frozen sturgeon. But immediately after finishing Fata Morgana I had a feeling it was inaccessible to audiences, that they would ridicule it. It seemed dangerously fragile, like a cobweb, and I didn’t consider it a robust or releasable piece of work. Sometimes it’s better to keep things under wraps, passing them from friend to friend, never making them public. Only after several generations should a film be released. I held on to Fata Morgana for almost two years without showing it, but was deviously tricked by my friends Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, and Lotte Eisner, who worked there as a curator. They borrowed a print and screened it at the Cannes Film Festival. When I saw the public’s reaction, I knew the film could be shown in other places too, including the New York Film Festival. It was eventually released and considered by some people as one of the first European art-house psychedelic films, a genre with which it has absolutely no connection. Today, more than forty years later, Fata Morgana is very much alive to audiences; it’s like nothing they have ever seen before, and everyone comes away with their own understanding. Perhaps more than any other of my films, it needs to be completed by those who watch it, which means all feelings, thoughts and interpretations are welcome.

  Why dwarfs in Even Dwarfs Started Small?

  German culture is full of them, from the earliest fairy tales through to Wagner and The Tin Drum. The dwarfs in the film aren’t freaks; these are well-proportioned and beautiful midgets. If you are only two feet tall, it’s the world around you that’s completely out of proportion: motorcycles are monstrous, beds and door handles are huge, the world of commerce is grotesque, and education, table manners and religious education are all horrific abnormalities. Even flowerpots have the strangest of dimensions. If the film has a “message,” it’s that we and the society we have constructed for ourselves – with oppressive and institutionalised violence, rules and regulations – are monstrous, not the dwarfs. We all have something dwarfish, inadequate, impotent and insignificant inside us, as if there is an essence or concentrated form of each of us screaming to escape, a perfectly formed representation of who we are. Think about the laughter we hear at the end of the film, which is laughter that can never be surpassed. A very real nightmare for some people is knowing that deep down they are a dwarf. Sometimes, when I was working on the film, I woke up in terror and had to feel about with my arms and legs. Was I still as big as I was when I went to sleep? Reactions to Even Dwarfs Started Small seem to depend on people’s feelings about their inner dwarf.

  Where did you find the actors?

  When you find one midget you find several, so for a year I went from one to the next, hiring everyone. They were happy to make the film, and I would always ask their opinions about what was or wasn’t suitable. For the first time they were able to reveal their real personalities to the world. If the dwarfs are good in the film, it’s because they express genuine humanity, and by doing so affirm their dignity. A deep relationship formed between the actors and the crew, and after a week of working with them I completely forgot they were so tiny. They really got into the spirit of things. The one up on the roof of the car as it goes round in circles was truly a bold little guy, and he was actually run over by this automobile. I thought he was dead, but he scrambled to his feet, proud of having done something that would usually have been entrusted to a stuntman. Later in the film, when the dwarfs burn the flowerpots, they really did water them with gasoline. All of a sudden this same dwarf caught fire. The crew stood there, looking at him as he burned like a Christmas tree, so I ran over and smothered him beneath me to extinguish the flames. Fortunately only his ear was singed.

  Incidents like these led to a little side event being reported in almost every biography of me. As I have already explained, being on equal terms with the crew and actors is vital. A director should never be safe behind the camera while everyone else is alone out there. The day this little guy caught fire, I told everyone, “If all of you get out of this film unscathed, if you’re unhurt at the end, I will jump into that field of cacti. Get your 8mm cameras ready. I’m going to do the big leap into the plants for you.” I thought I should give them something for their family album, the way kids on snowboards leap up into the air and strike a pose. I put on some goggles to protect my eyes and jumped from a ramp, but miscalculated. I can tell you that getting out is more difficult than jumping in. Any old idiot can make the leap, but it takes great skill to extricate yourself from something like that. The spines were the size of my fingers. I
don’t think there are any left embedded. The body seems to absorb them eventually.

  Where is the film set?

  In the published script it says the story takes place near San Cristóbal, in Chiapas, Mexico, at an institution for juvenile offenders. But I couldn’t say for sure.

