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

by Paul Cronin

  Bells from the Deep doesn’t strive to report facts about Russia as an ethnographic film or book might do; that would be like reading a Hölderlin poem in which he describes a storm in the Alps and insisting it’s a weather report from 1802. The best of the film is fabricated. It begins in the Tuvinian Autonomous Republic, northwest of Mongolia. An old man is throat-singing about the beauty of a mountain. Later in the film there are two boys – one twelve, the other fourteen – singing a love song. What does this have to do with a film about faith? Yet it belongs; just by dint of declaration this becomes a religious hymn. Later we see what appear to be people deep in prayer. We were driving to a location when I stopped the bus because in the distance I saw a frozen lake with dozens of people on it; they had drilled holes in the ice and were sitting, quietly fishing. It was so cold they were crouching down with their backs against the wind, all facing the same direction, as if they were in deep meditation, so the film declares them pilgrims in prayer.

  In the final moments there are two speed skaters moving through the shot. I spotted them from a distance and whistled to catch their attention, then explained I wanted them to be in the film, passing in and out of the frame, gently in between the people on the ice. They agreed, but were anxious to show how good they were and started dashing around like madmen; one of them used to be in the Soviet Olympic skating team and wanted to show off. I had a specific piece of music in mind for this sequence, so the images had to correspond with the rhythms in my head. I told the skaters to go much slower and float majestically into shot with a certain gravitas and magnificence. We shot it several times before they understood exactly what I wanted. Watch the scene again and look at the precision with which they move.

  Is the legend of the Lost City of Kitezh real?

  Bells from the Deep is one of the most pronounced examples of what I mean when I say that through invention, fabrication and staging you can reach a more intense level of truth. I took a fact – that for many people this lake was the final resting place of this lost city – and explored the truth of the situation to reach a more poetic understanding. I heard about the myth while I was out there; it’s a very real belief of these people. As recounted to me, the legend is that the city was systematically ransacked and demolished by hundreds of years of Tartar and Hun invasions. The inhabitants called on God to redeem them, and He sent an archangel who tossed the city into a bottomless lake, where the people live in bliss, chanting their hymns and tolling the bells. During the summer, pilgrims crawl around the lake on all fours, saying their prayers. I was also there at the beginning of winter because I wanted shots of them looking through the ice, trying to catch a glimpse of the lost city. Unfortunately there was no one around, so I hired two drunks from the nearby town and asked them to play pilgrims. One of them has his face on the ice and looks as if he’s deep in meditation. The accountant’s truth: he was fast asleep.

  You can find a sister to this image in Encounters at the End of the World, which I filmed years later. The sound designer Douglas Quin gave me a series of extraordinary recordings of underwater seal calls – what one physiologist in Antarctica describes in the film as “inorganic sounds” – and I asked the scientists to get on their hands and knees, as if they were trying to listen through the ice for these noises, which sound like early electronic music. It was all precisely staged because I wanted the shot to be perfectly balanced; of course, none of these people would do such a thing for real. I asked them to repeat it a couple of times, to the point where the ear of one woman froze to the ice. I was immediately profuse with my apologies. While we were shooting Encounters I noticed that the divers who went under the Ross Ice Shelf, a bay in Antarctica the size of Texas, didn’t speak much. To me, it seemed as if they were priests preparing for Mass. When under the ice, the divers find themselves in a separate reality in which space and time acquire a strange new dimension; Henry Kaiser, who filmed down there and whose footage appears in The Wild Blue Yonder, speaks about his dives being consciousness-altering experiences. In the film I say that those who have experienced the world under the frozen sky often talk of “going down into the cathedral.” I made up that line, though there is something almost religious about being down under the ice, as if confronted by the essence of Creation itself.

  Is what we see in Bells from the Deep representative of the general attitudes and feelings in Russia today?

  Many Russians – including my wife – are philosophical when it comes to beliefs and superstitions. The depth of the Russian soul is unique, and the border between faith and superstition is often blurred for them. The question is: how do you depict the soul of an entire nation in only sixty minutes? The scene of the drunken city-seekers somehow represents Russia; the entire country is secretly searching for the Lost City of Kitezh. Russians who have seen Bells from the Deep consider this sequence the best in the film. They understand the devout passion and religious fervour of people who stare so intently, face down, with unwavering concentration, into the depths below.

  Florian Fricke wrote the music for several of your films.

