“Images at the Horizon”

A WORKSHOP WITH WERNER HERZOG

CONDUCTED BY ROGER EDERT

AT THE FACETS MULTIMEDIA CENTER,

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS,

APRIL 17, 1979

(Transcribed, Annotated and Edited by Gene Walsh)

The Werner Herzog workshop was made possible, in part,

by grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the National

Endowment for the Arts.

Stills courtesy of Cinema Five, the Goethe Institute. New

Line Cinema, New Yorker Films, and the Twentieth Century

Fox Film Corporation.

I would also like to offer particular thanks to Ramona Curry

of the Goethe Institute in Chicago and Patsi Felch Mono-

koski of the Music Library at Northwestern University for

their suggestions on the preparation of this manuscript.

G. W.

1979. Facets Multimedia, Inc.

FACETS: HERZOG

Images at the Horizon”

A WORKSHOP WITH WERNER HERZOG CONDUCTED BY ROGER EBERT

AT THE FACETS MULTIMEDIA CENTER, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS,

APRIL 17, 1979

(Transcribed, Annotated and Edited by Gene Walsh)

ROGER EBERT: I first saw your work at the 1968 New York Film Festival when you

brought SIGNS OF LIFE, which was your first feature-length film. You were a new

name to us all at that time, and the New German Cinema itself was also very new,

and now my personal opinion is that in the last eleven years—I hope I don’t

embarrass you by saying this—you have made the most interesting films given us by

any single director. To my mind, you are the most interesting director of the 1970’s.

Unlike so many others, instead of just returning again and again to the same subject

matter and expressing it in exactly the same style, each of your films has been a new

departure and provided us with a new vision.

I think that one way to start this discussion tonight might be to ask you to talk about

the three films that were shown here today: the feature-length documentary, LAND

OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS, and the two shorter documentaries, THE

GREAT ECSTACY OF THE SCULPTOR STEINER and LA SOUFRIERE. I

had seen the two shorter documentaries before, but tonight I saw LAND OF

SILENCE AND DARKNESS for the first time, and it seemed to me that this film

has a certain definite connection with KASPAR HAUSER: EVERY MAN FOR

HIMSELF AND GOD AGAINST ALL. Both of these films seem to express your

recognition of the fact that we all have a desperate need to communicate and that, in

particular, a man—a person—who cannot speak and hear and talk and be

understood is, in a very tragic way, completely closed off from existing as a human

being.

WERNER HERZOG: Yes, it’s true. I’ve always seen that very close connection

between those two films. But I would also say LAND OF SILENCE AND

DARKNESS is very close to NOSFERATU now, and it’s very close to

WOYZECK, and, of course, it’s very close to STROSZE K and to all the other films

that I have made.

But LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS is a film that is particularly close to

my heart because it is so pure. It’s one of the purest films that I have ever made in the

sense that it is one in which things are allowed to come across in the most direct way.

The fact that it was made with a minimum of machinery and expense by just myself

and one cinematographer, Schmidt-Reitwein, made possible this real difference in

the directness of its approach.

Another reason that I like to show this film to more intimate audiences like this is

because I would like that it should be a source of encouragement for all of you who

want to make films. This particular film was made on less than thirty thousand

dollars. You should know that you can make films like this almost without any

money at all. You can make a film just with the guts, just with the sense that you

have to make it. In fact, you can make a film like this for no money at all! You only

have to steal, let’s say; fifty thousand feet of raw stock, expropriate a camera for two

weeks, and that’s it!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

And so that’s another of the reasons why I like to show this film.

Besides, when we tried to figure out the details of my stay here, I personally asked

Milos Stehlik, the Director of Facets, and the people at New Yorker Films, who

distribute most of my films in this country, to arrange to show some of my

documentaries, because they are almost always neglected by the public, and yet for

me they are just as important as my feature films. There is something in LAND OF

SILENCE AND DARKNESS that is almost like a part of me, but I would say that

a film like THE GREAT ECSTACY OF THE SCULPTOR STEINER is a film

which is also very close to me in a slightly different way. In STEINER the reasons

for this feeling of closeness are, perhaps, even clearer, more nearly at the surface,

because it’s almost an autobiographical film. At one time I wanted to become a

world champion in ski-jumping myself, and I think it is only because I quit my

career as a ski-jumper at the age of sixteen that I then really started to make films.

EBERT: When exactly did you start to make films? You must have started very early.

You’re thirty-six years old now, and so your film, SIGNS OF LIFE, must have been

made when you were only twenty-four, and I understand that you made four short

films even before that! Could you tell us something about those films?

HERZOG: I started to make films very early. At the age of fourteen or fifteen it was

already quite clear to me, apart from becoming a ski-jumper, that I was going to

make films. But, of course, I had many years of failures and humiliations. I did all

the things that everyone does who tries to make films and doesn’t really know what

the business is all about: I submitted my projects to several producers and to various

television stations and so on,. . .and all of them were rejected. It was very

humiliating how these people kicked me out of their offices.

But finally when I was seventeen and a half or almost eighteen...

EBERT: When you were sixteen, the networks weren’t interested in you?

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

HERZOG: No, it’s not like that because by that time I had already submitted one

project—it was on reforms in penitentiaries—that those people actually liked very

much. They said that they really wanted to make the film, but, since I had had such

bad experiences in showing up myself, because I was still a school boy, I didn’t want

to walk into their office. I just made phone calls, and I wrote letters to them. I even

had some letterhead printed to make myself look more impressive. Then, after two

months of negotiations—because I wanted to direct the film, myself—it was

inevitable that I had to see them, and, when I finally walked into their office, a

secretary opened the door, and theyjust looked beyond me as if expecting to see the

father that had come with his boy!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

But, of course, there was nobody behind me. All this lasted only ten seconds, and

then the whole thing was over, but it made me very mad. Because these people had

made such rude and insipid remarks, I thought to myself, “For heaven’s sake, what

made them producers,’ these assholes?”

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

How did these people become producers?

Out of this experience, I discovered that I would never be able to make a film in my

whole life if I did not become a producer myself, and so the very same night I started

to work in a factory—a steel factory—doing welding, and I did that for two years

from eight o’clock at night until six in the morning. During the daytime I was still in

school, but in the evenings I was able to make enough money to produce my first

three short films.

EBERT: Was your first film shot in 35mm.?

HERZOG: Yes, I started shooting with 35mm. film immediately.

EBERT: What were the subjects of your first films?

HERZOG: My first film, HERCULES, is a film that I do not like very much. I like

all my films, but there are two among them that I really do not like that much.

HERCULES was only a sort of test for me in terms of learning how to edit very

diversified materials. It’s a film on body building, but it’s just too superficial for me

to be able to call it a real film on body building or anything else.

Then I made GAME IN THE SAND in 1962. Only three or four people have seen it

so far, and I really would not want to call this a ~film.’ Not as long as I live!

And then I made PRECAUTIONS AGAINST FANATICS and LAST WORDS,

but LAST WORDS, a short film that I like very much, is a film which was made

during the shooting of SIGNS OF LIFE. I had written the screenplay for SIONS

OF LIFE when I was nineteen, but it took me four years until I got all the finances

together for it. So it was a very, very long hard struggle.

EBERT: In terms of the films that you have made since then, SIGNS OF LIFE is a

rather traditional film in style, isn’t it?

HERZOG: No, I don’t agree. It only looks on the surface as if it were made in a

traditional style, but, in fact, it’s really a film that is unique in that it has complete

innocence. It’s my only innocent film. This kind of innocence is something like

virginity that is over when once you do it.

EBERT: In other words, since SIGNS OF LIFE was a film that you made without

having made another feature, you were able to be completely fresh in your

approach toward making it.

HERZOG: No, it’s something else. Even today I still am able to approach each film in

a fresh way. It’s something else. For example, when I see my films in a

retrospective—and recently I saw SIGNS OF LIFE in just this sort of a series—l

always have the very strong feeling that this particular film is my on/v really

innocent film. It was made somehow as if there were no film history. Something like

that happens only once in your lifetime, because, when once you have lost this

innocence by doing your first film, or maybe your second, or third, then you...

EBERT: Then you become aware of yourself as an artist.

HERZOG: No, but I think we should leave it at that. I cannot explain it any better.

EBERT: Your next film was FATA MORGANA?

HERZOG: Yes.

EBERT: That was a film that when it was first shown in this country—I don’t know

what kind of reception it got overseas—but it got a very hostile press in New York in

particular.

HERZOG: Almost everywhere.

EBERT: I remember at that time all the people who loved SIGNS OF LIFE—when

you came back to the New York Film Festival with FATA MORGANA—they

said, “Here is this promising young director—this brilliant director from Ger-

many—why does he make such an inaccessible film? Why doesn’t he want to make a

film that people will want to come to see?”

HERZOG: But it is not inaccessible. I found that out, and I told those people

immediately, ten years ago, that they would soon get acquainted with this kind of

filmmaking, and I think that it has all worked out that way now. After ten years,

that film is still alive—still people go and see it—and they understand it much better

now, I think.

It’s very strange, but people always have certain expectations. They want me to do

certain things that are just in their own minds. They do not see that I also have my

needs and my anxieties and my fascinations. Then, for instance, when I come up

with a film like NOSFERATU—a vampire film—everyone starts to wonder just

why I should want to make a vampire film, as if they just cannot believe it, and yet

this film is so close to everything else that I have made so far!

You know it’s very, very difficult for anyone to continue to work in this medium,

because there’s always some sort of public opinion or public expectation which

interferes in some way. If I had followed up all the public expectations or even just

the expectations of the press, I think I wouldn’t have been able to make am’ films at

all anymore!

Once in a while—very often, in fact—I have thought to myself, “Why are these

people so mad? Why are they so insane? Why don’t they just accept what I do? Why

not just come and have a look at it?” But instead they are always coming toward my

work with plans for certain sorts of prefabricated houses’ already in their minds,

and for some reason they expect that my work should follow exactly the pattern of

those prefabricated mobile homes which they happen to have sticking somewhere

in their brains.

