by Paul Cronin
For years I explained to Beate that much of what she complained about when in the editing room was due to the physical circumstances of shooting, that there were always obstacles that I struggled with on location, that every shot involved some sort of compromise. “If you don’t believe me,” I told her, “why not come to the set of the next film?” She came to do continuity and watch the filming of Stroszek in Germany and America, and hated every day of shooting even more than the time she later spent editing the film. She found the whole experience, and the story, completely disgusting, and would sometimes signal to the cameraman to stop the whole damned thing, including one take when Bruno and Eva Mattes were doing some of the best work I have ever seen. But that’s life; you have to accept strong collaborators. I don’t need yes-men and -women around me, a docile crew that tells me everything I do is great. What I want are people like Beate, who bring with them a strong independent spirit and attitude.
Having said that, because Beate had been on location the film was more difficult to edit, and after Stroszek I realised there is a certain value to keeping the editor as far away from the shoot as possible. Maintaining a distance helps preserve the purity of approach; an editor must be able to look at footage as clearly and objectively as possible. Being witness to all the trouble and effort that goes into shooting a particular scene – maybe one I’m anxious not to cut – means they might decide to keep it because of all the trouble it caused us during filming. But not wanting to remove a scene that doesn’t work can never be a useful position to take. During the editing of every film you have to undergo the sometimes painful, sometimes joyous process of tearing things out and throwing them in the garbage. A film is easily ruined when a director squeezes his material into preconceived notions that have been channelled into post-production. When looking at your material, forget about the screenplay you wrote and then filmed; put aside any ideas you might have brought into the editing room about how the material should be pieced together. If a filmmaker distorts the fundamental nature of his footage by butchering the images to fit preconceived editing patterns, audiences immediately sense a patch-up job. The only thing to do is look carefully at what is sitting in front of you. Let it all overshadow you. Only one question remains: what is truly present in the footage? At every stage it’s vital to allow the material to take on a life of its own. You might want your children to have certain qualities, but you will never end up with one to your exact specifications. Every film needs the chance to live its own life and develop its own character, however surprising. It’s a mistake to suppress this. If material contains qualities you didn’t expect, continue digging and discover the gems.
Have you thought about releasing the so-called “director’s cuts” of your films?
I have been the producer of much of my work, and every film of mine has been the director’s cut. As for out-takes, I have none. It’s too expensive to store such things – those endless reels – and soon after the release of a film I throw out all the unused footage, everything that didn’t make the final cut, including the negative and printed out-takes. A carpenter doesn’t sit on his shavings. When I was in New York after the shoot of Fitzcarraldo, I looked through all the material and decided what was useful and what wasn’t, then threw out everything I didn’t want to transport back to Germany, which meant considerable savings in freight and customs charges.
I have always kept the completed, cut negatives of my films. For years they were in a state of decay, some with colours fading, because I never had the money to pay for a duplicate negative. Originally my feelings about this had to do with my belief that film has a shorter shelf life than literature, that the inevitable deterioration and decay of celluloid is a natural phenomenon. Most films made in the first years of cinema’s history are no longer with us, and in the not too distant future perhaps people will read books to find out what films were being made at the turn of the millennium. All that will exist is a single photo, alongside a basic description of the story and a few lines about the director. In the last few years my attitude to film preservation has changed, perhaps against my better judgement. I can see why films are worth saving, especially because I’m glad that certain German films from the twenties are still in existence, and that much of the work of Griffith, Méliès and the Lumière brothers is in good shape and available for contemporary audiences. Our world has always been, in a manner of speaking, reflected through cinema, and when you think about people five hundred years from now trying to understand civilisation today, they will probably get more out of a Tarzan film than the president’s State of the Union address. Attitudes and trends shift so radically over time that what is considered today a third-rate B-picture, ridiculed and rejected on its first release, might tomorrow be heralded a masterpiece. It means we have a responsibility to preserve even bad films.
There is something about the work I produced forty years ago that still draws people in, but I’m under no illusions: my existence on this planet is fleeting, and so, perhaps, should be the lives of my films. I would never dare predict that anyone will be watching them a hundred years from now. Anyway, I live wholly in the present and really couldn’t care less about posterity. There is only forward.
* See Grass’s Two States – One Nation? The Case Against German Reunification (Secker and Warburg, 1990), where he writes: “We should be aware – as our neighbors are – of how much grief this unified state caused, of what misfortune it brought to others and to ourselves as well. The crime of genocide, summed up in the image of Auschwitz, inexcusable from whatever angle you view it, weighs on the conscience of this unified state.”
† See “Thinking about Germany,” p. 458.
‡ Milirrpum v. Nabalco (1971) 17 FLR 141 was the first litigation on land rights and native title in Australia. The Northern Territory Supreme Court ruled against the Aborigine claimants, a decision overruled by the High Court of Australia in 1992.
§ See Chatwin’s essay “Werner Herzog in Ghana,” in What Am I Doing Here (Vintage, 1998).
9
Fact and Truth
What was the starting point of your Minnesota Declaration?