  We filmed for five weeks, and were especially careful with the sound because I knew it was important to record all the dialogue live. Hombre’s unique high-pitched voice is the reason you could never dub a film like this into another language. On the first day of shooting I discovered he had an extraordinarily shrill laugh, so I would grab and tickle him when he wasn’t expecting it. “Your laughter is more important than any spoken words in this film,” I told him. I found his laughter – which he would secretly rehearse – so astonishing that I decided it would carry the end of the film, with the shot of him and the dromedary as he literally laughs himself to death. In the final frames it’s almost as if he is screaming for help. That one sequence sums up the whole film. “Give it your best laughter,” I told him. “This is your big moment. Go wild. We’ll shoot it only once, but make sure you give the ultimate performance. You’ll be the last thing in the film.” He gave it everything he had and even started to cough, but kept on going. If I had gone back three weeks later, he would have still been there. Eventually the moment came when I couldn’t take it any longer. “This really is too much,” I said to myself. “Let’s go home. End of film.”

  The scene with the car that drives round in circles – an image you also see at the end of Stroszek – was inspired by a real experience of mine. When I was a teenager I had an absurd job as a parking attendant at the Oktoberfest. There was an area filled with Ferris wheels and other rides next to a gigantic meadow, which was used as a parking lot, and every night I had to cope with two thousand drunkards. The Bavarian police weren’t much help; they would let people drive off unless they were half unconscious. Some were so far gone I confiscated their keys and hoisted them from their cars. They wouldn’t even bother getting up and just fell asleep there and then. Sometimes I would take an automobile, lock the steering wheel in place, step out and let it drive around in circles until it ran out of gas.

  Where does the opening music come from?

  I asked a young girl, perhaps eleven years old, from Lanzarote to sing a local song, which I recorded in a cave, gaving it a strange, unique sound. “Sing until your soul departs,” I said. “Sing your lungs out of your body.” What she did has something wild and ecstatic about it, and corresponds perfectly with the rest of the film. Even Dwarfs Started Small also has music that I originally recorded for Fata Morgana: a thousand-person choir in a cathedral at Grand Lahou in Côte d’Ivoire. I had gone there because someone claiming to be the Messiah had created his own little state where a group of people lived; he would preach in the cathedral and perform miracles for the locals. We went there on a Sunday and encountered an extraordinary procession and beautiful singing. If you look carefully, you’ll find other things from Fata Morgana that seeped into Even Dwarfs Started Small, like the goggles the two blind dwarfs wear. In many ways the films intermingle.

  How different do you think Even Dwarfs Started Small would have been if your experiences in the desert had been less harrowing?

  When I returned to Lanzarote I was still much affected by sickness and the hardships of the production of Fata Morgana. The resulting film became much more radical than I had originally planned, and when I look back, it’s clear I made Even Dwarfs Started Small to free myself from recent bad memories; Aguirre looks like kindergarten in comparison. Somehow I had the feeling that if Goya and Bosch had the guts to do their gloomiest stuff, why shouldn’t I? There was such pressure inside me that I felt the necessity to share these visions. Up until that point my other films had been quite discreet, but Even Dwarfs Started Small screams loudly at audiences. When it was first screened in cinemas, I asked projectionists to turn up the volume because I felt the film’s impact would be diminished if it weren’t loud enough. It all sounds so gloomy when I talk about it here, but the film has a genuinely playful tone and is actually a comedy. Destroying everything they can find and turning everything upside down has been a truly memorable day for the midgets; you can see the joy in their faces. Audiences walk out aching from laughter.

  The film wasn’t widely seen.

  In West Germany at the time we had something called Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle, which was essentially voluntary censorship. After the Nazi era, the West German constitution refused to accept any sort of censorship, though the film industry had a self-imposed set of rules. You weren’t legally obliged to submit your films to the censorship board, and if you chose to bypass it there were no penalties per se, but distributors generally wouldn’t touch films that hadn’t been passed, and most cinemas refused to screen them. I submitted Even Dwarfs Started Small, and the board banned it from the first to the last minute. I appealed the decision and said they would be forever ashamed if the film went unseen in West Germany, then rented a handful of cinemas in a couple of towns to screen it myself. Eventually it was released uncut, and I got several death threats. A white-supremacist militia from Bavaria called every week to tell me I was second on their “to kill” list. To this day the film has never been broadcast on German television.

