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This is KZSU, Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
Those of you who feasts on this show who join its banquet of ideas on a regular basis have heard me speak before about the snail and the mollusk.
The snail sets forth in search of its food, wandering the night.
The mollusk instead holds fast to its rock, periodically lifting its shell to absorb the nutrients that reach it through the currents of the sea.
Likewise, some of us travel the world and take in its wonders while some of us stay put and let the world come to us.
If you're going to be a mollusk, Stanford University and in title opinions are as good a rock as any to cling to.
The proof being that just recently, the filmmaker and author, Werner Herzog, came to Stanford at my invitation to engage in a conversation about a book he wrote in the 1970s called "Of Walking in Ice."
That conversation, which was not open to the public, took place with a small group of graduate students and faculty members who had read the book in advance.
I moderated the discussion and today we are airing an edited version of it for all you friends of entitled opinions.
As many of you know, Werner Herzog is a sublime poet of the cosmos in his single-minded devotion to the poetry of filmmaking.
He has wandered the earth in all directions, defied every sort of challenge, sought out the most remote mountains, the most remorseless deserts, the most roiling oceans to capture what he calls the ecstatic truth of human existence and the natural world.
The poet WB Yates once asked, "How can we tell the difference between the dancer and the dance?"
Well, Herzog is both, his walking, his itself a kind of dance, and that brings me to the book under discussion of "Walking in Ice."
In late November 1974, Herzog received a call in Munich informing him that his beloved mentor, Lauti Eisner, the godmother of New German cinema, had fallen gravely ill in Paris and was on her deathbed.
He sent a message that he was on his way and that she could not die until he arrived.
Herzog then set out on a three-week journey on foot from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter.
As he put it, "It was clear to me that if I did it, Eisner wouldn't die."
Of walking in ice is his remarkable written account of everything he saw and felt on his trek to his friends' bedside, from descriptions of the landscape and weather to practice the rest of the world.
And whether to practical concerns about where to lodge at night to the intense loneliness of his solo trip on foot.
At the outset of his journey, Herzog noted the following, "Our Eisner mustn't die, she will not die, I won't permit it."
She is not dying now because 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 die.
What follows is our conversation about Werner Herzog's trek from Munich to Paris in 1974 and the book that resulted from it and much more besides.
We hope you enjoy it.
Werner, can I ask then about the role of the earth or the land in the journey?
Because there is a very strong presence of what is underfoot as your walkings on this thing.
And forgive a slightly elaborate question.
You mentioned the first page of your guide to the perplex. You said that I have to mention it the title is wonderful but it was down from the Jewish philosopher, Maemunidis.
Middle-aged, serial, he had an almost identical title.
I read this title, it was like lightning struck me, this is the best title I've ever seen in my life so I had to steal it.
Sorry for interrupting.
That's great. So you mentioned that at 14 you decided to convert to Catholicism. Your father was atheist, furious.
And your mother thought it was because the local priests played football.
But you say that you were fascinated by the historical tradition of Catholicism and its attention to ritual as opposed to other kinds of religions.
So I guess I'm going to ask about the role of ritual and walking on the land.
And here I'm going to, I'm going to be a little bit professorial. Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher, has an essay on walking.
So looking at it in preparation for tonight. And he says that this English word to "saunter".
Yes, it's like "tariya" without land.
He says there's two etymology. One is "saunter", the other is "saunter dead", holy land.
And that to walk is to always be homeless on the one hand, but always be aware of the holy land that you're either seeking or that you're walking on.
Did your trek across this part of Germany and France on this land, did it give you a revelation?
You said that the world reveals itself to those who walk. Did it be in trouble by foot? Did it reveal a certain sanctity as such?
The very earth and land of the European continent.
Like I said, in the book, "The Beethim", that from the feet comes knowledge.
And the whole voyage had the quality of a pilgrimage. It had some...
It's a ritualized. Something is ritualized about it. I have little doubt.
But it's not easy to talk about it because when I speak about sanctity and soul, let's touch this expression only with a pair of pliers.
We know that it would be misleading very, very quickly if we didn't somehow reflect the term.
But I think the role, of course, a very remarkable writer and human being.