The Minnesota Declaration, written in 1999, is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and designed to provoke, but the ideas it tackles are those my mind has been seriously engaged with for many years, from my earliest documentaries onwards. After wrestling with these issues in various films, they became more relevant than ever with Bells from the Deep, Death for Five Voices and Little Dieter Needs to Fly. The point is that the word “documentary” should be handled with care. It seems to have a precise definition, but this comes from the lack of a more appropriate concept for a whole range of cinema, and our unfortunate need to categorise. Although they are usually classified as such, it would be misleading to call those three films documentaries. They merely come under the guise of that label.
The background to the Minnesota Declaration – subtitled “Truth and Fact in Documentary Filmmaking” – is simple. I had flown from Europe to San Francisco and back again in a short space of time, and ended up in Sicily, where I was staging an opera. Unable to sleep because of jet lag, at midnight I turned on the television and was confronted by an excruciatingly boring nature film about animals somewhere out in the Serengeti, all cute and fluffy. At two in the morning I stumbled across something equally unbearable. But then, at four o’clock, I found a hardcore porno. I sat up in bed. “My God,” I said to myself. “Finally something straightforward, something real.” It was the naked truth, even if it was purely physical. I had been thinking about writing some kind of manifesto, a rant against cinéma-vérité and my thoughts about fact and truth in filmmaking. I wanted to explore the idea of what I call “ecstatic truth,” even if it’s a phrase that shouldn’t be interpreted too deeply; everyone should figure it out for themselves. That same night I sat for twenty minutes and wrote down the twelve points, the fundamental idea behind which is that we can never know what truth really is. The best we can do is approximate.
There is a monastery in Rome called the Santissima Trinità dei Monti. On one of the walls of the cloister is a painting of St Francesco di Paola. From a distance, looking down a corridor, the image is clearly of a saint staring up into the sky in some sort of rapture, but the closer you move to the picture, by doing so changing your perspective on it, the more distorted and incomprehensible it becomes. When you stand directly in front of it, the image has been completely transformed; the saint has disappeared and a landscape – the Strait of Messina – has taken his place. There are other examples of paintings that use anamorphosis, but I have always considered this the most interesting one. Sometimes, when you think something is understood, when you feel that the truth of an image has been grasped, the more unknown it becomes, no matter how close you get to it and how deep you explore. Truth can never be definitively captured or described, though the quest to find answers is what gives meaning to our existence.
A few days after my late-night hotel experience in Sicily, I was at the Walker Art Center in Minnesota for a retrospective of my work. In something that turned into a serene, low-key rant, I read out to the audience what I had written in that hotel room and distributed printed copies. “I have brought you a kind of manifesto,” I told everyone, “and would like to call it the Minnesota Declaration. Do I have your approval? If anyone has any objections, let me know.” The crowd went wild; it was the first time I had ever received unanimous public approval. These dozen points contain, in condensed form, everything that has angered and moved me over the years. And hopefully people will find it all somewhat humorous and unpretentious.*
Your conclusion about cinéma-vérité is that it fails to penetrate the deeper truth of situations it portrays.
As I said when we talked about ekstasis, some mystics lived their faith and spirituality as if in ecstasy, allowing them to penetrate things more deeply than pure rationality does. They experienced truth in an ecstatic form by leaving behind the confines of their human essence. The word for “truth” in ancient Greek is “aletheia,” derived from the verb “to hide.” This is a negative definition, meaning to bring something out of hiding and make it visible, and is actually a very cinematic concept because when you film something, there is a latent image on the celluloid; only when you develop that celluloid does the image emerge for all to see. My work in cinema strives for the same: to make visible those things that are latent in us.
When filmmakers explore dimensions beyond the so-called “truth” of cinéma-vérité, they are ploughing fertile ground. Cinéma-vérité is fact orientated and primitive. It is the accountant’s truth, merely skirting the surface of what constitutes a deeper form of truth in cinema, reaching only the most banal level of understanding. If facts had any value, if they truly illuminated us, if they unquestionably stood for truth, the Manhattan phone directory would be the book of books. Millions of established and verifiable facts, but senseless and uninspiring. The important truths remain unknown. Do we know what all these people dream about? For whom do they cast their ballots? Why does Mr John Smith cry into his pillow at night? Too many documentary filmmakers have failed to divorce themselves clearly enough from the world of journalism. I hope to be one of those who bury cinéma-vérité for good.
None of us lead lives of pure logic and order, and similarly, in the best cases, cinema has a strange, mysterious and illusory quality. It isn’t suited to capturing realism and daily life; it has forever been able to reach beyond formal systems of understanding. It sheds light on our fantasies and – like poetry, literature and music – can illuminate in ways we will never truly be able to grasp. It leads audiences into places where they can observe truth more deeply. I have, with every one of my films, attempted to move beyond facts and illuminate the audience with ecstatic truth. Facts might have normative power, but they don’t constitute truth. Facts don’t illuminate. Only truth illuminates. By making a clear distinction between “fact” and “truth,” I penetrate a deeper stratum that most films don’t even know exists. The truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically and mathematically correct. In other words, I play with the facts as we know them. Through imagination and fabrication, I become more truthful than the bureaucrats. I keep telling young people – sometimes hesitant to explore this kind of cinema – that manipulation, concoction and invention are what cinema is really about.