  Even Dwarfs Started Small was accused of being anarchistic and blasphemous, which I suppose it is. The film certainly breaks a number of taboos, though none of the criticisms bothered me because time always somehow allocates the correct significance to things. The animal-rights people were furious at the scene in which the monkey is tied to the cross and paraded about, though we used soft wool to hold the creature down. The religious song the dwarfs sing meant the Catholics were also breathing down my neck, and the final scene caused problems because a rumour went around that to get the dromedary on its knees for so long I cut its sinews. I quickly learnt that you can’t kill a rumour with a fact; you kill it only with an even wilder rumour. I immediately issued a statement explaining that I had actually nailed the dromedary to the ground. That shut everybody up. In reality the creature was a docile and well-trained animal whose owner was standing two feet outside the frame giving it orders. He was trying to confuse the dromedary by constantly giving it conflicting orders by hand: sit down, stand up, stand still. Not knowing what to do, the animal defecated in despair, something that looks exquisite on screen.

  The only film I can think of that has a similar quality to Even Dwarfs Started Small is Tod Browning’s Freaks, which, with its exceptionally dark vision, I consider to be one of the greatest films ever made. I hadn’t actually seen Freaks when I made my film, but after finally watching it I was overjoyed to discover that forty years before me there was a filmmaker doing something comparable. Although the monsters in Freaks are portrayed with real tenderness, it seems that Browning was apologetic about his film, and maybe never knew what a great piece of work he had created.

  You have described your films as “the articulation of collective dreams.”

  The images in my films are your images too. Somehow, deep in your subconscious, you find them, dormant, lurking, like sleeping friends; they correspond with the inner landscapes inside us all and strike directly into the soul of man. Occasionally – perhaps only a dozen times throughout my life – I have read a text, listened to a piece of music, watched a film or studied a painting and felt that my existence has been illuminated. Even if centuries are being bridged, I instantly feel I’m not so alone in the universe. Watching one of my films is like receiving a letter announcing you have a long-lost brother, that your own flesh and blood is out there in a form you had never previously experienced. This is one reason why so many people around the world seem to connect with my films, which represent the universal visions buried within us all. None of my work is subject to trends or historical movements.

  In no way would I compare myself to the man, but allow me to cite his name to make a point. I once went to the Vatican to see Michelangelo�
�s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that before he started painting, no one had articulated and depicted human pathos with such clarity. Pathos had always existed, but Michelangelo was the first to really express it. Since then we have been able to understand ourselves that much deeper. The purpose of the filmmaker is to record and guide, as chroniclers of past centuries did. Like many people who express themselves through images or writing, I am seeking some insight into human nature. There’s nothing exceptional about this; most painters and writers with any skill are working away at the same thing. It isn’t that I’m particularly inventive, only that I am able to awaken certain feelings and thoughts inside of you. I can see, on the horizon, unpronounced and unproclaimed images. I can sense the hypnotic qualities of things that to everyone else look unobtrusive, then excavate and articulate these collective dreams with some clarity.

  Apparently you never dream at night.

  Every morning upon waking I feel a deficit. “Again! Why haven’t I dreamt?” This might be one reason why I make films. Maybe I want to create images for the screen that are so obviously absent from my head at night. Perhaps my films are a way of filling this void. Please note, however, that I constantly daydream.

  You really never dream?

  It’s very much a singular event for me, perhaps once every couple of years. And my dreams – always in monochrome – are very prosaic, something like me eating a sandwich. Do the psychoanalysts really want to spend time on that?

  * The not-for-profit Kuratorium, funded by the Ministry of the Interior, was established to put the proposals of the Oberhausen Manifesto into practice. Submitted scripts were read by film reviewers. Between 1965 and 1968 the Kuratorium assisted in the financing of twenty films by providing interest-free loans.