EBERT: And, if we’ve seen STROSZEK, we know you could never really count on a

mobile home!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

But, if I were asked, and I have not been asked, so I will just, you know, kind of

subtly ask myself, the answer to the question, “What is the connection between

NOSFERATU and your other films in terms of both subject and theme?” My

answer to this would be that in many of your films—both your fictional films and

your documentaries—you seem to show a fascination with characters who live at an

extreme of life. This could be either an extreme personal experience that is chosen

or an extreme position that is forced upon them by circumstances: by a handicap,

for example, or by cruel behavior, or by just their inherent oddness. However, when

I suggested to you earlier that this was something that I saw again and again in your

films—people living at the edge of life or at the extremes of existence—you said that

this interpretation was somehow too simple.

HERZOG: Yes, because I think that what you say carries with it an understanding,

let’s say, of a figure such as Kaspar Hauser, that he was something odd, or

something marginal, or something bizarre, or something extreme. But, when you

take a look at the film, you will find out very soon that Kaspar is the only one who

makes sense, the only one who is dignified, Who has a radical human dignity—and

all the rest are insane and bizarre and eccentric. Yes, all the rest are eccentric! And I

think that individuals like Kaspar Hauser are not so much marginal’ figures. They

are just very pure figures that have somehow been able to survive in a more or less

pure form. Sometimes, of course, they are under very heavy pressure, like, let’s say,

Steiner, 1 Or like Fini Straubinger,2 or even like myself when I was making LA

SOUFRIERE. But, under this sort of pressure, people reveal their various natures

to us. Ws exactly the same that is done in chemistry when you have a particular

substance that is unknown to you. When this happens, you must put this substance

under extreme conditions—like extreme heat, extreme pressure, extreme radi-

ation—and it is only then that you will be able to find out the essential structure of

this substance which you are trying to explain and to discover and to describe.

EBERT: That, in a sense, is what happened in AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD.

HERZOG: In almost all of the films.

EBERT: So, perhaps, when I’m saying that your characters are at extremes, it doesn’t

necessarily mean that they themselves are ‘extreme’ objectively, but only that they

are in an extreme relationship to the society that they find themselves in. Kaspar

Hauser, for example, is very much an outsider as he is seen by everybody else who is

alive at that time in that particular society.

HERZOG: But he’s not an outsider: he is the very center, and all the rest are outsiders!

That’s the point of the film.

I don’t know exactly how many of you in this country also think that Kaspar is just

some kind of a bizarre strange figure, but, if you do, it’s exactly the same thing that

has happened with audiences, for example, in Germany. There’s so much hatred

there against my films that you probably wouldn’t even believe it. AGUIRRE got

by far the worst reviews that I’ve seen in ten years for any film, and now for

NOSFERATU its still going on and on. In Germany, in my own country, people

have tried to label me personally as an eccentric, as some sort of strange freak that

does not fit into any of their patterns. And that’s ridiculous. They are insane!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE, FOLLOWED BY APPLAUSE)

EBERT: I was rather shocked when you told me that AGUIRRE ran for only three

weeks in Munich, which is your home city, and then moved to another theater

where it only ran for one additional week. Later, when people there said, “Well, why

can’t we see it?” you told them that they all could have seen it if only they had given it

the proper support. Did you know that AGUI RRE even had a longer run than that

right here in Chicago?

HERZOG: Yes.

EBERT: To begin with, I think, there was a built-in resistance on the part of Chicago

audiences—and even American audiences in general—to films from Germany from

directors that they had not yet heard about, but then an educational process went

forward. Places like Facets3 and the Film Festival4 and the Film Center5 began to

show all these interesting new German films—I’m stressing this point because I

think it’s generally agreed that many of the most interesting films of the last ten

years have been coming out of Germany—with the eventual result that an audience

has now developed to the point where your films do play here commercially, and,

while they don’t make as much money as they do in Rome, for example, where your

NOSFERATU has just broken the house record recently set by GREASE, and,

while we realize that that degree of commercial success is probably not going to

happen in Chicago for quite a few years, nevertheless, the turnout here tonight, for

example, and the successful commercial runs of your films in this city would seem to

indicate that you are not considered by us to be quite as ‘bizarre,’ shall we say, as

you are in Germany.

HERZOG: Yes, that’s true, and it’s also true that during this time my only means of

survival has been on the basis of showings of my films outside of Germany, like in

Algeria or in Mexico or in France or in Yugoslavia or here in the United States. In

Germany I have had to work for eleven years in almost a total void without any

response at all. There was some response, of course, from a small flock of friends

and believers who would come to see all my films—but, although you can write

books or do paintings for ten or eleven years without having any sizable public

response, for me to be able to survive in filmmaking for so long has been a complete

miracle. I do not fully understand how I have managed to survive all this time, but

probably the most important factor in my survival has been the reception of my

films outside Germany—particularly in the United States—which has grown more

and more through the years. That you are here now and that you are looking at my

films is the basis for my survival, and it has been the basis for my survival for at least

a decade. That’s why I like to come here. I have no other specific reason for coming

here. Usually I would much rather go to more remote places. Chicago is very big,

and I would prefer to go to smaller places which are, like Mongolia, still

unexplored.

EBERT: Unfortunately there are whole states in the United States where a sub-titled

film has never yet played commercially.

HERZOG: Yes, it’s a great problem for many people here in this country to accept a

culture that is not their own, because this country still is struggling very hardjust to

define its own cultures. It has so many roots and so many different ethnic

minorities, and they all are still in a process of amalgamation. What this means is

that whenever something comes toward them from outside, they will always try to

keep their fences’ completely closed. So it really is not surprising that it sometimes

takes very, very long in order to jump those fences!

EBERT: You might want to say something about your theory that Americans are,

in fact, much more bizarre than they believe.

HERZOG: Another thing about Americans that I’ve said before is that these people

here believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the

world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are the most exotic people

in the world right now. Believe me, I say this with a lot of sympathy!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

I have been in the United States a couple of times now, and every single time I come

here I’m surprised all over again. In San Francisco, for example, I switched on the

television, and there was this preacher who for four hours was screaming for

money! Without even a break for commercials!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

And that’s not an event that only takes place somewhere in California. This

program is broadcast nationwide! His name, I think, is Scott, a white-haired...

EBERT: Did you get his address?

HERZOG: No, but there are many wonderful preachers all around, and I like them

very much! I would like to get in closer touch with them.

EBERT: Was this sort of vision of the United States one of the main reasons why you

wanted to make STOSZEK and your documentary on auctioneers, HOW MUCH

WOOD WOULD A WOODCHUCK CHUCK?

HERZOG: The film about auctioneers is something quite different. It’s about

discovering the ultimate language—the very last poetry that is ultimately imagin-

able—and about just how far language itself can go in this capitalistic system. Every

single system develops its own sort of extreme language. For example, in Germany

we’ve developed the language of propaganda to a still unchallenged extreme. Or,

for another example, the Orthodox Church has developed the use of ritual chant in

their liturgy in a way that is also unparalleled and quite extreme. And now this

capitalistic society has begun to develop its own sort of an ultimate language which

is, for me, the language of the auctioneers!

EBERT: What’s fascinating though is that you would want to make a film about

somebody who talks as fast as it is possible to talk and yet still want to make other

films about people who do not talk at all and cannot even hear or see.

HERZOG: But with the auctioneers it’s not only talking fast. It’s almost like a

ritualistic incantation, It has a common borderline with the last poetry that is

possible for us, and it is very close to music as well.

But, anyway, STROSZEK goes more vitally into what I’m concerned with, because

in Western Europe, in particular, there is such a strong domination of American

culture and American films! And all of us who are working in filmmaking have to

deal with this sort of domination. For me, it was particularly important to define

my position about this country and its culture, and that’s one of the major reasons

why I made STROSZEK.

But another important reason for making STROSZEK was that I originally

wanted to make a film of WOYZECK with Bruno. WOYZECK, you know, is a

subject that goes back to a theater-fragment by a German poet, Georg Büchner,

who died in 1837. He was probably the most ingenious writer for the stage that we

ever had, and Büchner, who unfortunately died at the age of twenty-three, left his

drama WOYZECK, unfinished, as just a fragment. Nobody even knows for certain

the exact sequence of his scenes, but, even so, it’s extraordinary! It’s really the most

remarkable and probably the strongest drama-text that has ever been written in the

German language, and I wanted to make this text into a film with Bruno. But then I

had some afterthoughts, and I had the feeling that it was not Bruno who should be

the one to play in WOYZECK, and so I told him, “Bruno, I’m going to invent a

story for you, not a WOYZECK but something with a basic feeling like

WOYZECK in it.” And so I wrote STROSZEK, although WOYZECK was still on

my mind, and it still kept on bothering me.

Then last year right after I shot NOSFERATU, the vampire film, only five days

later, I shot WOYZECK with the same crew and the same leading actor, Klaus

Kinski, who is known to you as ~Aguirre.’But now the situation is such that you will

probably see WOYZECK he/ore you will see NOSFERATU here in this country.

EBERT: Since you mentioned Bruno S. who is the person who plays ~Kaspar Hauser’

and who also, of course, is the star of STROSZEK, perhaps you could talk to usa

little bit about your use of Bruno and his feelings about being in movies and what

you describe as his ‘twenty-three years in captivity.’

HERZOG: Well, when you ask me about the use of Bruno...

EBERT: Or the collaboration with him, I should have said.

HERZOG: Yes, but still that always implies a question of morality.

EBERT: I didn’t intend...

HERZOG: And, when one speaks about the use of Bruno, it always sounds like an

accusation, and so I will take it as that!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

Yes, because to make a film with a man like him always has a question of morality

involved, and. I think, this was the all-pervading problem that we were aware of

during the shooting of both the films that we made with him.

