German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director (born 1942)
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Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect
Of course, we are challenging nature itself...
and it hits back.
It just hits back. That's all.
And that's grandiose about it.
And we have to- to accept that
it is much stronger than we are.
Kinski always says it's full of...
erotic elements.
I don't see it so much erotic.
I see it more full of obscenity.
It's just-
Nature here is vile and base.
I wouldn't see anything erotical here.
I would see fornication
and asphyxiation...
and choking
and fighting for survival...
and growing and...
just rotting away.
Of course, there's a lot of misery.
But it is the same misery
that is all around us.
The trees here are in misery,
and the birds are in misery.
I don't think they- they sing.
They just screech in pain.
It's an unfinished country.
It's still prehistorical.
The only thing that is lacking is-
is the dinosaurs here.
It's like a curse
weighing on an entire landscape.
And whoever...
goes too deep into this...
has his share of that curse.
So we are cursed
with what we are doing here.
It's a land that God,
if he exists...
has-has created in anger.
It's the only land where-
where creation is unfinished yet.
Taking a close look at -
at what's around us...
there - there is
some sort of a harmony.
It is the harmony of...
overwhelming and collective murder.
And we in comparison to
the articulate vileness...
and baseness and obscenity...
of all this jungle -
Uh, we in comparison to that
enormous articulation -
we only sound and look like...
badly pronounced
and half-finished sentences...
out of a stupid suburban... novel -
a cheap novel.
And we have to become humble...
in front of this...
overwhelming misery and...
overwhelming fornication...
overwhelming growth...
and overwhelming lack of order.
Even the- the stars up here
in the-in the sky look like a mess.
There is no harmony in the universe.
We have to get acquainted to this idea that...
there is no real harmony
as we have conceived it.
But when I say this, I say this all
full of admiration for the jungle.
It is n
But his most exciting action was something we witnessed ourselves. At issue were some five tons of contraband coffee, as we were informed much later. At any rate, word had got out, and one night the police were on their way to arrest Siegel Hans. He was able to escape out of a window. All he had on him was his trumpet, and the next morning when it got light, he blew down on his trumpet from the Spitzstein. The police gave chase, but by the time they got to the summit, he was blowing from the cloven top of the Mühlhorn or the peak of the Geigelstein on the other side of the valley. The police, humiliated, called up more and more reinforcements, but Hans continued tooting at them from peak to peak. We heard him. We saw troops of police running through the valley and up the slopes, but neither they nor the officials stationed at the pass got a glimpse of him. He was like a phantom. We children knew why they couldn't catch him. As far as we were concerned, he had run from the Spitzstein all along the border heading into the sunset until he had run right around the whole of Germany to the Geigelstein on its east-facing side. It was the only way he could avoid having to go down into the valley. Twelve days later, he surrendered to the police, but by then, he had a mythic status among his admirers.
If you switch on television it's just ridiculous and its destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and — I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against "Bonanza" and "Rawhide", or all these things.
No one, not a soul, intimidating stillness. Uncannily, though, in the midst of all this, a fire is blazing, lit, in fact,with petrol. It's flickering, a ghostly fire, wind. On the orange-coloured plain below I can see sheets of rain, and the annunciation of the end of the world is glowing on the horizon, glimmering there. A train races through the land and penetrates the mountain range. Its wheels are glowing. One car erupts in flames. The train stops, men try to extinguish it, but the car can no longer be extinguished. They decide to move on, to hasten, to race. The train moves, it moves into fathomless space, unwavering. In the pitch-blackness of the universe the wheels are glowing, the lone car is glowing, Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation.
I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death.
One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me. Our Eisner mustn't die, she will not die, I won't permit it. She is not dying now because she isn't dying. Not now, no, she is not allowed to. My steps are firm. And now the earth trembles. When I move, a buffalo moves. When I rest, a mountain reposes. She wouldn't dare! She mustn't. She won't. When I'm in Paris she will be alive. She must not die. Later, perhaps, when we allow it.