I didn't know his work about walking, but of course he is very close to my heart.
And an experience not so much, I think, in his case of traveling on foot, but living outside of the norms of society in his own reflection and existence in nature.
It's self-innoughting else.
That's a saunter, the homeless, yeah.
And saunter, it's without land.
It's those who do not have any property.
That's interesting, not just homeless.
They are those who have no property in the same way.
I understand, for example, Native Americans, they never saw the country as property.
It's a very foreign term for me, the term property, or owning something has been very, very strange for me.
Since you've mentioned flying, and we're talking about things, we have a question.
I've suggested just a few questions for people.
So I think, Becky, you have a question that's directly related to that.
Can you get close to that?
I'll read it as I wrote it.
I think we've already talked about it a little bit.
But I'll ask again, because I think there's still more to say.
So I was struck by the presence of the animals in your journal.
So they're ravens, pigs, dogs, sheep, jackdawls, parrots, horses, cattle, geese chickens, cats, sparrows, mice, and even at one point, flying reptiles.
And this connection to the animal world is so profound.
At several points, you wonder if you are still looking human as you do on page 22 and 101.
You noticed this particular affinity to birds, like the rainbow you write on page 96, the cranes are a metaphor for him who walks.
I'll just cite a few other bird examples.
Let the storm blow me around the petrol station until I get wings.
You write on page 22.
I fly and fly and don't stop, don't quit, don't look fly on.
You write later on.
You drew the palace in the treetops on page 36.
In the very last sign of the book you write, as we've already spoken about, open the window from these last days onwards I can fly.
I don't take these references to flight lightly.
And I wonder if what you are getting at is something even more powerful than metaphor.
As you suggest in the tribute that you wrote to Lottie Eisner in 1982 and you gave us wings.
And I mean that quite literally.
The way I read you, and I hope I haven't misread you, is that the story is not only about walking, but also about flight as you have suggested.
And I mean there's two types of flight.
On one hand, they're getting away from.
And the second, the soaring.
There's a fling of death of flight in the sense of escaping the socialized human world.
But also this bird's eye perspective that your journey affords you.
I wonder if you would be willing to say more about your connection to birds and animals.
And the way your stories, this story, but also maybe the stories you tell in your films are told through them.
It's a profound question and not completely easy to answer.
There's a very simple answer to it that has to do with the realism of traveling on foot.
And in snowstorms, in rain, and so you do not see any humans.
But you see mice.
More than you ever would imagine when you're in a car, you do not see the mice at dogs barking at your house.
Running and converging and staring at you as if you were the solution and as you were the revelation of everything.
So that's one side.
But there's always a very strange type of bestiary.
In particular, you see a lot in my films even much while there.
You see dancing chicken.
You see cannibalistic chicken.
You see radioactive mutant albino crocodiles in a film actually on a Paleolithic cave paintings.
The earliest that we have ever found dating back to 35,000 years ago.
So there's a strange bestiary in my films and clearly so in the writing.
Where it exactly comes from, I do not know about it.
Probably has to do to some extent with my very intense nexus with nature.
That's one thing.
But it's also quite often the animals are transformed into something very odd.
Like the radioactive mutant albino crocodiles or like the iguanas in bed lieutenant.
You have a strange quality about them where they transcend all qualities of being animals.
And in a way you see it not as clearly pronounced but I do remember that I'm asking in one sentence,
is friendship with mice possible?
Yes, it is.
And that's a, it sounds like a very odd sentence.
But it makes a lot of sense in a very much in a larger context.
And of course I'm not somebody who is having ended any tendency of tree hugging.
For example, I think that's a grotesque sort of form of showing affection to nature.
It may affection to nature is different.
But it comes up all the time and I'm becoming much more aware because you are asking the question.
But I think we have to go through details here and we have to go through very much so details in films that I have made.
It becomes visibly and obvious, more obvious in the text.
You mentioned tree hugging and there's another question that we have about, if not hugging a tree then shaking a tree.
Could we have Maria Masuko?
Yeah, I am.
So in Dippetis actually.
Close to yeah.
Yeah, okay.
So you have this moment.
I think I'd like to read a piece of it at least.