Perhaps I have to explain a little bit about Bruno so that you can understand. He

was born as an illegitimate child to a prostitute in Berlin, and she really did not want

to have a baby so she used to beat him. Then, when he was three, she beat him so

hard that he lost his power of speech, and this was a perfect pretext for her to put

him away into an asylum for retarded children, a place where he definitely’ did not

belong. He was very much afraid of being in this situation because the other

children in that place were either insane or extremely retarded, and he was quite

smart. So, at the age of nine, after six years of captivity in there, he started trying to

escape, but then, when he finally did escape, he was captured and put into a

correctional institution. From there he escaped again and again, and each time he

was put into more and more severe correctional institutions. Eventually he

developed a long record of minor criminal offenses: for example, for vagrancy or

public indecency. One of these times he broke into a car in wintertime when it was

snowing, and he slept inside the car. Next morning the police dragged him out, and

for this he was given a five months’ term in prison. And so, all together, he was

forced to spend a total of twenty-three years in this kind of captivity, and, as a

result, in many ways he’s been almost completely destroyed. By the time I met him,

he was really as badly mutilated as any man I have ever seen in all my life, but, even

so, in terms of making a film with him, once you have decided to make that film—or

am’ film, for that matter—on the very bottom line of things, it must always be an

exchange of services. It’s always an exchange of using each other for the sake of a

particular project, for the realization of a certain film that we have decided to make

together. Bruno knew that each of us—myself as much as anyone else—would have

to submit our private feelings and our laziness and our personal desires to that final

goal that we all had together. I think that Bruno understood this completely.

One signal that he understood all this—one particular thing that was very

significant for me—was that for the entire six weeks of shooting for KASPAR

HAUSER he did not even once take off his costume. He actually slept in his

costume all the time. In the little town where we shot that film we were staying in a

hotel, but, since Bruno was always in a situation in which he believed that he might

need to escape and run away immediately, he never slept in the bed. It was really

very pathetic. He just had a pillow and a blanket on the ground right next to the

exit-door.

On another occasion I also spent some time with him in his own apartment. Here we

slept in the same room, but one day I had to get up very early at 5:30 in the morning

while Bruno was still there snoring, and so, before leaving, I said, “Bruno,” very

quietly to him to tell him that I was going. His reaction to this was so pathetic. It was

just as if you had hit him with a bullet. He jumped right out of that bed and was

standing there, and he said, “Yes!” just as if he were going to have to run.

Really, things like that are so tragic that, of course, it is a very, very important

question whether or not one should ever make a film with him at all or just keep

your hands off entirely. But, in this particular instance, I think Bruno understood

that this was also to be a film about him, that it was also going to be a way of

revealing his own situation to him. It was a way of making things more ‘transparent’

to him, and I think he understood that. But he also understood that six weeks of

shooting a film could never repair all the damages that already had been done to

him.

Still there remains a very, very deep loneliness in that man and a basic distrust of

any human being. Even so, there were sometimes signals of trust. For example,

when he would want to be very affectionate but could not express it directly in

words, he would come and grab and squeeze my fingertip. But, then, the very next

moment he would accuse me of stealing his salary away from him simply because I

had opened a bank account for him. I had even asked him before to do this for

himself. The reason that I had tried to talk him into doing this was because at night,

when he would go to a bar, he would just get himself drunk and toss his money

around so that by the next morning he would always have spent all of his salary.

That’s why we opened this bank account for him, but he thought there was a big

conspiracy going on between me and the boss of the bank to steal the money back

from him again. So one day I asked the boss of that bank to have lunch with us so

that he could explain to Bruno that there was no conspiracy, and this man tried for

two hours to explain to Bruno that only he himself with his own signature could

withdraw any money from that account whenever he wished to do so, but Bruno

still wouldn’t believe it. So we took all the money out, and we left it in his closet! But

I understand that he finally keeps his own bank account now, that he finally trusts

in it.

I also know that he is still obsessed with death. For example, his greatest obsession

during the shooting of KASPAR HAUSER involved his scene in the morgue with

that big stone table. He wanted to have that table! He always said to me, “This is the

table of truth, because we are all going to end up here stark naked, and no one will

be any different.” This was the table of truth for Bruno, but it weighed almost a ton,

and so we couldn’t buy it. Finally I bought him a table out of a surgery-room, which

had flexible parts all over it a real/i’ wonderful one!—and he keeps it now in his

apartment.

Yes, now his situation has somewhat improved. He has moved into a three-room

apartment which you can see for yourself in the film STROSZEK. Yes, part of that

film was shot in his own apartment, and there you will see the piano, for example,

which he bought with his salary from KASPAR HAUSER. So his personal

conditions have improved slightly, but not drastically, because he’s still doing ajob

in a steel factory in Berlin. He has never quit that job. We only shot these two films

during his vacations.

EBERT: You told me earlier that Bruno to this day in Germany is actually better

known as a street musician than as a film personality.

HERZOG: That only pertains to the situation in Berlin where he lives and where he’s

been a street singer for twelve years. He knows by now, every single backyard in

Berlin, and all the people there also know him. I only mentioned this to you because

I wanted you to know that in making our film it was not so much a question of us

just dragging him out into the light in front of cameras. By the time that the film was

made, he had already been a public figure in Berlin making appearances in front of

small crowds in backyards for at least a dozen years. So it really was not so shocking

for him to be in a film. Besides he had already been in a film before this, a semi-

documentary by a young Berlin film-maker, an excellent movie called BRUNO

THE BLACK.6 That, in fact, is how I discovered him.

EBERT: When you said that you spent ten years making films without having very

much financial support or even developing very much of a following in Germany, I

was going to ask you if it was particularly difficult to finance films when you have a

fairly unpredictable person in the lead like Bruno, but, then, it occurred to me that

you would probably never make a film that was easy to finance because, in addition

to the difficulties that are often inherent in film-making, you always make films

which seem to be almost impossible to make anyway: for example, AGUIRRE,

THE WRATH OF GOD.

HERZOG: Yes, people in some of the studios have asked me, “How, for heaven’s

sake, could you possibly have produced that film yourself? It must have cost five

million dollars at least!” Then, when I told them that it was made for only three

hundred twenty thousand dollars, they simply didn’t believe me. They just thought I

was a liar. They still do not believe me, but it’s the truth!

Here in this country you always have the inclination to speak about money, as if

money in itself could ever produce a film! As if money had ever moved a mountain

It is never money that moves a mountain!

EBERT: Not money, but will.

HERZOG: No, it’s more than that. It’s faith or spirit—people who fight for their

lives—or just sheer guts! But it has never been cash money that’s made my films. Of

course, cash money has always been involved—it’s like some sort of ‘grease’ that

keeps things going—but it’s only one of the several components that go into making

films, It is never money alone that makes films. It is not money that moves a

mountain!

WORKSHOP MEMBER #1: You told us where you found Bruno, but where did you

find the actors who play the various Americans in STROSZE K? Were they all from

Wisconsin?

HERZOG: Yes. I found them all in Plainfield Wisconsin which is called ‘Railroad

Flats’ in the film, but, as a matter of fact, ‘Railroad Flats’ is really tnis place named

Plainfield, Wisconsin, a little town of four hundred eighty people. In this place,

within five years, eight of these people became mass murderers.!

(EXCLAMATIONS OF SURPRISE AND SOME LAUGHTER

FROM AUDIENCE)

And the most notorious case—one which you might have heard about—was Ed

Gem, the man who decapitated and skinned people and made a throne-seat out of

human flesh and other things like that! He was a man from Plainfield, Wisconsin.

I went there with a friend of mine, Errol Morris, who has now made an excellent

film. This is his first film, and it is called GATES OF HEAVEN. Try to see that film!

Did you know that I had to push him very hard in order to get him to make that

film? It was the type of situation where he was always complaining to me that he had

no money to make a film, and so I finally said to him, “You just don’t have the guts

to do it!” I even said, “But, if you do start to make your film tomorrow, I’m going to

eat my shoes!”—and I did so!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

That’s why I’m wearing new boots today!

But, anyway, Errol Morris had been investigating all these murder cases for two

years, and he had about five thousand’pages of transcripts. Really incredible stuff!

But the reason that I ended up in Plainfield, Wisconsin, was because of one

particular question that had arisen from all this research. He had found out that Ed

Gein had also dug up graves—it’s rather well-known this fact—but, in addition, he

had also found out that all these dug-up graves made a perfect circle and that the

very center of this circle was the grave of Ed Gem’s mother! So naturally we were

yen’ curious to find out if he had also excavated the body of his own mother, and the

only real way to find out the answer to this was by going at night and digging in that

graveyard!

So, after I had completed some shooting in Alaska for HEART OF GLASS, we

made an appointment to meet at a certain date down in Plainfield, Wisconsin.

EBERT: Did he really dig up his mother?

HERZOG: I don’t know, because we never ended up digging in that graveyard, and

I’ll tell you why. It was because my friend did not show up! Of course. I was very

much interested in finding out the answer myself, but I would not do it alone. It was

primarily Errol Morris’ own battle to find this answer out. So, when he did not

show up, I called him and said, “I think it is good that we did not do it. because,

sometimes, it is better and more valuable to have an opeii question than to have one

that is answered. To have to keep this question open did he really dig up his

mother or not’? and not knowing is much more exciting and much more rewarding

than simply knowing the real answer.

So, now, I think it was good that he was such a mess and did not show up, but, when

he didn’t show up. at that time, our car had broken down in Plainfield, Wisconsin,

and there was no garage anywhere around. We asked people if there was anyone

there who could help us, and they all said. “Yes, there’s a wreckage-yard just a mile

outside of town.” So we went there, and there was this man, and I liked him so

much...

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

But that wreckage-yard itself was so sad with all these ducks sitting around in the

cold, and this man who owned it had an Indian assistant whom he used to shout at

and kick in the ass!

Then, a year later, when I came hack to film STROSZEK. I found him again. and I

said. “I want to make a movie here. Where is your assistant, that Indian who ssorks

for your and he said, ~‘What Indian?” Hedidn’t esen remember the Indian because

he had hired that guy for one day and was so dissatisfied with him that he had fired

him that very same evening. He didn’t even remember at first that he had e~er hired

that man once! But we finally tracked that Indian down.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #2: In STROSZEK those two people on their tractors

carrying guns was that really happening out there’?

HERZOG: No, that was invented, hut actually something like that might have

happened at any moment. It is really very dangerous there in Plainfield. because

those people are all so trigger-happy that sometimes they will just shoot instantly at

whatever moves. So, you see, it was probably a really good thing that we did not dig

in that graveyard there, because, if they had seen us in the graveyard digging, they

might not have asked questions but just opened fire!

