Every Night the Trees Disappear

by Alan Greenberg

  Among the ruins high above, Herzog was filming his vision. Sam had been placed upon the precipice, and the cameramen took two shots of him: one from the helicopter and one from the Stone of Pain itself. Then the musicians, wearing the gowns of monks, took positions in the ancient graveyard, with Binkley sitting below a strange, humanlike slab. They performed a fragment of a sad, abandoned tune once heard in the woods of Saint Erfen, something that had been scratched down by a drunken monk wandering away from his monastery circa 1024 AD. As von Ramm sang the lament, the forgotten villagers stood spellbound in the heavy gloom, gazing out toward the Abyss. The weather had been perfect; the shooting went well. But the team had worked too long. With the helicopter unable to navigate the darkness, some of the actors and team members were left stranded, and that night they slept on Skellig Rock.

  The filming was finished. Back in Ballinskelligs, Herzog went to sleep in a room with a shattered mirror. I stayed in an old house across the road, a place that looked haunted but wasn’t. Long ago, the first transatlantic telegraph cable stretched between New York City and that house. When I got into bed, I saw three books on the floor. One was called The Universe, one was called Evolution, and the third was a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I started reading the Emerson, and I later stole it.

  NOTHING TO DECLARE

  Driving home from Ballinskelligs, Herzog chose a more direct but scarcely traveled route to the eastern shore. It was the rough, twisting mountain pass known as Oisin’s Gap, which O’Shea described as the earth god’s path when he returned to drive abstract Christianity out of Ireland. On the narrow road, a small flock of sheep with pink-stained ears walked along, scattering off the road when the van was heard slowly approaching. Once Herzog saw that the way had cleared, he resumed his speed, only to see a tiny lamb dart onto the road and into his path. Again, the awful thump; the lamb was hit hard and was pressed beneath a wheel.

  Herzog stooped down to the suffering animal. The lamb breathed faintly, but otherwise it showed no sign of life. The herdsman, the script girl, and I looked on as Herzog drew his knife.

  “Please—stay back, don’t look,” he admonished.

  Herzog leaned forward to kill the lamb. He reached and grabbed it by its skinny neck, gently pulling it out from under the wheel. The lamb offered no vital signs. Herzog hesitated. The lamb lifted its head. It jumped to its feet and ran off frightened into a pasture.

  The rest of the journey was uneventful. When a ferry official found fault with Herzog’s ticket, Herzog warned him not to talk to him like a clerk. The man became submissive, even though he’d been right.

  Back on the continent, the van passed through a huge portal that read NOTHING TO DECLARE. I was jostled and almost arrested by a customs agent for trying to photograph the sign. In Ostend, the travelers bought fresh seafood and sat on the wharf to eat it. Herzog got angry upon seeing that the script girl and the herdsman were unwilling to peel and eat the food, and he splashed them with a bottle of Coke. I threw a bag of shrimp at him.

  At last, the van drove into Bavaria. As it entered Munich, the city was trembling from a distant earthquake, somewhere over the mountains, to the south.

  A few nights later, Herzog had a fitful sleep. Sitting up with a start, he shook his wife and said, “Get me some embers—I need more—the film—”

  Martje Herzog awoke and saw her husband stare about the dark room.

  “Get the actors—we must start filming now,” he ordered.

  “Werner, you are at home, in bed,” said Martje quietly. “The filming is over with.”

  Herzog spotted a glowing alarm clock. Seeing that it was in camera range, he carefully repositioned it.

  “Get me the actors,” he repeated. “It’s completely dark. We must shoot this scene now….”

  AFTERWORD

  It is now thirty-five years since this book was published in a different version, with a different tone to it. As I gaze at events and persons who are like a distant echo, I myself do not recognize the young man I used to be.

  To be frank, I had hesitations about the book Heart of Glass, because I did not like the tone of adulation toward me. But Alan Greenberg has now looked at the person and events with fresh eyes. I still do not fully recognize myself, since now I come across as didactic and dictatorial. In fact, the production of this very unusual film had a coherent vision and a rather precise organization behind it. But I do not mind that Alan focuses on the wild digressions rather than the elements one would normally expect in relating the making of a film.

  Apart from that, one thing in the book is misleading. My suggestion that my little son call me Herzog was a joke, one that made him laugh like nothing else.

  Nothing was ever pedantic, and Alan was always game to diverge from what could have been a “regular” schedule of filming. Nothing was ever fully predictable with actors under hypnosis in front of a camera. The reasons for doing this experiment were simple: the story of a village community in Bavaria that walks straight into a foreseen and foretold disaster, almost like a community of sleepwalkers, needed a specific stylization. But the trance was not within the actors alone; the film is permeated by images (and music) of a Land in Trance.

  The first experiments were methodical. I did not know whether people could be so deep in hypnosis that they could open their eyes without waking up or whether two or more persons under hypnosis could have a dialogue with each other if they had contact. Initially, I engaged a professional hypnotist who soon annoyed me to the point of utter disgust, as he tried to make me believe that there was a Cosmic Aura somewhere out there that a hypnotist, endowed with special shamanistic powers, could attract to himself and project onto his subjects, average mortals. This New Age babble truly enraged me, and I decided to become the hypnotist myself. All the baloney about hypnosis which still floats around in much popular opinion has a simple cause: neuroscience still does not know much about the “switching off” process in our brains. However, the practical methods to induce hypnosis are well understood and can be practiced fairly easily. Obviously they require the cooperation and trust of a subject who is willing to follow the suggestions of the hypnotist.