It's definitely not tree hugging.
But you come across a grove of trees and you say that the apples are lying rotting in the wet clay soil around the trees.
Nobody is harvesting them.
On one of the trees which seemed from afar like the only tree left with any leaves, apples hang in mysterious clusters close to one another.
There is no single leaf on the wet tree just what apples were fusing to fall.
Picked one up.
It tasted pretty sour.
But the juice in it quenched my thirst.
So then you toss this core as on page 87 against the tree and some of the apples fall like rain.
And when the apples had grown still again, restful on the ground you go on.
I thought to myself that no one could imagine such human loneliness.
It is the onlyest day the most isolated of all.
So I went and shook the tree until it was utterly bare.
In the midst of the stillness the apples pummeled the ground.
When it was over a haunting stillness grabbed me and I glanced around.
But no one was there.
I was alone.
So on the reading list I had two simultaneous reactions.
On the one hand I thought I have definitely done this.
But I don't think I actually have.
I just had the sense that it was a somewhat instinctive universal reaction and shaking a tree was the perfect image for it.
And on the other hand I thought to myself how on earth could you come across unripe apples in December?
And the combination of these two reactions told me that something is going on in the scene.
And I wonder if it has to do with the way you describe it as particularly human loneliness.
What about a tree expressed your human loneliness in that moment?
Do you remember it and what could you tell us about this scene?
I do remember it and it was truly a tree sometimes.
You see apple trees are the trees that are not harvested.
And the leaves are all gone during the fall and beginning of winter.
And still the tree was full of apples.
And it was very...
It was a low-least.
The deepest solitude that I've experienced on this track on foot.
And it's very strange what do you do.
I was curious and I tasted one and it tasted sour.
And I threw the core into the tree and they pumbled down some of the apples.
And then I had the feeling that the apples should be where they should be.
At that time they should be on the ground.
I shook the apple tree very violently.
And all the apples pumbled down and the strange thing is when they are all down and they rest.
And I'm saying it in German in a very strange stylised Bavarian.
And I'll see an important Aeneur Uyghab.
It's a gave a quiet.
So it's not proper German.
It's a stylised Bavarian expression.
Then all of a sudden, silence and solitude struck me as deep as I had never experienced it before after.
And until today I have not had the sense of such utter abandon and solitude.
It's not just a solitude because there's no humans around.
It's a very existential form of solitude.
And I've thought quite often about it because I do believe that solitude of men differs from solitude of women.
It's a strange thing that gives a clear distinction between men and women.
When you see a female solitude, which apparently has different forms and different forms of expressions.
So I've thought beyond that moment which is a key moment in this book.
Werner, in English, of course there's two words.
Solitude and loneliness.
The word that your translator chose there is loneliness where solitude can be even blissful and it's occasion to commune with oneself in an expansive way.
Loneliness is a sense of privation of being deprived of human company.
And many of the people that you come across throughout your journey are full of loneliness from your perception of them.
No.
That's no, of course not everyone has such in him or in her.
And I do remember I made a film in Bavaria, in much of it in Bavaria and dialect.
It's called Heart of Glass and it's a very strange film because actors are acting under hypnosis.
But so deep in hypnosis that they would open their eyes without waking up from the state of hypnosis.
And there's a cowherd, a herdsmen, a prophet at the end of the 18th century who made prophecies.
And there's something that struck me very much in the film and he prophesizes that all human beings have left the planet and the prophet prophesizes.
And I see a man on the forest road running with a burning branch in his hand and he's shouting, "Am I really the only one?
Am I really the last?"
So that's kind of existential if there's nobody, if it might often be, I think about a situation where I or somebody would be the only one survive.
And surviving in last one.
And that's why I was so fascinated by the work of my wife, Lena, who did an oratorio last whispers where she created a composition and oratorio from tape recordings of already extinct languages.
And some speakers were there's only one single last final remaining speaker in the world remaining.
And this must be unspeakable, a solitude that is completely and utterly unspeakable.
That has somehow a faint echo of that, of course you'll find in of walking in ice.
But my experiences or the experiences of my wife have deepened this understanding of solitude.