During the filming of STROSZEK, even then, there were several serious shooting

incidents because it was the hunting season. As you may know, each season there

are some two hundred fifty thousand hunters that come up to this area for deer

hunting.

During this time, I had asked my editor, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus to come with us

on location. She was so fed up with just sitting all the time in the editing-room that

finally I said to her, “Please come with us and do continuity.” But, when she got

there, it was so extremely cold that she decided to wear this reindeer coat which

came all the way down to her ankles, and, wearing this coat, she was just walking

across an open field when suddenly a police-car stopped, and these two cops rushed

out and jumped her, just like on a football field! They brought her down to the

ground because they were quite convinced that if she had walked another fifty yards

she would have been shot!

Did you know that event year in that town they shoot about fifteen people and that

they also shoot about one hundred fifty cows!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

And do you know in Plainfield, Wisconsin, what the farmers do? With white oil-

paint, they write on their animals in great big letters: C 0 W. This is a cow!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

Oh, it’s a wonderful place!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

Well, you would like it there. You know there are some of these places in the United

States where all the lines of force somehow cross each other almost like knots, like a

certain sort of concentration of what’s going on in the rest of the United States.

These are places like the Stock Exchange on Wall Street, like San Quentin prison,

like Disneyland, like Las Vegas,.. .and like Plainfield, Wisconsin! Please remember

that town!

EBERT: I realize I probably shouldn’t ask this question, but which of your films do

you think is your best film? Is it AGUIRRE or EVEN DWARFS STARTED

SMALL or, perhaps, HEART OF GLASS?

HERZOG: I never speak about my best film. I really like them all very much, with the

exception of the first two which I do not like that much. I like them all like children.

Children are never perfect, and they all have their weaknesses and their strong

points, but what matters is that they are alive. All these films are still very much

alive so I wouldn’t be able to give a preference to any individual one. Even so,

however, I do have the feeling that a film like EVEN DWARFS STARTED

SMALL is going to outlive AGUIRRE. It’s going to become older. Just as you

might predict that, since this particular child is not very strong physically, as a man,

he will probably not grow older than—let’s say—sixty, whereas another child may

live to become ninety, so, in a similar way, I think that DWARFS will outlive

AGUIRRE, but, then again, maybe I am wrong.

EBERT: I’m handicapped at this point because EVEN DWARFS STARTED

SMALL is one of the few films that you have made that I have never seen, but I

would like to say that I do find HEART OF GLASS to be terrifically moving,

profoundly mysterious and poetic.

HERZOG: Thank you for saying that, because this film, in particular, has had very

bad press here in this country.

EBERT: It made every ten best list here in Chicago.

HERZOG: Yes, but, generally speaking, it is still one of those films that has not been

accepted, particularly not here in this country, and I like that film very much

because I learned so much from having made it.

During the preliminary tests we arranged before we shot HEART OF GLASS, we

saw many interesting examples of just how extremely well memory works under

hypnosis. One of the most fascinating things that I learned is the extent to which

people can bring out something that is hidden very deep inside and perform it

publicly in their state of trance.

But now I have gone beyond that. For example, I have shown films to audiences

already under hypnosis. In order to accomplish this, I went to a theatre and

instructed all the people there that I would show a film to them, and that, if they

wished, they could experience this film under hypnosis. This way I discovered that,

if you look at a film under hypnosis, you mai’ be able to have visionary experiences

of a type that you have never had before. Of course, it does not work in exactly the

same way with everyone. There are a lot of variations. In fact, every single person

saw the film in a different way, but I would say that thirty per cent of the people who

saw the film under hypnosis had absolutely unique visionary experiences.

One purpose of this experiment in hypnotism was to discover to what extent it

would be possible to bring out and emphasize those poetic’ visionary qualities that

are hidden inside so many people. So, in order to find out just how inventive they

really were, I hypnotized them. First I told them, “You are an inventor of great

genius, and you are working on an insane, beautiful invention, and then I told

them, “Invent now, and, when I come to you and put my hand on your shoulder,

you will tell me what you are inventing, exactly what sort of machinery it is that you

have created.” And the results were so incredible that you just wouldn’t even believe

it! So much imagination it was just incredible!

And then I tried to provoke poetic language out of people who had never before

even been in touch with any kind of poetry But you know you cannot simply say to

them, “Now you are a great poet.” If you were to do this, they would not become

great poets. They would not even be able to write or produce a single line of poetry.

It’s always a question of how you suggest it to them. So, in this instance, what I

suggested to them was that they were travelling into a strange, exotic, beautiful

country with forms of jungle, birds and trees that they had never seen before in all

their lives and that for the first time they were going to set foot on an island which

had not been visited for hundreds of years. And I told them that, when they were

walking through this jungle, they would come across a huge rock and that, when

they took a closer look, they would see that this was not just an ordinary rock but

was instead one solid, smooth piece of emerald. And I told them that there was a

poet five hundred years ago—a holy monk who had lived on this island and who

was a great poet—and he had left an inscription on this rock. It took him all of his

life to carve this inscription because the emerald was so hard. It took him all of his

life to engrave with a chisel and a hammer this one single poem on the rock. And

then I told them, “Now, when I put my hand on your shoulder, you will open your

eyes, and you will be the first one who is privileged to see and read this poem.” And

so I put my hand on the shoulder of a man who was at least fifty-five years old and

who was working in a horse-stable—a stable-cleaner without ant’ formal educa-

tion—and this man started to read’ a poem that was really very beautiful. With a

very strange voice, he started to recite, and here is what he said: ‘Why can’t we drink

the moon? Why is there no vessel to hold it?” And it went on and on like this, and it

was very, very beautiful.

But, after that, I decided to stop doing these tests because I did not have a clear

enough idea of exactly what I was going to study, and tests of this kind should be

done very carefully and cautiously because they also imply certain definite risks.

At the present time, I think that we do not know very much about the process of

vision itself. We know so very little about it, and, with this kind of experimental

work that I have been describing, we might soon be able to learn a little bit more,

This kind of knowledge is precisely what we need. We need it very urgently because

we live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and, if we do not find

a dequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to

express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs, It’s as simple as that! We have

already recognized that problems like the energy shortage or the overpopulation of

the world or the environmental crisis are great dangers for our society and for our

kind of civilization, but I think it has not yet been understood widely enough that

we also absolutely need new images.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #3: In relation to your statement about new images, I’ve

recently seen NOSFERATU in a pre-release screening, and I believe that FATA

MORGANA, HEART OF GLASS, and NOSFERATU are your most fully

realized films in terms of what you believe about the importance of creating new

images. I was wondering if possibly you feel the same way?

HERZOG: To some extent, yes, but I think that this same striving—this Irving to

articulate new images—is present in all my films.

One should never attempt to define this process just in terms of the images that you

see on the screen, because it also involves a new form of ‘emotionality’ which

somehow underlies the images in all these films. For example, if all of you had not

seen LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS and if I were to show you only the

last five minutes of the film—the scene where there’s a man who embraces a tree—

all of you would probably think, “Well, there’s a man who embraces a tree,” and

that’s all. What’s happening is really very simple: you just see a man who feels and

embraces a tree, and that is all, but, if you had seen the entire film, then you would

have received this scene and this image with a different dimension of depth and

insight. It requires that additional one and a half hours of film preceding this scene

to make you receptive and sensitive enough to be able to understand that this is one

of the deepest moments you can ever encounter in the cinema.

So, you see, it’s not just the image itself which conveys this meaning, but it’s very

hard to verbalize exactly what I mean. Perhaps, since you seem to have some

sympathy for my films, you will also be able to understand what I mean, but I know

I cannot really teach this to you. I cannot teach you. You have to see it for yourself.

You have to be able to sense it directly. That is why the films count much more than

anything I could possibly tell you. It’s misleading to have me here and have all this

attention focused on me personally because the only thing that really counts is what

you see on the screen.

Neither do I want to take the privilege away from you of discovering certain things

for yourself nor do I want to ‘squeeze’ into you certain opinions of my own—yet it

has happened very often to me that, when I’ve tried to verbalize and to explain on a

very personal level what I meant to express in my films, people take me like

Moses—like a prophet of some sort—and then they say, “Well, but the films don’t

fulfill exactly what he says. They just don’t make sense the way he says they do.”

Very often—very, very often, in fact—I have run into trouble of this kind because

what I say often does not seem to make sense for people in respect to the films that

they have seen. Therefore. I hesitate at this time—or ani’ time—to give you a ‘recipe’

for understanding them.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #4: 1 also saw a pre-release screening of the ninety-four

minute American version of NOSFERATU, and I noticed that several scenes are

missing which were described in articles about the production of the film—such as

for example, a certain scene with Clemens Scheitz that shows him spreading the

plague and also a scene where Klaus Kinski as ‘Nosferatu’ frightens horses that are

on the horizon just by making a slight gesture—and I was wondering if there is a

different length or slightly different content in the German language version and if

there is any way that we will be able to see that version?

HERZOG: Yes, what you have read is true. These scenes do, in fact, exist, but they

never were part of the completed film, neither in the German nor in the English

version. As you seem to know, we shot the film in two languages, in German and in

English, and both versions are slightly different from each other, but in substance

they are the same. These two scenes that you have mentioned were left out of both

versions in very early stages of the editing.

Both these scenes in and of themselves were very beautiful, particularly the scene

where the vampire frightens the horses: in this scene there are some horses grazing

on the meadow, and he just stands there and very slowly raises his arm, and he has

long claws, and he only does just that and the horses go off in panic! We had an

explosive device behind the camera, of course, with the fuse set to go off at the very

moment he does that, and this scene looked very good on the screen, but, in context

with the scene that was shown right before, it looked too much like a circus trick,

and, in the context of the entire film, I didn’t like it anymore.

Now, in regard to your question about the scene involving Clemens Scheitz, there

are actually two scenes that I cut out which are also very good scenes in themselves,

and I’ve even shot certain other longer sequences that are entirely cut out of the final

version of the film.