  I first met him around 1967, at the home of an industrialist, the man whose wife took me to Africa to make The Flying Doctors of East Africa. I would play football with him on the lawn of this enormous house. He was classically trained, a fine pianist who had studied at Freiburg University until injury forced him to quit, so he became a composer instead. For decades he was a trusted collaborator and wrote the music for many of my films, including The Great Ecstasy, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu and Heart of Glass. He also appears as the pianist in both Signs of Life and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. We worked closely together, and often I would tell him the story I had in mind before there was even a written screenplay. We wouldn’t talk about music; we spoke instead about the inner drama of the story, or about some sort of vision I had. He was a poet first and a musician second, and his feel for the inner narrative of a cinematic story was infallible. Florian never failed to create music that has forever given us an entrée into otherwise in accessible dimensions. It’s what I was saying earlier about the music in Fata Morgana. Florian’s compositions add dimensions to a film that we never knew existed and enable us to shift our perception; they make visible what would otherwise remain mysterious and forever hidden in my films, and also what lies buried in our souls. Although when seen alongside Florian’s music an image remains the same projection of light, it is somehow transformed, like the cliff faces and peaks of The Dark Glow of the Mountains, which appear to possess a sacred aura and cast a strange spell when we look at them while listening to music by Popol Vuh, Florian’s one-man band.

  I described to Florian what I wanted for Aguirre – something full of human pathos and the surreal – and what he came up with wasn’t real singing, nor was it completely artificial either; it sits uncomfortably between the two. I wanted choral music that would sound out of this world. Florian used a strange instrument called a choir-organ, which is similar to a mellotron and contains three dozen different tapes running parallel in loops. Each tape would be a voice of a single pitch. Put together it sounds like a human choir, but the music has an artificial, eerie quality to it. He was always full of ideas like this, though towards the end we moved in different directions; he drifted into New Age pseudo-culture and the style of his music changed. I used to joke with Florian, telling him, “You must never grow old. You have to die young and beautiful.” I can still hear those words in my mind today. After his death in 2001 I asked his widow if she had any music of his I had never heard, and she gave me a piece I used in Wheel of Time. Not only does this music somehow help transport the images, it’s also a bow in the direction of my dear friend.

  Has sound design always been important to your films?

  On practically my first film I came to understand that sound decides the outcome of many battles, that the texture and subtleties of a film often come from its soundtrack. I encounter many young directors who manage to make their first film – after overcoming pr
oblems of finance, organisation and everything else – but fall down because of their neglect of sound. Almost all my films have been shot with direct sound, which inevitably takes more time and energy than recording it months later in the controlled environment of a studio. Sometimes it takes more time to prepare the sound than it does to set up the shot. When it comes to post-production, for The Wild Blue Yonder soundtrack I took recordings of howler monkeys I made in Guyana when I was making The White Diamond and carefully added them to Henry Kaiser’s underwater footage. Every bird noise you hear in Aguirre was intentional. Throughout the shoot we recorded as many birds as possible, then carefully mixed the film’s soundtrack, which makes the jungle seem alive and dangerous. The silences were especially carefully designed; whenever you hear nothing there must be Indians around, and that means death.

  The silences in all my films are important. I asked Jean Clottes, one of the scientists in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, to talk about how the silence inside the cave is so profound that you can hear the beating of your own heart. Ernst Reijseger’s cello emerges out of the faint heartbeat I added to the soundtrack and the almost imperceptible drops of water you hear inside the cave. It reminds me of a moment in the Taviani brothers’ film Padre Padrone, when the father says to his son, “Close your eyes and listen.” All we hear is the gentle rustling of leaves on a tree. I will never forget the enormity of the impressive silence I heard in the Sahara and when, as an adolescent, I went with the fishermen of Crete on their small boats that dispersed into the night. With powerful carbide lamps they would attract the fish, which would criss-cross the water like streaks of silver amidst reflections of the stars burning brightly in the sky. No one ever spoke; everything was dead quiet. It’s no coincidence that there is a noticeable absence of urban life in my films. I rarely shoot in big cities. I admire Robert Bresson’s films, in which we hear so many silences, each one different. Compare these subtleties with a film like Apocalypse Now, where sledgehammer sound effects constantly hit you over the head. It’s like watching early colour films, with their absurdly bright and garish images screaming at you.

  Can you read music?

  Although for years when I was young my mother struggled to get me interested in playing the flute and failed to teach me even the most basic melodies, and though I must be one of the few opera directors who can’t read music, I know I’m a very musical person. I put my disconnect from music down to a childhood tragedy I experienced at the age of thirteen. The music teacher at school asked everybody to stand up in alphabetical order and sing a song. The whole thing had an ideology behind it; at the time ideas were floating around about everyone having innate musical talent, whether or not they were able to sing. When it came to my turn, I was asked to stand up. “I am not going to sing,” I told the teacher. It quickly turned nasty. Bold as I was at that age, I insisted, “Sir, you may do a somersault forward and backward. You may run up the walls and on to the ceiling. I … am … not … going … to … sing.” That annoyed him so much he brought in the headmaster. In front of the whole class, while I was standing there, they discussed whether I should be thrown out of school. It was that serious, but I was very stubborn. Then the bastards took the whole class hostage. “Nobody is going to leave until Herzog sings.” Everyone started pressuring me, saying, “Don’t worry, we won’t listen to you. We just want to go outside during the break.” The headmaster insisted there would be no break if I didn’t sing. I stood my ground, but after forty minutes, for the sake of my classmates, I sang. While doing so I knew I would never sing again in my life. I told myself, “No man will ever break me again.”