So this condition of loneliness of being alone, of being the last on the earth or being extinct raises also the specter of our planet, which seems to be the only one which has any life on it in our earth.
And we have a question from Andrea Capra about this moment in walking in ice that relates to this.
Yes, and perhaps this is one of the inner landscapes that you mentioned before.
I would like to read this passage that really struck me.
It's a page 51 of the English edition and I quote, "In the pitch blackness of the universe, the wheels are glowing, the long car is glowing, unimaginable stellar catastrophe state place, entire wards, 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 Way have condensed into unstars.
Outer blissfulness is spreading.
And out of outer blissfulness now springs the absurdity."
My question would be the following.
In your book, I believe the sense is a prevail.
There are indeed many passages that describe sensations such as the fatigue of walking, the discomfort of freezing temperatures, the pains of hunger.
I would like to ask you, where does this pitch blackness of the universe come from?
Does it come from your sense experience?
Is it one of those inner landscapes or is it from some other realm?
And what is the role of cosmic nihilism in your journey?
And why do you tie it to blissfulness?
Thank you.
The last thing is the most mysterious blissfulness.
I can't even reflect back on how this sentence came into my mind.
But of course, what I'm describing is almost describing of black holes that were pretty much, I think, unknown at the time or not in the popular
convention or thinking.
But yet, I do believe that when you imagine yourself out there in the universe and you move away from our planet, which we have seen many, many decades later after I wrote this, there are photos of planet Earth, like a tiny dot somewhere, and there's nothing but darkness around.
And tiny specks of light, so ultimately it's pretty dark and pretty cold out there.
And pretty chaotic. There's something completely chaotic and unbalanced out there.
We have had at least since let's say Aristotle or even before him, a notion that the universe out there was composed of
spheres. And the outermost sphere was perforated in the permanent fire out there was shining through those were the stars.
But the idea of a harmonious universe out there in the harmony of spheres is a mistake that has been around in philosophy and natural history for
two millenials almost. And it's still is lingering away and in a way, and those who have a tendency to be into new age, quasi sort of philosophical
able those who hark the trees, they would still speak about the universe being in harmony. Now it is not, it is chaotic and murderous and not good to be out there, and all attempts to colonize all thinking of colonizing Mars for example, it's an obscenity.
The sheer obscenity, number one, we will not do it, we will eventually send two or three scientists out there fine. And they will survive in a small shelter that's as large as a phone booth basically.
But we are not going to colonize it and there will be not like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos believe they have a million people out there. It's not going to happen.
And as we have seen in the last century, the demise and the bankruptcy of social utopias like communism, paradise on earth like fascism, a master race that would somehow spread over all the planet.
And the catastrophes it has brought over the human race. Now this century we are living in will show the bankruptcy of technological utopias. We will not colonize Mars. We will not become immortal. It's it's baloney and we will have the proof during this very century.
And we should rather make sure that our planet which is the only home we have should stay inhabitable instead of making a completely hostile environment like on Mars somehow inhabitable.
Everything else is too far away. You do not spend 220,000 years to reach Alfa Centauri, which is only four and a half light years away.
It will take you with the highest speeds you can ever that a human body can sustain the infirm of acceleration and deceleration will take you 120,000 200,000 years. It's not going to happen.
So I fundamentally agree. Well, the unimaginable human catastrophe. So does it say it again? No, that was the unimaginable human catastrophe that you just described.
In a way yes, but at the moment when you are walking into your sea, some sort of gravel pit in front of you yawning and the fire flickering down there. It all of a sudden triggers something strangely cosmic in the deadly tired body and mind.
And all of a sudden I'm describing a train that goes into the universe and in stars, orange down there being swallowed up something. It's very strange terms that are not German words either there's no such thing as an star and orange down.
There's undleuk discomfort or disaster, but not a dis-star or un-star.
So maybe as a follow up to this fascinating question and conversation, Vena, do you think there's an ethical dimension in the book, namely, instead of these technological fantasies or ludicrousies,
you urge us to walk to re-experience, re-inherbit, you know, the soil on which we're stepping. Would you agree to that that walking is your alternative to those flights into outer space?