Exactly the same thing has happened to all my films. In AGU I RRE, for example, I

had at least one more hour of very, very beautiful material that is n5iTWffiëTfliii~

now, and also in KASPAR HAUSER, there were certain scenes that simply

deviated too far when seen in the film’s full context. During the editing of every film,

one has to undergo this kind of cruelty which makes it necessary for you to just tear

these scenes from your heart and throw them away and leave them. This is one of

the most painful lessons that you have to learn when you make films—that in each

film there is some sort of an unique inner timing that must be discovered and

respected so that this particular subject will work for an audience.

And now, as to your question about the difference in the German and the English

versions, you should know that only here in the United States have we decided to

cut it down by a couple of minutes. I made all these cuts myself, and, although I

never thought I would want to do something like this, in making these cuts I have

really learned something.

Before making these cuts, we first showed this film in previews, and for these

previews we had a very, very average kind of American audience—taxi drivers, for

example, and people who just incidentally strolled into the theatre—and I found

out that NOSFERATU, in its original cut, in certain moments, all of a sudden,

became boring for these audiences. It took a quarter of an hour of strong film after

these sequences to pull these audiences back into the film.

So, by making these cuts on NOSFERATU, I did exactly the same thing that I had

already done for THE GREAT ECSTACY OF THE SCULPTOR STEINER.

Basically I made that film for television, but, when it was finished, I ended up with a

film that was exactly one hour long. I wanted to have this film televised nationwide

in Germany, but the people at the television stations went out of their minds when I

came to them with this sixty-minute film, because in Germany we have a very

strongly structured pattern for showing things on television. We have—let’s say—

fifteen minutes of news, no commercials, and then forty-five minutes of docu-

mentaries. Forty-five minutes, that’s the length of our television documentaries,

and so they said to me, “We cannot show this film because it’s one hour

long, and we would have to change the entire structure of television in order for us

to show it!”—this structure is extremely complicated in West Germany because it’s

state-owned, and the Federation is involved in all of this—and so I said to them,

Let me try to cut it down to forty-five minutes.” Then they said, “If you do that,

please try to make it forty-four minutes and ten seconds long, because we absolutely

need another fifty seconds for station identification and the introduction for the

film.” So I went back to the film, and I made it exactly forty-four minutes and ten

seconds long. In doing this, I did not feel I had lost a jewel’ out of my crown,

because I consider filmmaking as a craft, and I am a craftsman.

In the same way, in regard to NOSFERATU, I learned that for wider audiences in

America the film in its original form would not work properly so what we are

doing now is to release the film in America in the larger cities in the German-

language version with English subtitles, and then later we will also show the film in

more remote areas in the English version which has been cut by a couple of minutes,

and this is all right with me. I do not feel hurt about it. Nobody at Fox ever insisted

that these cuts be made.

But I must tell you that those preview screenings were such a cruelty! People were

asked to fill out and return evaluation cards which asked, “How much did you like

the film?” and then you were asked to give the film an ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’ or

good’ or ‘mediocre’ or ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ and many of these people were so mad at

the film that they made a new category on their cards and crossed it, and this

category said, ‘The pits!’

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

And when you get that back, I mean. hum/reds of those cards...

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

To release a film and to move it out to audiences is always a process of extreme

cruelty, and one has to learn how to survive it. That’s a real art. You have to survive

this sort of being kicked in your belly and being kicked in \‘our ass and being

slapped in your face-—-and so. after all, I think that the film is all right like that!

People who have seen it with these cuts really don’t miss anvthing.

EBERT: 20th Century Fox is probably getting all its money back in the French and

Italian releases alone.

HERZOG: No, not from the French release, because NOSFERATU was a co-

production with Gaumont, and Gaumont took all the French territories, and not

Fox.

But in France NOSFERATU was extremely successful. It had an amazing amount

of spectators. It’s a miracle to me. I don’t understand it. We had eighty-five

thousand spectators in the first week in Paris alone! That’s insane for me. It was

only out-done by STAR WARS!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

And for Rome I didn’t get the exact figures, but Fox told me that in Italy alone they

would get their money back.

All that success in France and Italy gives me a very good feeling because now we are

not under so much pressure to desperately make every last quick dollar out of this

country by pushing it with an insane sort of campaign. You know this kind of

bullshit that sometimes goes on!

WORKSHOP MEMBER #4: Could I ask you a second question very briefly? Your

films seem to have a great deal of spontaneity, but yet there’s such a very calculated

beauty about Schmidt-Reitwein’s images. The lighting and even the exact time of

day seem to be very calculated, almost to the degree that is found in Vermeer’s

paintings. For example, there’s a moment in LA SOUFRIERE that the camera

goes toward the sun—it’s a ‘lens filter’ effect just like the cover of the current Popol

Vuh album—or in NOSFERATU you have a moment where the camera goes up to

the impending clouds just when the character played by Bruno Ganz is wondering

about his journey. He comes to the mountain. Then he hears the rumbling, and

these clouds are coming in. All these images seem to be so extremely meticulous, but

yet there remains a definite feeling of spontaneity.

HERZOG: Yes, you are right. Those images are very, very precisely planned. We had a

very clear concept of what we were going to do, and Schmidt-Reitwein is one of the

most excellent cameramen in the world at organizing light—at knowing exactly

how to light a scene—in order to get these particular effects.

When I first met Schmidt-Reitwein, I saw that he had something very particular

about him. He’s a man who had spent three and a half years in prison in Bautzen in

East Germany in solitary confinement. As a result, this man sees certain things that

other people do not see any more, and so I said to him, “Please come and live with

me,” and we lived together for five years in the same house, and then we went to

make films together.

For NOSFERATU we did these scenes so precisely because we knew we were

working in a very special field—namely the field of a particular kind of ‘genre’ film

which had its own specific rituals and narrative laws and mythic figures that have all

been well-known to audiences for at least half a century now. It is just as if, for

example, I were going to make a ‘western,’ and, by the way, that is one thing that I

am not going to do!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

But, if I were going to make a ‘western,’ however, first I would ask myself, “What is

this particular genre about? What are its basic principles? How am I going to modify

and develop this genre further?”

And so one of the reasons for this precision in regard to the images is because the

genre of vampire films requires extreme stylization, and you have to work very

precisely in order to achieve that exact level of stylization.

But it is also true that very much of what you think may be stylization and deliberate

construction still may have developed instinctively. It’s hard to explain, but, for

example, that scene on the mountain with the clouds came about because I simply

liked those clouds, and I said, “Since we still have film in the camera, let’s go ahead

and film these clouds.” Now, from the viewpoint of narration, it does not make any

sense at all to show clouds that barely move for two full minutes, yet in terms of the

over-all context it’s very beautiful and necessary.

On the other hand, some kind of construction is also necessary once in a while. For

example, the final shot in NOSFERATU was filmed on a sandy plain in Holland,

and there was a very strong wind so that the sand was blowing at the height of our

ankles, and, for this scene, a horse with his black rider is supposed to gallop toward

the horizon. In order to obtain the proper effect, I shot, separately from that scene,

shots of clouds in single-fram exposure—about one frame every ten seconds—

which were then incorporated into the original image, and, when we did this, we

turned the shots of the clouds around so that the clouds which you are seeing are

actually upside down. It produces a very, very strange effect, and I like it very much.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #5: To what degree are your films preconceived, and to

what degree are they created as you shoot them?

HERZOG: You should extend your question even further and ask me to what degree

are my films developed during editing as well?

But it’s not easy to answer your question in a general way because each film

somehow has been quite different. But, speaking as generally as possible, I would

say that all my screenplays have been written basically as prose-texts. The word

camera’ never even appears in any of these texts, and I would say that I’ve written

most of the dialogue for most of the films very often at the very last moment. During

the shooting of both AGUIRRE and KASPAR HAUSER, for example, I didn’t

even know the dialogue myself ten minutes prior to the shooting, and, then, under

that enormous pressure of getting everything ready, I absolutely had to produce

something, and so I finally wrote the dialogue!

In a similar way, very often I have changed the scripts rather drastically during the

shooting and introduced many entirely new scenes into many of the films. In

STROSZEK, far example, the end of the film is now quite different from the way it

was originally described in the screenplay. AGUIRRE had a completely different

beginning and a completely different ending in the screenplay, and both of those

were changed during the shooting. Originally I had wanted to open AGUIRRE

with the whole army up an that sixteen thousand foot high glacier. First you would

see a thin thread of animals—of pigs—four hundred of them—moving across the

glacier. They would be completely dizzy and staggering because of that altitude,

and, then, you would see that they were only a very small part of a huge army.

Somewhere in between the extremes of that army, there was this smaller army of

pigs! But I didn’t do it the way I had planned because everyone got sick from the

altitude. Two out of three people just couldn’t stand it up there, and so I said to

myself that I simply could not do it the way it had been planned. I knew that we

would have to have a different beginning, and I really like the beginning that

AGUIRRE now has very much.

But, as a very rough general rule, I would say about thirty per cent of what you see in

the final version of my films has not been in the screenp1ay. Then, during editing of

course, there are a lot of further modifications. More than you would even think

possible!

But it is really not very easy to answer your question because every single film that

I’ve made has had a completely different history.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #6: In attempting to get your vision on the screen, in a film

like AGUIRRE, for example, just how much do you listen to your editor?

HERZOG: My editor, Beate Mainka-ielhinghaus, is very important to me, and I

would say that without her I would be only a shadow of myself. But there’s always

an enormous struggle going on between the two of us, and it’s very strange how she

behaves during this process. She’s very rude with me, and she expresses her

opinions in a manner that is like the most mediocre housewife, but somehow she

always makes sense. Nevertheless, sometimes she makes mistakes, and we always

struggle.

I worked with her for the first time during the editing of SIGNS OF LIFE. I had

really made that film with the blood of my heart. I had struggled for it, and, when

she saw the material for the first time, it was on a reel that was coiled the wrong way

around so that she saw it backwards, and so she would look at the whole reel on the

Steenbeck in rapid speed which is five times the normal speed, and she would be

seeing it backwards besides, and she would say, “Bullshit!” and throw it all away!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

It’s all dreck!” she would say, and I almost fainted when I heard this! After all, here

we had worked on this particular sequence for five days, and we thought we had

finished with it, and there she was saying, “No!” to all that we had done.