  I disconnected myself entirely from music at that moment, a painful move that created a profound vacuum within me. Today I would give ten years of my life if I could play the cello with the same ease as breathing. The finest music has a quality of consolation you find nowhere else, with perhaps the exception of religion or being in contact with small children. During music lessons at school I became ever more autistic. I was on a different planet; I turned off my ears, and between the ages of thirteen and eighteen music didn’t exist for me. When I left school I sensed a huge void, so I dug into music with a ferocious intensity but no guidance from anyone. I started with Heinrich Schütz, and from there to Bach, Orlando di Lasso, Carissimi, then Beethoven and modern composers. Later I encountered Gesualdo’s Sixth Book of Madrigals, a moment of absolute enlightenment for me. I was so excited I called up Florian Fricke at three in the morning. “Everyone who is into music knows about Gesualdo,” he said after half an hour of my raving. “You sound as if you have discovered a new planet.” But for me that’s exactly what it felt like, as if I had found something tremendous within our solar system. “Are you ready to take the insult that the director of the opera can’t read music?” I ask the conductors I’m working with. “But I can listen very well.”

  The Transformation of the World into Music was made at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival.

  I became fascinated with Wagner relatively late, and today consider his music as some of the greatest ever written. When I heard Wagner’s Parsifal for the first time in Bayreuth during a rehearsal, the auditorium was almost empty. There was a moment in that particular staging when for twenty minutes Kundry is lying on the ground, hidden as part of a rock formation, then suddenly rises up and screams. It was such a shock for me, with my knees propped up against the chairs in front of me, that I was jolted so violently I tore my entire row of seats from its anchoring. Along with Wolfgang Wagner, the grandson of Richard Wagner, I tumbled backwards. Wagner got to his feet and rushed over to me. I thought I was going to be fired, but he bowed, took my hand and said, “Finally, an audience that knows how to respond to the music.” I appreciate that Richard Wagner isn’t a particularly attractive figure and am well aware of his anti-Semitism, though he is no more to be blamed for Hitler than Marx is for Stalin.

  Wolfgang sent a telegram asking me to stage Lohengrin at the Bayreuth Festival. I replied immediately, answering his request with a single word: “No.” He refused to take that for an answer and became like a terrier snapping at my heels, insisting I reconsider, even though I kept turning him down. Finally, after weeks of this, he became suspicious and asked whether I had even heard the opera. I told him I hadn’t. “Would you please listen to my favourite recording, which I’m going to send you?” he asked. “Then, if your answer is still no, I’ll never bother you again.” Upon hearing the Vorspiel [overture] for the first time, I was completely stunned, as if lightning had struck. I knew this was something big and beautiful, so I accepted Wagner’s offer. “Let’s just do the Vorspiel and keep the curtain closed,” I said to him. “When people eventually demand to hear the opera, we’ll just play it again.” Wagner, I think, started to like me. A few years before, when I was writing the script for Fitzcarraldo, I decided Fitzcarraldo should listen to Wagner in the jungle, but when I was next in Peru I distinctly remember listening to Siegfried and quickly realising that Wagner’s music didn’t connect to the landscape and story I wanted to tell. It’s too Teutonic; just go down to the jungle and try it for yourself. The ending of the film – where Bellini’s I Puritani is performed with a jungle backdrop – couldn’t have worked any other way.

  I directed Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 1987, where it ran for seven consecutive years until 1994, when I made The Transformation of the World into Music. You have to see the film in context, as a work serving a clear purpose; it’s another one of my “utility” films. Over the previous few years operas staged in Bayreuth were being recorded for transmission on the French/German television station Arte. The plan was to screen all of Wagner’s operas – something like forty hours of music – in the space of a month, and an introductory piece about the festival was needed. Arte suggested a rather dubious approach, something like “The Myth of Bayreuth,” but I told them I would focus instead on the more practical aspects of the festival. I knew I wanted to stay away from the Wagner fundamentalists and mystification of Bayreuth, t
hough there is a moment in the film when Plácido Domingo talks about the festival being a pilgrimage for many people, where performances are sacred rituals. What interested me was that at Bayreuth you find a climate and atmosphere like no other opera festival, a genuine appreciation of music, something made clear by the women, who don’t wear jewellery – not like they do in Milan and Salzburg – because it would be out of place. I was fascinated by the craftspeople, who spend months every year preparing the productions. I made The Transformation of the World into Music during my final restaging of Lohengrin, when I had easy access to colleagues, musicians and singers. There were new and significant productions being staged at the time, like Heiner Müller’s Tristan und Isolde, so my own work on Lohengrin is only a small part of the film. What’s important to remember is that Richard Wagner designed Bayreuth as a workshop where the most important thing is craft and experimentation, not adoration. For two years after I initially staged Lohengrin, I kept modifying and improving the production. The whole thing was an important learning experience for me.