We should do flights into outer space. It's wonderful in its phenomenal that we are sending a robot on an asteroid and it's fantastic that we have Hubble telescope which opens our eyes to unimaginably beautiful formations out there, chaotic and dangerous but incredible to look at.
But maybe there's something subversive about it that traveling on foot is something fundamental human and finding humanness and the truth in meaning in what our existence is all about.
Those who travel on foot experience it firsthand.
And when young filmmakers come to me and ask me about advice, what should they do? And it's not only that I should say that to young filmmakers, it should be to those who study literature and to those who study medicine or whatever, mathematics, walk, travel on foot.
That's one of the things, two things, and the second is read, read, read, read, read, read. If you don't read, you will be a mediocre architect, a mediocre filmmaker at best, but you will not do the real intense and beautiful things.
You have to read. And I see it even in academia, even in fairly good universities like this one here. I see that students are not reading enough.
But it's a long, long historical evolution that has started 40 years ago, 50 years ago long before the internet. But the internet has accelerated the disaster that we are not reading enough anymore.
I would add a comment here about the possible connection between walking and literature poetry especially because I don't think we appreciate nearly enough the degree to which poetic rhythm has its basis in the walking on uneven surfaces.
I've noticed that a lot of students have rarely walked on uneven surfaces like land and up hills and good things.
And when it's always an even pavement type of walking, it's very hard to understand the difference between the iambic meter and an annepestic, or the way in which the actual prosody of a poem takes away to us are very good.
It's sort of impulse in walking.
And so I would say probably the best training for someone who is firing to be a poet is just walking on the land that has not been paved. But that is just a speculation I grew up in.
Well, it has formed quite a few very important poets, the most important of all in my language German would be aldolin who has traveled on foot a lot and you see, oh, there's a wonderful short text, something like only 35 pages back here,
written in the 1820s or so shortly before he died. And it's called "Lentz" about the storm on Trang poet, "Lentz" who became insane and he travels on foot over the mountains and he travels actually exactly some of it is exactly the same thing in the Vauge mountains in left-range,
the French first mountains and food day and plates at Valdersbach. And I, by coincidence, because I was traveling the straightest line between Munich and Paris, came across some 1520 kilometers at Lentz, had traveled on foot and he ends up as one of the great voices of his time as a poet, but completely insane and aldolin also becoming insane and
another one, a very, very wonderful Swiss writer, Robert was not the German writer, Martin Vazas, speak of Robert Vazas, who wrote some of the finest and strangest prose that we have in the 20th century. He traveled on foot a lot and he also ended up insane.
It's strange and sometimes I keep thinking, "How do I keep my sanity and what do I have to watch out for?" So I'm vigilant.
I'm trying to be vigilant.
This leads to the last kind of solicited questions after which we can open it up, but Corey Danceroff.
I'm sorry, improvising, just to not backtrack, but I notice often that the walk uphill is a movement towards a kind of unreality or a strangeness.
The footpath over is Schauk'sburg. There's no path recognizable. The trees and bushes seem completely unreal and then you, from that height, you look down with contempt and you say lower down, it's ugly and wet and meaningless compared to the footpath over the height.
Another moment, you're climbing higher and higher. And there's a moment where you say it will be unpleasant beyond that height.
So I see that constant ascending towards a surreal or unreal stratosphere or height, but then there's a sense of danger where you can tell sometimes that it might be unpleasant to be a kind of
"more unreal" and maybe you'll lose control altogether and go insane. So yeah, I wonder, my question was originally about writing and about how writing itself is sort of a height where there's less inhibition.
You can see far, there's a part where you say the gaze flies far in all directions and it seems like writing itself allows your thoughts to fly really quickly.
I wonder if there's something to be said about how writing is a form or a medium that would lead to sort of an insanity and maybe you need to hold yourself back by tying yourself to the equipment of filmmaking that somehow maybe keeps you grounded in some way.
If not, notice it's myself. It's a very interesting observation and I have to look into my own writing, but I think you describe something correctly that on an ascent, I seem to move into the unreal into the realm of fantasy.
Maybe that it's a form of exhaustion that plays into it, but it's not just that it's a prose of ascent that takes you into something that is higher beyond ourselves, something sublime.