But, eventually, I learned that just as there are people who have a perfect sense for

music and can always identify a certain pitch with mathematical precision, in

exactly the same way, she is one of those people who have a perfect sense for film

material, and I really have learned a lot from her! What I have particularly learned

from her is that while editing a film you have to become less than a dwarf in front of

your own material.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #6: 1 am still interested in pursuing a little bit further the

question of the importance of the editor in your films. In that light I am curious to

know whether or not you have ever completed shooting any of your films—your

documentaries perhaps even more than your fiction—without having had an editor

on the set at any of these times?

HERZOG: With the single exception of the time when we filmed STOSZEK, my

editor has never been on the set with us.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #6: Does this mean that most of your films have been shot

entirely before your editor has ever even seen the footage?

HERZOG: Yes.

EBERT: Except that once the editor was almost shot as well!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

HERZOG: I think that it has a certain definite value that the editor is not on location.

It is very important that the editor shouLd keep away from all of our attempts to do

things—from all our daily struggles—so that she can form much more of an

independent opinion about the material itself.

After I have been filming something, I’m always loaded with certain subjective

feelings and certain irrational preferences. For example, it might be that I liked one

person in a particular film very, very much—someone like Scheitz, for instance—

he’s mad, but I like him very much—and so, when editing NOSFERATU, in

relation to a particular sequence involving Scheitz, Beate Mainka would tell me,

This scene looks good, but in context it doesn’t work anymore,” and I would see

that she was right. Although it would be very hard for me to cut that particular

sequence, it would be correct to make that cut, and I would do it. But, if she had

been with us on location when we shot that sequence with Scheitz—and, by the way,

she also likes him very much as a person—if she had been on location through all

our struggles, she would probably have said, “This scene doesn’t work that well in

context, but please let’s leave it in because it’s Scheitz!” Do you see my point? I think

it is good to keep the editor away from where we are filming in order to preserve the

purity of her opinion.

Having her on location, as we did for STROSZEK, we discovered had certain

definite disadvantages. Afterwards it was more difficult for us to edit that film than

any of the others.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #6: Yes, I see, but isn’t there any difference in your

approach to the documentaries you’ve made as opposed to the fictional films? In

other words, when you were shooting the documentary on Steiner, for example,

once again was the majority of that film shot before the editor even had a chance to

intervene or offer any suggestions?

HERZOG: Yes, sometimes she wouldn’t even know what I was shooting. I would just

tell her that I was doing something down in Yugoslavia on a ski-jumper, and that

would be all. But I would also tell her, “I will finish in mid-March, and so, when I’m

finished, let’s be ready to start to work immediately on the footage.”

WORKSHOP MEMBER #6: That’s particularly interesting in the light that quite a

few Hollywood features are shot in a manner that’s just the opposite of your

method. In fact, for most of these productions the footage as it comes back in the

dailies’ is usually edited that very same day so that they can decide immediately

whether or not they want to re-shoot anything.

HERZOG: Very often I don’t like so much even to see the ‘dailies’ myself, but, even

when I do, there are usually only two other people who see them with me. These two

people are the cameraman and his assistant. I don’t like to have anyone else around.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #7: In the articles and reviews that I’ve read about your

work, I’ve always wondered why the use of music in your films has been so much

neglected by critics in this country..

HERZOG: The music in my films is also very much neglected, if I may interrupt you,

in Germany as well. Since AGUIRRE, my friend, Florian Fricke, has done the

music for almost all my films—for STEINER, for LA SOUFRIERE, for

STROSZEK, and for HEART OF GLASS—and I’ve tried to push very hard so

that he would be given the National Film Award this year. They’ve never given it to

him, and there has been complete neglect of his work. Not even a single mention!

And this year they just by-passed him once again!

WORKSHOP MEMBER #7: Don’t you choose all the music yourself for your films?

HERZOG: Mostly yes, I do it myself.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #7: Do you have any musical training?

HERZOG: No, but I think that there are very few people around who know how to use

music properly in films, even those who do have formal training. I always keep

wondering why it is that the music is so bad in most of the films that I see. Of course,

there are some very, very good people around like the Taviani brothers. Those

bastards are so incredibly lucid in their use of music that they make me feel

ashamed. You have to see PADRE PADRONE! It is one of the best films I have

seen in ten years. You must see that film! If it ever plays here in the States, go on the

next plane to New York or wherever you have to go to be able to see it!

EBERT: It has already played in Chicago.

HERZOG: You must see that film! It’s wonderful.

Satyajit Ray, the Bengal filmmaker, also knows how to use music. There’s one

wonderful film in particular that he has made called JALSAGHAR, THE MUSIC

ROOM. Please, if that film ever shows somewhere here in the States, try to see that

film!

EBERT: That film has also played here in Chicago. Actually it did pretty well.

HERZOG: But, returning to your question, most of the time I work very, very long

on the music. Sometimes it even takes me more time to work on the music than to

work on the editing. Almost all of my films are shot in direct sound, but, even so,

normally it takes me more time, more energy, more precision in preparing the

sound than for working on the camera to establish the shots and the movement of

the camera. Just to set up all the reflectors always takes you hours, but to prepare

the sound I take even more time! On most occasions it is the sound that decides the

outcome of the battle.

I’ve often seen young filmmakers who when they finally manage to make their first

film when they finally manage to overcome the problems of finances and

organization and all the rest—very frequently fail completely with their sound.

Very, very often they just do not understand how important sound is, and very, very

few people even begin to understand what music can be in a film.

Music has always been a matter of major concern for me. Even though I’ve had no~

training in music at all. I did all the work on the music for EVEN DWARFS

STARTED SMALL by myself. I took a folksong and modified that song by taking

out some of the instruments and adding others. Then I found a twelve year old girl

who could sing that song, and, in order to obtain the right quality in her voice, I

went to a cave and recorded her singing.

I’ve always worked very hard to select the music, but, in doing so. I’ve usually

worked very closely with Florian Fricke. For example, to create the music that is

used in the opening of AGUIRRE we used a very strange instrument which we

called a ‘choir-organ.’ This instrument has inside it three dozen different tapes

running parallel to each other in loops. The first ofthese tapes has the pitch in fifths,

and the next has the whole scale. All these tapes are running at the same time, and

there is a keyboard on which you can play them like on an organ so that, when you

push one particular key, a certain loop will go on forever and sound just like a

human choir but yet, at the same time, very artificial and really quite eerie.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #7: Has any of that music for AGUIRRE been recorded

and released commercially?

HERZOG: Yes, there is an album of the music which was released in Europe—in Italy

and France, that is, but not in Germany—and I think that it’s also being released

now here in the United States.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #7: Perhaps you can get it as an import.7

HERZOG: Besides the album for AGUIRRE, there’s also one for HEART OF

GLASS 8 and, then, of course, Florian Fricke has made seven or eight albums.

Some of these are available now here in this country.9

WORKSHOP MEMBER #8: What have been the major influences on your work?

Have they come from film? Or from music and the other arts? Or somewhere else?

HERZOG: My strongest influences come from music, but my second strongest

influences come from athletics.

Maybe it’s hard for you to understand, but in recent years I have become a fanatical

listener to very early music. For more than ten years I have been listening more and

more to music that goes back beyond the Renaissance, to late Medieval music orto

music by Schütz10 or Monteverdi11. Orlando diLasso12 and Johannes Ciconia13

are probably names of which you have never even heard, and yet it is their music

more than anything else that has influenced my sense of timing .and my

emotionality.

And athletics is something that I have been involved with all my life. I’ve always

been a ski-jumper and a soccer player, and yet, when I work on a film, people always

seem to think that this kind of work is just the result of some sort of an abstract

academic concept of story development or some purely intellectual theory as to how

drama should work. They don’t seem to realize all that is involved in making a film.

They don’t know, for example, that I’m always afraid of making a film whenever I

first start to do it. Right now, my very next project is a film where I truly know that

there will be problems that are beyond my personal strength and are beyond my

present capacity.

My method of overcoming this kind of fear has always been by working very hard

physically on the film. For example, in KASPAR HAUSER, 1 worked hard

physically in the garden that you see, which was once a potato-field, and there I

planted all those strawberries and flowers and many other things. Then, even when

we were shooting in the interior rooms, I always worked very hard together with the

set-designer, and together we moved a lot of very heavy furniture. For example, we

moved the piano to a certain corner, and then we’d ponder over it, and we’d think,

No, it’s not quite right, It shouldn’t be there. Somehow the room has no balance.”

So we would move the piano somewhere else, and then we would move the desk

over there where the piano had been, which, in turn, would make it necessary to

move the chairs some place else—and so, simply out of doing this sort of physical

work, all of a sudden, I began to feel safe, and I was not following just an aesthetic

pattern any more. Even though, of course, there was still an aesthetic pattern in my

film, for me, from then on, the rest of the filming just followed a simple, physical

pattern.

To give you a specific example of this process, in KASPAR HAUSER, in order to

set up the scene with the death-bed, really all that we had to do was to move the bed

to the center of the room and very quickly arrange six or seven people so that they

would just be standing or sitting around it, but now, when I see this scene in the film,

1 realize that it is a perfectly balanced image, and yet it only took nte five seconds to

do it! I just had all these people there, and I said, “You sit here, you stand there, you

stand there, you stand there, you sit here,” and that was it! It was just a physical

knowledge which I was able to possess of a certain order that existed within that

space, and it is that kind of knowledge which has decided many an important battle

for me.

That is precisely the reason why I could not ever make films out of a wheelchair. If I

had an accident in a car tomorrow and was paralyzed from my hip downwards and

confined to a wheelchair, it would be the immediate end of my filmmaking. I would

immediately stop. Even though it would be theoretically possible to continue if

there were people to carry me around and help me along. I still could not do it

anymore.