Is there, in this respect, any difference between your fiction and non-fiction films?
The line between fiction and documentary doesn’t exist for me. My documentaries are often fictions in disguise. All my films, every one of them, take facts, characters and stories and play with them in the same way. I consider Fitzcarraldo to be my best documentary and Little Dieter Needs to Fly my best feature. They are both highly stylised and full of imagination.
Land of Silence and Darkness is an important film in this respect.
Yes, though at the time my ideas on the subject weren’t so developed. I wonder if they were even conscious; it was more an instinctive approach. The line quoted at the end of that film – “If a world war were to break out now, I wouldn’t even notice it” – isn’t something Fini ever said; I wrote those words because I felt they encapsulated how someone like her might experience the world. The lines at the start of the film, when she talks about the ecstatic faces of the ski flyers who she says she used to watch as a child, are also by me. This is all pure invention; Fini had never actually seen a ski flyer before. I asked her to recite those words because I felt that the solitude and ecstasy of these athletes as they flew through the air was a powerful visual metaphor to represent her solitude and state of mind. No scenes were ever shot contrary to her wishes; she was happy to record what I had written for her, and showed her understanding by squeezing my hand. Different rules apply when the subject of a film is dead. With Kinski in My Best Fiend and Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man – both of whom weren’t around to defend themselves – I was especially careful with the material I was working with and the stories I wanted to tell.
What I did with Invincible is an example of how I have used these ideas and applied them to a feature film. Most of the facts about the life of Polish blacksmith Zishe Breitbart in the twenties didn’t interest me, so I reinvented the character, transplanting him into the early thirties, the period when the Nazis were gaining power. Everything fascinating about the relationship between Germans and Jews was exacerbated in that era, then turned into the most monstrous crime and tragedy. The “truth” about Zishe’s life is brought much more into focus when we see his story through the lens of Nazi Germany.
This isn’t an approach you take for all your non-fiction films.
The stylisations in my documentaries are usually subtle ones; you probably wouldn’t notice them unless you were paying close attention, though even in a film like Ballad of the Little Soldier you can see hints. I could have made a straightforward study of the situation in Nicaragua and called it The Children’s War Against the Sandinistas, but I used the title I did because some of the most interesting material I shot was of villagers and young soldiers singing. The Miskito Indians are a people with a great musical tradition, and I felt their songs were a powerful way of revealing their deepest beliefs. I wanted to tell the story of children who were dying in battle, and the images of them singing become a powerful way of looking into their hearts, much more so than filming them with rifles in hand. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams you see Maurice Maurin, a man with extraordinary olfactory talent, roaming the landscape, fantasising about the odours of thirty thousand years ago. I filmed him using his primal technique of searching for currents of air and sniffing around at the base of a mountain. This was all my invention, though at one time Monsieur Maurin really was president of the French Society of Perfumers.
Take a look at the argument I have with Graham Dorrington in The White Diamond. He didn’t think it right that I go up in the prototype airship, and insisted that for safety’s sake he make the mai
den flight on his own. But if there was going to be only one flight, I wanted to be up there with a camera. The truth is that though these conversations really did take place, what you see in the film was staged, and we shot the scene several times. In The White Diamond is a sensational image captured by one of the cameramen, a wildlife photographer. We see a droplet of water in extreme close-up, and refracted through it is the waterfall, which appears upside down. I knew if I placed it in the right context and was inventive enough, the kitsch wouldn’t show. There’s a scene where Marc Anthony Yhap is out foraging for medical herbs. He stops on a ledge where there is a view of the falls and points out this droplet to the camera. Everything he says was planned, including my question to him, the most insipid New Age thing I could think of: “Do you see a whole universe in this one single drop of water?” In real life I would never ask something so stupid, but Marc Anthony slowly turns with an imperceptible smirk on his face and says, “I cannot hear what you say, for the thunder that you are.” I shot this scripted line – which I borrowed from Cobra Verde – a few times before I got exactly what I wanted. It wasn’t actually even a real droplet of water. It was glycerine, which is more translucent and has better optical properties. I placed it very carefully on the leaf myself.
At the start of Echoes from a Sombre Empire I appear on camera, sitting in my Munich office, reading from a letter written by Michael Goldsmith in which he explains that his experiences of Bokassa and the Central African Republic still resonate powerfully within him, and that he recently dreamt about crabs invading the earth. These large, bright-red creatures have emerged from the ocean and are crawling everywhere, eventually covering the entire planet, layer upon layer. Michael’s letter was real, but it never mentioned crabs; the idea was mine, and the images of them crossing the railroad tracks came from footage I found in an archive. There is no symbolism here and I can’t explain it fully, but I know these images belong in the film. There is, incidentally, no clear-cut symbolism in any of my films. I’ve never thought in such terms; for me, a chair is a chair, and even if it were shoved under my nose I wouldn’t recognise a symbol in a painting or film. Years later I went to Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, west of the Australian mainland, and filmed those same crabs for Invincible. I spent days waiting for millions of these creatures to crawl out from the jungle, head towards the sea, mate, then lay their eggs.