That longinos, for example, describes very well about his letter on the sublime and it means the elevated existence and the in reality all of a sudden is lifted up into something transcendent.
It's very strange because it's a practical form of ascending of ascent.
Yes, I think you have a remarkable observation here.
I may add something which is not really related. I read Xenophones amabasis, the ascent in antiquity.
And he describes a very, very strange moment, a wonderful direct moment that he witnessed with his writers and the starving soldiers had stretched out the entire army had stretched out over something like 50 kilometers.
And the vanguard and the rear guard were attacked by local troops and it was a war of attrition and they were starving and thirsty and hoping for reaching the Black Sea.
And he describes a moment where he sees very far into the distance, kilometers into the distance at the height of this trail and he sees a commotion, an incredible commotion and peoples flailing their arms and he thinking there might be an attack summons, his generals and summons the best of the best troops.
But then he notices that some sort of shout is coming down.
One person shouting to the next and shouting, it comes like wild fire at him and they shout salazar, salazar, the sea, the sea.
And it passes by him in 50 kilometers later the shouts, the sea stops.
As if the sea was an apparition and not combat, an imaginary combat that had happened, it was something divine that the head observed.
I think it has nothing to do with what we are discussing here but I just came to my mind and I'm sorry for dictycration.
On the note of the divine, also in Sam there is a group of Sam called the songs of the ascent and I think there is a salmic quality to this text.
Also when you think about it, I thought to go back into the Psalms because some of my consolation in deepest turmoil and distress.
The book of job in the Psalms and the living second punic war, those are my consolations, my anchors.
In solitude.
Now in deep turmoil and distress sometimes combined with solitude when nobody would ever believe in him or I could hoist this big steamboat over a mountain and you had deserted.
And when you had deserted among many who have not fled the scene but they are still around and you sense that they are looking at you and trying to hold you and stop you from your own insanity, from your plan that cannot be performed into reality.
So that is a kind of moments where we would grab the Psalms for the book of job.
As I said, defiance is like motif.
Do we have any questions from all of you who made the effort to read the book and coming so in a polyna?
I have a lot of questions for the first.
Can you speak up in the light of the book?
I am curious about the blurring of the real and the film world in your work.
I was reminded of Kaka was Calico Vette offsets and he talks about how the film world has overtaken reality.
And in the film burden of dreams you say everyday life is an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams.
And I am very curious about that because you also have in this work lines like, I will say it in German.
Man Reutta and Fanglass, not even a film vera vera de laistre vahad, so that you require sort of this intervening element of the film lens in order to make the things that you are witnessing real.
I am not only a alien from your surroundings and your landscape but also from the people, the form of the narration is the indirect speech.
And I am just very curious about how these two realms exist for you.
What you quoted was from Fitzcarald, a dialogue from Fitzcarald or that behind everyday life lies a reality of dreams that is a belief system of the native people in the jungle.
But of course very often in my films you see a departure from reality into a clearly into a world of dreams and imagination.
And you have also seen probably clearly in documentaries where I depart from the factual, from the reality where I modify realities in such a way that it resembles
truth more than reality. I am moving away from facts in order to create some sort of an illumination.
So it is all pervading in my films and it is in a way pervading the things that I write.
I am one sentence to the next I continue to a sheer dream into sheer poetry and it has never been foreign to me to switch from one step to the next into a dream form of reality.
I do not dream, but I do have vivid sort of dream experiences when I travel on foot. That does happen.
Sometimes it happens when I drive long distance in a car. All of a sudden the entire car is filled with butterflies and they are flying and floating around and I cannot see clearly enough anymore.
I try to clear the air and hold the straight line on the freeway. And those are the moments where I know you have to stop.
And I drive no matter where I am, I drive onto the shoulder and I try to swat the dreams away because it would be very dangerous to drive on with a car filled with about 2,000 butterflies.
It is not right. You just don't drive anymore.
But what we are pointing at is also that literally from one image to the next, from one sentence to the next, all of a sudden it is a dream like quality.
It is something not real. An unreal, real sort of world that I describe. I must say it is deeply what poetry I think does.