That’s also why I like to carry prints of my films around with me. In 35mm. they

each weigh about fifty or sixty pounds. It’s awkward to carry them, but I like to

carry them just in order to have the feeling that I can leave them somewhere in an

office or in a projection-booth. I can leave them right there on the ground and just

walk away. It’s just like, when you have had a dream or a nightmare for five nights

in a row, then, the very next morning you want to tell your wife immediately what

you have been dreaming. You want to communicate this dream immediately to

someone. You feel you must get rid of it in this way. Then, once you have told it to

someone, just this process of giving a name to that fear somehow cuts the fear in

half, and a film like EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL is a perfect example of

this process. Just naming the anxiety, just giving a name to a nightmare in order to

articulate it, is like taking half the weight off my shoulders. It’s always a great relief

to be able to drop something like that down from off my shoulders, but the

embarrassing thing about it is that once I drop one thing there are already three

more sitting on me. I just cannot keep up fast enough, and I don’t know what to do

about it. I cannot catch up with it anymore. That is why I have tried to work so very

fast this last year. I’ve made two feature films and written two books, and I have two

films in preparation, but still it’s just not fast enough for me!

EBERT: I remember you saying that in your next film you were going to employ eleven

thousand Peruvian Indians in a project that will involve moving an actual

steamboat across a mountain from one river-system to another, Is that correct?

HERZOG: Yes.

EBERT: You said that you were not going to use a plastic boat and a Hollywood

mountain, but that you were going to use the eleven thousand Indians to move a

real iron ship across those mountains! Would you care to elaborate on that?

HERZOG: Yes, but it’s a question that’s not been completely resolved as yet. In

theory it would be possible for me to move a ten thousand ton steamboat across the

highest mountain with just one single finger. If I had the proper system of pulleys

powered by a five hundred volt transmission, then I could easily just pull the rope or

simply walk with it for two miles, and the boat would move exactly two inches up

the mountain! So, in theory, the problem is easy to resolve. But, in theory, of

course, it’s even easy to move this earth out of its trajectory! It can be done in

theory. Archimedes has already stated that, not just me, but so far it’s only in

theory. Yet, in terms of moving the boat across the mountain, I think it really can be

done. We have some very smart people already working out the solution, but we

cannot use modern technology because the story takes place around the turn of the

century, and so we will have to use just some pulleys and levers and ropes and other

simple things, and somehow we’ll do it. You will see. We’ll do it!

EBERT: It’s really awesome, like some of the things you accomplished in AQUIRRE.

HERZOG: Yes, but that’s kindergarten next to what I am now preparing!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE, FOLLOWED BY APPLAUSE)

For this filming in Peru there is just so much preparation! A project like this simply

cannot be done unless either you have twenty—five million dollars and a full year’s

time for the shooting or else you have to take at least three years to prepare it fully so

that you will only have to spend about two or three million dollars in order to get it

done. There will be more than ten thousand people in this film, and they all have to

be organized. They have to have a place to sleep. They have to have costumes. Then

we will also need to have two boats that are absolutely identical, and it will take at

least half a year just to rebuild a second boat so that it will be an identical twin of the

first. All this kind of preparation is very difficult work!

EBERT: Perhaps you ought to make things a little easier for yourself.

HERZOG: People don’t seem to understand that I hate to make difficult films. I hate

to have all these problems.

That’s the reason I liked making WOYZECK so much. I shot that film in just

eighteen days, and I edited the film—an entire feature film—completing the final

cut in only four days! That’s how films should be made. That was perfect!

Also one other thing that you should know is that I have been doing more and more

writing now. I have learned how to write from making films, and I have released five

books in the last two and a half years.14 One day, sooner or later, you will have

translation of these books.

But there is one text in particular which is closer to my heart than any of my films. It

is a book that is titled WALKING INTO ICE which I wrote at nighttime during the

shooting of NOSFERATU. I think that this book will outweigh all my films.

EBERT: I doubt that.

HERZOG: No, you will see.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #9: Would you please tell us something more about the

book you are writing?

HERZOG: I am not writing a book right now, but I have written two prose books last

year. The first one was released in September, and the second one was released

about a month ago. I have also written three books before these last two, and I’ve

published poetry now in some magazines.

This book that I mentioned which is the one that I like the most is basically a diary

that I wrote when I walked once from Munich to Paris. Originally I never thought

that I would publish it because it contained material that was very personal. I had

never even read it for the four years since it was written, but, then, during the

shooting of NOSFERATU, I happened to take it with me—it’s a very tiny little

booklet with miniature pencil writing in it—and, all of a sudden, it struck me that

this was not a private text after all. It was something very much like my films. It had

so much in it that I felt that I should try to overcome the embarrassment that would

be involved in making it accessible to other people. So I started to write it over

again. I re-wrote the entire diary in order to put it into a more concise form, leaving

out some of those passages that were still very private, and now I like it very, very

much! It’s probably the best single work that I’ve ever done in all my life.

Perhaps that sounds easy to say without my having the proof here to show to you. I

hope that it will be translated into English soon, but it will be very difficult to

translate because the text lapses quite often into the Bavarian dialect. There are

many expressions in it that are ‘wrong’—wrong German in a grammatical sense—

and to discover how to translate this ‘wrong’ German into wrong English that will

still make sense is going to be very difficult. For example, there’s one sentence

towards the end of the book that says in German: “Together we shall cook fire, and

we shall stop the fish.” Well, you can cook a meal, but you cannot cook fire; and you

can stop the traffic, but you cannot stop the fish. You can catch the fish but not stop

the fish. This kind of expression sounds ‘wrong’ and very, very strange even when

you read it in German, but, even so, in German still there is a definite feeling behind

these words that somehow they express the absolute truth. Translated into English,

however, as literally “together we shall cook fire, and we shall stop the fish,” these

words lose everything. They only’ sound wrong and nothing more beyond that. This

means that there will be a very, very deep problem in translating this book,.. .and so

I must ask you all to learn German!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

WORKSHOP MEMBER #10:1 was wondering if you would mind telling us what you

feel is the relationship of your work to that of other filmmakers, and if there is

anyone in the American cinema today whose work you feel particularly close to?

HERZOG: Yes, there is one filmmaker here in the United States who is very important

for me—who is like the Shakespeare of filmmaking—and that is Griffith.15 So, if

you ask me to say who is the most important filmmaker here in this country, I would

say, “It’s Griffith.. and Griffith.. .and Griffith.. .and Griffith again!

Then I also feel very close to the work of some of the Brazilian filmmakers like Ruy

Guerra, 16 who appears in AGUIRRE as an actor, and Glauber Rocha. 17

And, of course, I like some of the Japanese films very much.

There is even some very good filmmaking being done in Germany now, particularly

in some of the filmmaking that has a tendency towards the ‘underground’ like the

work of Werner Schroeter,18 for example. It’s very strange that a wonderful man

like Werner Schroeter is such an unknown here in this country. It is extremely

unfortunate that people always focus their attention on just three or four figures

and neglect the work of so many others. For instance, I also happen to like some of

Fassbinder’s films.19 Every fourth film is a good movie!

(LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE)

Yes, and that’s what I like about him. He has made some excellent movies, but you

should also know that we have some very good underground filmmaking as well. I

feel very close to these people, particularly Klaus Wyborny,20 who is a complete

unknown even in our own country. Probably you have never even heard of him, but

he is a very, very good man.

I also like some of the American underground filmmaking very much, and I even

like some of the Hollywood pictures to some extent. You may find it rather strange

but I like very much THE BROADWAY MELODY OF 1940 with Fred Astaire.21

It’s a wonderful movie!

So, you see, there are many, many people around whose work I really like and many

films that I see where I have the feeling that I am no longer entirely alone. What I

mean to say is that every once in a while it continues to happen to me that when I

hear music or see a film just as part of an audience and nothing else, as a part of that

audience, it suddenly occurs to me that I am not entirely alone any more, and that’s

exactly what I try to accomplish with my films. Wherever my films are shown,

whatever the size of the audience, if I see people coming out of the screening who

give me the feeling that they also~ have not been alone—that they have had the

feeling that they are not entirely alone anymore—then I have done everything that I

have set out to do! That’s exactly what I want to do, but much of the time I feel out

of tune with most of the industry, with almost everything that’s going on—yet, even

so, there are still enough good people around to make me feel confident.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #10: What is your opinion of film festivals? What good do

you think they do?

HERZOG: There are two or three film festivals that I really like. One is Cannes. The

second is Telluride, a very small festival in Colorado, and the third is another very

small festival that is held in Germany. Everything in between doesn’t make much

sense.

Cannes is a big circus. It’s just like a county fair. Everyone tells me, “Oh, I hate

Cannes,” and yet they come back every year. Again and again you always see the

same people. It really is just a big circus, but, then, it is important to remember that

the cinema itself comes from the circus. It has grown out of county fairs, and so I

must admit that I like Cannes to some extent even though it’s an extremely cruel

and crazy place. You can see three hundred films there in two weeks if that is your

wish. It’s the biggest marketplace for film in the world, and for that reason I like it to

some degree.

And I like Telluride in Colorado very much because it is like some sort of a secretive

family reunion of very good people, very inspired people, all of them very much

alive!

But, in general, I think that there are more film festivals than good films, and, as a

result, for these few good films there’s always this terrible competition which is

always so indecent and so undignified. For that reason, I think it would be better if

we could somehow cut down the number of festivals to one-third of what we have at

present. Then the situation would make much more sense.

But, when I say this, I must also confess that film festivals have been very important

as a sort of first taking-off place for me, and so I cannot deny that many festivals still

have a certain very real value for many filmmakers. For example, I have always

been extremely grateful that my first films were accepted at the New York Film

Festival, because that acceptance somehow opened the door a little bit for me in the

United States for the very first time.

WORKSHOP MEMBER #11: What do you think has been the political impact of

your films?

HERZOG: I doubt the political impact of all films in general to a certain degree. I

think there are much stronger means available for making a direct political impact.

For example, a microphone and a man who is an effective public speaker, taken

are the greatest politicians. Like Lenin. Or like Adolf Hitler. Even Hitler, when you

take a close look at that man, basically he was just a speaker who somehow was able

to give expression to the very unclear, strange, aimless fears and desires of the

German nation after the Weimar Republic. He was primarily a speaker,.. .and so, if

you want to go into politics, go get a microphone and become a speaker!