  Some of the actors in the film are not under hypnosis—in particular the character of the prophet, Hias, played by the wonderful actor Sepp Bierbichler, since he had to be the clairvoyant, the one who experiences clear prophetic visions. The entire group of master glassmakers practice their craft without hypnosis, simply because the glass in its fluid state is more than one thousand degrees Celsius and by far too dangerous to handle with a very limited consciousness. In a very few moments of the film, some actor or other may not have been fully in trance or may remember everything quite vividly afterward, believing that there was no hypnosis at all.

  There is no such thing as complete control—and control was never on my agenda as a director—over a person under hypnosis, because whatever constitutes the hard core of a character cannot be touched. There is no such thing as murder under the spell and force of hypnosis. This is the stuff of cheap crime novels. Put a knife into the hand of a young woman in a trance and ask her to kill her beloved children, and she would simply refuse. People also lie under hypnosis, and this is the reason why hypnosis has never been admitted in any country as an instrument in criminal investigations. In many cases, memory functions better under hypnosis than in a normal state of awareness, but even that varies wildly. My dearly despised hypnotist of those first days put women under hypnosis and suggested to them that they lived in ancient Egypt. They would even speak the language and remember their former lives in detail. One of the women described living in Alexandria as a temple dancer on a high platform from which she could see the Nile River. But in pharaonic times, no branch of the river’s delta even came near Alexandria. When the woman was asked to speak a few sentences in the ancient language, she indeed spoke a foreign tongue, but it turned out that this was all babble, similar to what you hear in Baptist churches in the Deep South where the con
gregation speaks in tongues. An expert of old Coptic language dismissed this as complete nonsense, and I had to mollify the enraged linguist with huge quantities of stout Bavarian beer.

  I showed films to audiences put under hypnosis, and some of them had the strangest experiences, such as a man who works in the stables of mounted police. He described later that he flew around the actors as if in a helicopter, and he could, for example, see Klaus Kinski, the leading actor of my film Aguirre, The Wrath of God, from behind. He saw his impact on his henchmen without a cutaway to them.

  It is even possible to induce hypnosis without the hypnotist’s personal presence. With a smaller percentage of success than direct contact, people can be hypnotized from a screen or even via telephone. For a short time, I had the idea of filming a prologue where I would appear on-screen and invite the audience—or rather whoever was interested in seeing the upcoming film under hypnosis—to look at me and follow my suggestions. Those who did not want it should not listen to me. At the end of the film, I would reappear and slowly awaken the audience. The idea was so stupid that it did not last long.

  Back to the distant past in which I made this film: I can only see the ones who have departed. Peter van Anft, my beloved sound assistant, whom I always would ask for his opinion of the scene we were just shooting, died in a horrific car accident soon after we finished work. He had predicted his fate in a letter in fairly precise detail. This has haunted me for a long time. When he was buried, his friends placed his favorite music cassettes, his blues harp, and a few bottles of whiskey in his grave.

  Herr Scheitz died. After the film, he had a small career as a theater actor. He kept doing his inscrutable mathematics with the premise that Einstein was all wrong. He kept claiming that the solution to all questions about the universe was the word “Feilgau,” but as Alan mentions in the book, the word is a completely mad invention. On his deathbed, Herr Scheitz had shrunk into a tiny, almost unrecognizable figure in a fetal position. He, in turn, did not recognize me either, but when I left, he suddenly called out that he was in the middle of composing a grand oratorio for me.

  My mother died.

  Claude Chiarini, my dear comrade when crossing the Sahara desert, died. What a life he led; he started out as a Foreign Legionnaire for the French, worked as a stills photographer and a medical doctor on my production, and ran a lunatic asylum south of Paris.

  And so many others died. At night the trees disappear. I hear them speak in the book. I see them all, back alive and full of enthusiasm, following me on a wild project which stands alone among so many other wild enterprises in my life.

  —WERNER HERZOG

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author owes a debt of gratitude for the support, inspiration, and occasional forgiveness proffered by Nick Amster, Anand Arupo, Dr. Eric Bernstein, Karen Boulegon, Phyllis Brown, Dr. Andy Chen, Bob Dylan, Melanie Friesen, Mike Golden, Brad Goodman, Beatrice Greenberg, Ben Greenberg, Ona Greenberg, Ry Greenberg, Martje Grohmann, Alan Hans, Sheryl Hans, Judith Hans-Price, Jim Jarmusch, Jeffrey Koehler, Dan Margulis, Richard Ringler, Bob Rose, Dr. Richard Rosen, Deborah Salkov, Amanda Shank, Deborah Smith, John Stansifer, Yuval Taylor, Barbara Weitz, Stuart Weston, and Kelly Wilson.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALAN GREENBERG IN 1976. PHOTOGRAPH BY WERNER HERZOG

  Born in New York City and raised in Miami, Alan Greenberg broke into film as special unit photographer for Paramount Pictures on Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900. He then worked with Werner Herzog on his screenplays Heart of Glass, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde.

  For his first solo script, Greenberg tackled the mysterious tale of the legendary blues genius Robert Johnson, selling Love in Vain to Mick Jagger while it was still a work in progress. As the first American screenplay ever published by a major house (Doubleday) as literature, Love in Vain has received unanimous accolades domestically and overseas.

  Greenberg then directed the feature documentary Land of Look Behind about the death of the shamanistic reggae superstar Bob Marley. This unique film won the Chicago International Film Festival’s Gold Hugo Award, has received universal critical acclaim, and has been honored as the best American documentary of the past twenty-five years.

  Among Greenberg’s other screenplays are the Norman Jewison-produced Dance Me Outside; one for David Wolper and Merchant Ivory Productions entitled Picasso; a rock-and-roll epic called Jimi Hendrix; Wild American, about the naturalist John Muir; and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” the premier episode of a cable series. Two forthcoming productions are based on his screenplays Tutankhamun—Lord of Two Lands and The Cheese and the Worms.