And correspondingly cinema is doing the same sometimes and there should be more like that.
I want to follow up on that question a little bit. As much as the book and films have this switch from something real to something fantasy or can happen within the same scene.
I was struck a lot by the humor in the book that we all read for today. A lot of it struck me very funny, especially most people with the town you come into and everyone is obese.
Sometimes it turns into the fantasy world seems to be a funny thing. The end of Bad Lou Tenant, where Nicholas Cage all of his problems immediately solved.
I see ostrichs. And we see a bunch of ostrichs running. I thought it was really rich in their kind of, they don't necessarily mean anything literal.
But the shifts often have a kind of, as much as a change in register between reality also they can in tone. And often for me like humor. I just want to ask you about that.
Yeah, there's always a human of walking in ice. There's a lot of it. I see a Santa Claus looking so bizarre that I can't burst out laughing in the crowds. I flee into a cafe and still see him outside the window in my face is frozen.
But I hold onto the table and the table starts to rattle so hard that the waiter looks at me. And I'm embarrassed that I flee to the men's room or something like that.
So it's a yes, there's always a form of humor. But sometimes you mention Bad Lou Tenant.
There's a very significant strange moment where I had, it was not in the screenplay, but I introduced iguanas on the coffee table of some homicide detectives who from an empty apartment are watching a suspect who lives across the street apparently.
And Nicholas Cage comes in and he says, "What are these iguanas doing here on my coffee table?" And the other detectives look at the coffee table and they say they ain't no iguanas.
But he's in such a haze of drugs that he sees the iguanas. The funny thing is we as an audience also see the iguanas. And it is a very significant moment because we as an audience and he, the Bad Lou Tenant, all of a sudden form of conspiracy.
A conspiracy over something imagined that only he can see, but we also see it. And it's a very fine moment. And I only, it only dawned on me that it was more than just an impulse that I had seen an iguanas in the branch of a tree and I said, "Get me that iguana, please, please, please get it quickly."
And so in hindsight, it had much deeper significant significance and it's a very hilarious moment where everybody laughs.
And of course beyond the humour, there lies a different, deeper meaning that's anchored in it.
And very often the laughter, the strange scenes when I buy something and I'm trying to shop something and all of a sudden my voice is only high pitched in squeaky and I don't know what to do now.
So the way it's described is kind of funny and yet it points always at something strange and deeper.
That leads to a question that I have because my colleague Laura Whitman and I are teaching a course on symbolism, literary symbolism.
And there are theories of the symbol that, you know, what you see, there's a deeper, as you said, there's a deeper reality behind it and can you actually, how can you penetrate it?
And so to make the question very simple, do you believe in symbols? Do you conceive of some of the stuff in your films and your books, all these things, as having a symbolical character?
I do have difficulties with that because I have never seen the world existence manifesting itself in form of symbols.
I have a very strange relationship to it.
Also, I do not really know what a metaphor is and I do not understand irony.
I do understand humor very well which is very different from irony.
Because irony always means seeing some sentence that is set to you with a different separate layer of meaning.
And that's what gives me my problem with a French language.
I sit in a cafe and everybody immediately starts to address me with ironic sort of questions.
And I answer back like a Bavarian bullfrog behind his style of beer.
I answer straight back and I startled him.
So in the similar thing, I've been asked about Fitzker-Arlldorf, the ship over the mountain.
Yes, I don't know it's a big metaphor but metaphor for what I do not know.
But I know it's a deep, very, very big metaphor.
That's one of the things that I think about the symbols is that as a college teacher of mine said, if a symbol refers to anything specific, it's not a symbol.
So maybe that boat is exactly that kind of symbol that cannot be translated into something.
But academia is trying it very hard.
I think it's very counter sometimes counter productive and it kills of sense of poetry.
So that's just a kick I want to do under the table.
They can see what's going on.
True, yeah.
But I think we have always been cautious about symbols and in particular when it came to the film I made on the political cave of forgotten dreams.
And there's something very mysterious.
You do have palm prints, not just hand prints or negative prints where you would spray paint with a paper with your spitting print, it's paint around and then you remove the paint and you have a negative hand print.