Or another very solid means of making politics is the use of weapons. Go and get a

rifle, if you wish. You will quickly discover that a rifle has much more precise effects

than any film could possibly have!

But, even so, in the long run, I do think that films—my films included—could have

some sort of political impact eventually because they might be able to change our

basic perspectives, our basic understanding of things, and changes of this sort, of

course, in the long range will have definite effects.

EBERT: In our discussion tonight, the words ‘vision’ and ‘visionary’ have come up

constantly in relation to your work, and what I would like to know now is whether

you started to make films and then this vision developed from the process of making

them or whether this vision was already there somehow even before the films

themselves were made?

HERZOG: From the very first, I saw all my films perfectly clearly in my mind, and all

My work has just been a series of attempts to make them visible for others. Of

course, this process is very difficult. There are always obstacles in making any film.

There are always compromises with reality, but sometimes out of these clashes with

reality something new emerges. I’ve never ever managed to make a film that is as

completely pure as I have seen it originally in my mind. Probably it never can be

done in film, and probably that is also one of the reasons why I like the book,

WALKING INTO ICE, so much, because there is no external obstacle to overcome

in writing a book like that. Paper is patient, and film is not.

There’s really not very much more for me to say at this point because I am still

searching. But I can assure you that I do see something at the horizon, and I am also

sure that, to a certain degree, I am already able to articulate what it is that I see. I am

still trying to articulate those images that I see at the horizon. I may never be able to

succeed completely. Maybe it’s absurd and ridiculous even to try—I don’t really

know—but I do know that I won’t give up!

(APPLAUSE FROM AUDIENCE)

EBERT: Well, thank you very much for being with us this evening.

(APPLAUSE FROM AUDIENCE)

Notes: IMAGES AT THE HORIZON”

1 Walter Steiner, the main protagonist in THE GREAT ECSTACY OF THE SCULPTOR

STEINER.

2 The deaf and blind woman who is the teacher in LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS.

3 The Facets Multimedia Center.

4 The Chicago International Film Festival.

5 The Film Center at the Art Institute of Chicago.

6 BRUNO DER SCHWARZE (1970), directed by Lutz Eisholz.

7 Far a short time the soundtrack album for AGUIRRE was available as an import (PLD 6040).

At the present time, however, the importer has decided to delete from their catalog the majority

of their imported “rock” recordings including several albums by Papal Vuh, and this means

that the soundtrack album for AGUIRRE is temporarily unavailable in this country.

8 The soundtrack album by Papal Vuh is currently available in this country as a French import,

COEUR DE VERRE (Barclay 900.536), from 1cm Records. (As a paint of interest, it should

be noted that the popular sang, “Heart of Glass,” recorded by Blandie, which, of course, is not

part of the soundtrack, was, in fact, inspired by the title of Herzag’s film. At the time of the

recording, however, no one in the group had as yet seen the film.)

9 Other albums by Papal Vuh which have been available in the United States as imports include

the following:

AFFENSTUNDE (LSB 83460)

THE BEST OF POPOL VUH (PLD 6073)

BROTHERS OF THE SHADE (Brain 601.167)

EINSJAEGER AND SIEBENJAEGER (PLD 6013)

DAS HOLELIED SALOMOS (UAS 29781)

HOSIANA MANTRA (PLD 5094)

IN DEN GAERTEN PHARAOS (PLD 6009)

LETZE TAGE LETZE NACHTE (UAS29916)

SELIGPREISUNG (PLD 5082)

YOGA (PLD 6066)

In addition, in the near future Jem Records will become the U.S. distributor for the “import”

soundtrack album for Herzog’s NOSFERATU.

10 Heinrich Schütz (1583-1672): Baroque composer, born in Germany, best known far his choral

music and as a composer of operas.

11 Claudia Monteverdi (1567-1643): Italian composer whose work bridged the Renaissance and

Baroque periods and who is considered to be the founder of modern opera as well as being a

renowned madrigalist.

12 Orlando di Lasso (a.k.a. Orlando Lassus or Roland de Lassus) (1532-1594): one of the

foremost contrapuntists of the Renaissance, often considered to be the greatest of the

Netherlands composers.

13 iohannes Ciconia (a.k.a. Jean Ciconia de Leodio) (1335-1411): Walloon theorist and composer,

born in Liege, died in Italy.

14 The books which Werner Herzog has had published include the following:

Drehbuecher I: LEBENSZEICHEN; FATA MORGANA; AUCH SWERGE HABEN

KLEIN ANGEFANGEN. (Skellig Editions, Munich, 1977)

Drehbuecher II: AGUIRRE, DER ZORN GO1TES; JEDER FUR SICH UND GOTT

GEGEN ALLE; LAND DES SCHWEIGENS UND DER DUNKELHEIT. (Skellig

Editions, Munich, 1977)

Drehbuecher III: STROSZEK; NOSFERATU. (Carl Hanser, Munich, 1979)

Heart of Glass: Text: Alan Greenberg, Scenario: Herbert Achternbusch and Werner Herzog.

(Skellig Editions, Munich, 1976)

Vom Gehen im Eis. (Carl Hanser, Munich, 1979)

In addition, a “novelization” of Herzog’s script for NOSFERATU has recently been published

in the United ~,tates:

Nosferatu the Vampire: A Novel Based on Werner Herzog’s Screenplay for the 20th century

Fox Film by Paul Monette. (Avon Books, New York, 1979).

15 David Wark Griffith (1875-1948): pre-eminent American director whose films include THE

ADVENTURES OF DOLLIE (first film: 1908), JUDITH OF BETHULIA (1913), THE

BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), INOLERANCE (1916), HEARTS OF THE WORLD (1918),

BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919), WAY DOWN EAST (1920), ORPHANS OF THE STORM

(1922), AMERICA (1924), ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1930), and THE STRUGGLE (last

signed” film: 1931).

16 Important contemporary film-maker born in Mozambiquc in 1931, studied in Paris at IDHEC

and worked as an assistant director for Jean Delannoy and Georges Rouquier, made his

first feature and most of the films for which he is best known in Brazil. His major films include

OS CAFAJESTES (The Unscrupulous Ones) (1962), 05 FUZIS (The Guns) (1964), SWEET

HUNTERS (1969), and OS DEUSES E OS MORTOS (The Godi and the Dead) (1971).

17 Important contemporary film-maker born in Brazil in 1938, started to make films in 1958,

later worked as a film critic and became a leading figure in the creation of the Brazilian

Cinema Nova.’ His major films include BARRAVENTO (The Turning Wind) (1962), DEUS

E 0 DIABLO NA TERRA DEL SOL (Black God, White Devil) (1964), TERRA EM TRANSE

(Land in Anguish) (1967), ANTONIO-DAS-MORTES (1969), DER LEONE HAVE SEPT

CABEZAS (The Lion Has Seven Heads) (1970), CABEZAS CORTADAS (Severed Heads)

(1970), and A IDADE DA TERRA (The Age of the Earth) (1979). In addition Rocha

appeared as an actor in Jean-Luc Godard’s VENT D’EST ( Wind from the East) (1970).

18 Important contemporary film-maker born in West Germany in 1945, strongly influenced by the

European operatic tradition and American underground film-making, started making films in

1968. His major films include SALOME (1971), THE DEATH OF MARIA MALIBRAN

(1971), WILLOWSPRINGS (1973), GOLDFLOCKEN (1975), REGNO DI NAPOLI (1977),

and PALERMO OPPURE (1978).

19 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, important contemporary film-maker born in West Germany in

1946, active in Munich theatre and “anti-theatre” prior to his involvemeiit with film, started

making films in 1965 and since then has completed more than twenty-five features. His major

films include LIEBE 1ST KALTER ALS DER TOD (Love Is Colder Than.’Death) (first

feature: 1969), WARUM LAUFT HERR R. AMOK?( Why Does Herr R. Run Anwkl)(l970),

WARNUNG VOR EINER HEILIGEN NUTFE (Beware ofa Holy Whore~(197l), HANDLER

DER VIER JAHRESZEITEN (The Merchant of Four Seasons) (1972), DIE BITTEREN

TRANEN DER PETRA VAN KANT (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) (1972), ANGST

ESSEN SEELE AUF (A ii: Fear Eats and Soul) (1974), EFFI BREST (1974), MUTTER

KUSTERS FAHRT ZUM HIMMEL (Mother Kuster’s Trap to Heaven) (1975), FAUSTRECHT

DER FREIHEIT (Fox and His Friends) (1975), CHINESISCHES ROULETTE (Chinese

Roulette) (1976). and DESPAIR (1978). In addition, Fassbinder has appeared as an actor in

films by Jean-Marie Straub, Volker Schlöndorff, Ulli Lommel, and many other contemporary

German film-makers.

20 lmportant contemporary film-maker born in West Germany in 1945, started as a student of

physics and became involved in the experimental/structuralist mode of film-making in the

late 1960’s. His first films which were made in the period 1966-1969 were collected into a single

multi-media event titled DAEMONISCHE LEINWAND (Demonic Screen) that was first

exhibited in 1969. His other, more recent films include PERCY MCPHEE—AGENT DES

GRAIJENS. SECHTE. SIEBTE. FOLGE (Percy McPhee~AgentofH0rr0r Chapters Six and

Seven) (1970), ROT WAR DAS ABENTEVERBLAU WAR DIE REUE (Red Adventure.

Blue Regret) (197!), DALLAS—TEXAS & AFTER THE GOLD RUSH (1972-1973), THE

IDEAL: flCSTACY AND BEAUTY (1974), FENSTERFILM (Windowfilm) (1975), PIC-

TURES OF A LOST WORLD (1975), and DER ORT DER HANDLUNG (The Place for

Action) (1977). In addition, Wyborny collaborated with Werner Her5og on the creation of the

dream sequences in KASPAR HAUSER: EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND GOD

AGAINST ALL.

21 A film directed by Norman Taurog, produced by M.G.M., in 1940.