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LAND
OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS
5/10
Land
des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit : (West) Germany 1971 : Werner
Herzog : 85 mins
Herzog’s
film about a deaf-blind lady named Fini Straubinger has one of the
most marvellous of all film titles, ominously evocative and intriguing.
What a pity, then, that it isn’t accurate. As Fini herself explains
at one point:
One
thinks of deafness as complete stillness. But oh no, that is wrong.
It is a never-ending noise in the head, ranging down to the lowest
ringing, perhaps the way sand sounds, trickling, then knocking, but
worst of all it pounds in the head so that one never knows where
to turn one’s head. That is a great torture for us… It
is precisely the same thing with blindness: it is not complete darkness.
Oftentimes there are very strange shades of colour in front of one’s
eyes: black, grey, white, blue, green, yellow – it depends.
(screenplay
published by Tanam Press in three-film volume, 1980, p188)
Then
again, just as we’re trying to square Straubinger’s statement
with Herzog’s title, she goes and mentions it straight out. At
a party for similarly handicapped friends, the solicitous Fini says “this
group must be looked after as well so that they are not pushed overnight
into the Land of Silence and Darkness” (p189). Did Herzog tell
Fini that this was going to be the title of his film, and ask her to
drop it into a conversation? It certainly doesn’t sound much
like the rest of her down-to-earth dialogue, and it seems odd that
the phrase is capitalised in the published screenplay. Or perhaps Fini
really did just make it up on the spot, and it caught Herzog’s
ear…
One
wouldn’t normally want to analyse such details so closely, but
Herzog’s methods in Land of Silence and Darkness (henceforth LSD)
make it necessary. For the director has admitted that some of “Fini’s” comments
and memories are, in fact, his own, including key statements at the
very beginning:
As
a child, when I could still see and hear, I once visited a ski-jumping
event; and this image keeps returning to my mind, how these men were
hovering in the air. I watched their faces very closely. I
wish you could see that too, once. (p184)
and
at the very end, an on-screen caption which reads “If a World
War broke out now, I wouldn’t even notice it.” (p203)
Except ‘admitted’ gives
the wrong impression, as Herzog clearly sees nothing wrong in such
inventions and additions. He’s never called LSD a documentary,
and he’s keen to undermine any notion that non-fiction films
can provide an objective form of recorded truth. But does rejecting cinema-verite mean
that one must create instead a deceptive hybrid – what one might
even call cinema-mensonge?
As
evidence of rampant directorial egotism, the bare fact of the additions
is troubling enough. It’s as if he either doesn’t trust
the strength of the subject, or that he just couldn’t get what
he wanted out of Fini herself. And the crushingly banal ‘world
war’ comment isn’t even true: of course, Fini wouldn’t
be able to see or hear evidence of war, but she’d certainly be
able to feel the shockwaves of explosions, feel the heat
of fires. One guesses that the loss of two key senses would lead to
a heightening of the remaining faculties – an enhanced sensitivity
to vibrations and textures (words are spelled out onto Fini’s
hand in a form of sign language) – but Herzog never raises the
issue.
Nor
does he explore Fini’s experiences of the last world war:
her age isn’t given, but the film was shot in 1970-71, she looks
at least 50, and we’re told she went blind at 15, then deaf at
18, which means she must have endured the misery of being a disabled
person under the Third Reich. But the topic simply isn’t mentioned.
Fini recounts some memories of her childhood, including a mysterious
fall which seems to have precipitated her condition, but events in
the outside world barely seem to impinge at all.
Fini
is clearly a remarkable individual, and her condition is the sort of
subject that film covers so scandalously rarely. We meet various other
sufferers, and in each case the scale of the disability is unique.
It’s all a question of degree: some were born totally deaf and
blind, others have lost these faculties over a process of years. Fini
retains 5% of her hearing, and, having been able to hear until her
teens, can still talk relatively normally. This enables her to act
as a kind of ambassador into the lonely lands occupied by each of the
sufferers, a living example of the ‘nicht isolieren’ (‘not
isolated’) slogan we see at a government conference on disabilities.
She
greets several as ‘comrades in fate,’ and shows an
indomitable determination to make contact with even the most apparently
hopeless cases – Fini’s attitude reminds us that there
really is always somebody worse off than ourselves. The film sets up
a chain of communication, from the audience to Herzog to Fini to the
people she helps, and the occasional gaps in the subtitling (plus occasional
discrepancies between the on-screen subtitles and the text in published
screenplay) emphasise the fragmented, unreliable nature of the various ‘languages’ used
at each stage.
That
these intentions are entirely honourable makes Herzog’s botched
execution all the more frustrating. The results are often extremely
hard going, and not just in terms of the terrible afflictions on view.
The film was made on a very low budget, which goes to explain the generally
rough-edges, and also the dingy lighting that mars so many sequences,
but there’s no excuse for his disastrous decision to put manipulatively
mournful strings music behind a scene showing a deaf-blind youngster
learning to swim.
The
undoubted highlight is a zoo trip where Fini and her friends interact
with various animals – including a monkey who reaches out and
pulls the gate off the front of Herzog’s camera. It’s a
startling moment, quite unlike any other in cinema, but forcibly reminds
us of the disturbing fact that, in most cases, the film’s subjects
aren’t even aware that they’re being filmed at all. It
falls a long way short of the roughly similar scene with Joan Allen
and the anaesthetised tiger in Manhunter,
but the energetic humour of the zoo sequence nevertheless puts the
static remainder of LSD to shame.
Herzog
includes far too many lengthy sequences of monotonous conversation,
and while it’s hard not to be humbled and moved by this material,
there are numerous moments when it’s even harder to keep your
eyes open. And in a film which forcibly reminds us just how fortunate
we are to be able to see and hear movies at all, that’s the last
reaction we should ever be made to feel.
19th August,
2001
(seen Aug-10-01, National Film Theatre, London)
by Neil
Young
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