But there are also positive prints in the cave at various locations.
Clusters of palm prints round is sort of prints.
And we know that with all probability it was just one person because quite a few of them a crooked, probably broken little finger is also printing with it that stood away from the palm.
So, and deeper into the cave we find the same sort of palm print.
And there's huge studies of exegesis, what kind of symbol this might be and what it signifies and what this cluster encounter balance to a lower cluster might mean and the symbolism explained.
And I was sitting with one of these scientists come up with wild wild theories and I said to him and to the other gentleman, can I be prosaic?
We do not know what these clusters mean.
But how about this kind of explanation that I would come up with?
The people who did this cave paintings must have been very young because you died between 25 and 35.
So, in the young man every single time he got laid in the cave left a palm print there.
So, could it be that one and I was very indignant that I was so prosaic.
But what I'm trying to say is that sometimes I'm suspicious about reading too much symbolism into movies, for example,
my movies, of course, are forms of art that live almost exclusively of symbolism.
But it's not where I feel very familiar. I'm not at home there.
It's true and the academic hermeneutic attempt to translate something that is symbolic into conceptual form is not really what even the poets who theorize about the symbol the most.
Where the symbol is something that is so strange and bizarre that it places you in the midst of the incomprehensible.
And you stay there in the midst of the incomprehensible.
That's when a symbol is really doing its work.
If you say it like that, I feel very...
No, no, I feel totally at ease now.
Do we have time for one last question?
Maybe Truman, did I see your hand up?
What do you like hidden behind the palm of your head?
I'll come up.
So, when you talked about how nobody today walks anymore, I began thinking about probably the most famous major exception today,
which are the refugees from Central America.
And although there's a lot of differences between their walking and your walking,
I was thinking also about the similarities, for example, their defiance of death, some conception of life, a better life maybe, or more meaningful life,
and also your traversal of national boundaries.
So, it's a very general question, but I actually wanted to ask you because, in a way, I think you would make a great documentary for their struggle in some ways,
because of the gargantuan epic task before them.
So, it's very general, but I'm just wondering what you think.
Well, it's a deep question, and you are pointing at the huge track of tens of thousands who collectively have been tracking, I think mostly from Honduras,
crossing into Mexico, in traveling on foot, all across Mexico, all the way to the American North American boundaries.
Very hard to fathom the experience because it is driven by despair, and it is driven by hope,
in much of it, of course, is a fantasy when you look at how rigid American politics is at this very moment, shutting down the border.
So, it's a very, very precarious situation, and the questions, of course, are very profound that have to be asked,
and they have to be asked on various levels, as to me doing a film on it.
You see, in the last 12 months, I've made three long films, and that's more than others making eight years.
And I've been constantly somehow working, and of course, I noticed what was going on, but while I was working in Japan, on doing a feature film, for example, things happened,
and I only got it in very small bits and pieces over Japanese television, which I couldn't understand anyway, but you could tell what was going on.
But I think the question is more a question outside of cinema.
It has to do with a human situation, and it has to do with monumental tragedies, and there is no, if there was an easy answer, anyone would immediately come up with.
And the main thing is probably that you as Americans have to change first and foremost a climate.
There has to be a different climate, and that's speaking of changing a climate is something which is very hard to do, but it has to do, for example, also with a neglect of the heartland of America,
and I'm speaking of Wisconsin, and I'm speaking of Arkansas, and I'm speaking of this, the hair created a government that was born out of a deep, necklicked, deep disenfranchisement of a whole part of the population.
And I think you are working and living and studying at the Western margins, in the Eastern margins, Harvard, Boston, and New York, and Washington.
They spoke to me about the high overs, and I always was alarmed, and they found it scandalous, take care of the center of America, make your context to your old high school buddies in Oman.
Nebraska, why not Lawrence Kansas, because then you change a climate, and the climate will lead to a different type of government in legislation and attempts to build walls will probably vanish as if it had been a nightmare only.
So, it cannot be solved on the level of movies, but it's a very, very deep subject, and I think there are young filmmakers who accompanied the trek and made films from within, which I hope to see one day soon.
Bernard Harris, I'll give you all. Thank you.
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