"The Director"
Feb. 2nd, 2026 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeDaniel Kehlmann / trans: Ross Benjamin
All the buildings in Vienna are gray now, except for a few that are dark brown. The whole city seems covered with dirt. In winter the sky is stony and low, in summer yellowishly damp. Even that was different once. If you’re old enough, you know that in this city of garbage, coal smoke, and dog shit, even the weather is no longer what it was.
reads from his card: “Franz Wilzek became a director only late in life. Before that he was the assistant of G. W. Pabst.” <> Why is he suddenly talking about me in the third person?
“He had his own theory of film editing. That a cut must always be based on a movement, creating an unbroken flow from the first shot to the last.
I look at the screen. See myself looking off somewhere—of course, the monitor isn’t the camera, you have to look into the camera to see yourself looking out from the monitor, except then you obviously can’t see yourself because you’re looking into the camera, not at the monitor.
* I still see them: black-and-white people in a concert hall. From high above I’m looking down on them, as if I were flying, a crystal chandelier is shining brightly, I’m sitting next to the camera on the arm of a long crane. They’re all facing forward, because they’re not allowed to look up.
“He was an extra. In the concert hall… In hall seven, in the studio in Barrandov, when you were shooting The Molander Case.”... “My father survived,” he says. “In case you want to know.”
“Great,” said Pabst. He knew you could never go wrong using this word with Americans, just as it was always safe to compliment their shoes.
It was a terrible script, he protested, a completely dreadful melodrama. He couldn’t do it.
The two men looked at him for a few seconds with expressionless faces.
“But there’s a circus in the movie,” Jake then said.
“And immigrants,” said Bob.
Back when he had filmed The Joyless Street, everyone had told him that you couldn’t make a movie out of mere everyday life. German films were about dragons and vampires and ghosts and romantic shadows, not about girls driven by hunger to sell their bodies, not about inflation, not about desperate people on a Vienna street
* Here there was no such thing as no, Lubitsch had explained to him; even if you wanted to tell someone he wasn’t right, you first had to tell him how right he was.
Garbo: her memory had never been good; usually while filming, someone stood next to the camera holding a card with her lines written in large letters. That was why she had developed a certain restlessly searching gaze, which appeared very mysterious on-screen.
Excessive beauty was hard to bear, it burned something in the people around it, it was like a curse. Sometimes it seemed to her that she would soon have to hide from the world. Then she would do nothing but sit by the window and look at her birds.
* even worse than the cold had been her stage fright, her nerves, her discomfort with her thin, freezing body. And that was when he came up with the idea of having the cameraman crank faster whenever her face was in view. It was a real magic trick: each of those slow-motion close-ups showed a play of expressions so enigmatic and impenetrably ambiguous that you couldn’t look away. She had it done the same way in her subsequent films.
Once life has broken you, you’ll give up, but things haven’t reached that point. He had explained this to her with a seriousness she had never known people making moving pictures could possess. Movies—until recently that had been spectacle and eye-rolling, cowboys with pistols, duels between knights, ghosts in the night, and clowns fleeing from policemen. But when he spoke, it suddenly sounded like theater, like a novel, like true art.
In the past, situations like this had agitated her greatly. She could imagine what it must be like to be God or an archangel and constantly feel the prayers rising from the depths. Each one by itself could be fulfilled, but precisely because there were so many, there was nothing to do but ignore them all.
“That life here is very good if you learn the game. We escaped hell, we ought to be rejoicing all day long. But instead we feel sorry for ourselves because we have to make westerns, even though we’re allergic to horses.”... Hollywood isn’t them anymore, it’s us! Siodmak, Preminger, Lubitsch, Joe May, me.
“She’s trying to get a visa to England. No chance. Only Nobel Prize winners and trained butlers get one. And Sigmund Freud.”
Pabst seemed even more agitated than he was. Krämer turned away and quickly walked off. He heard Pabst saying something else, but he didn’t stop. The message had been delivered, the mission fulfilled.
She began to scold him—though in the way Americans did, that is, softly, with a fixed smile and clenched jaw,
Louise Brooks: “Sure, she’s the biggest star in the world, and I’m just your last hope. If anything else had worked, you wouldn’t have called me, Mr. Pabst.
Then they usually say, ‘What am I rich for anyway? I don’t have to put up with this!’ Soon only well-off men came along, but they found me too expensive; to live in the way to which I’ve grown accustomed, you have to be really rich. And then came men who not only had no money, but also wanted my money. What was I supposed to do? They were the best looking and were funny, and I had the most splendid time, and then my money was gone too!”
* secondly, I have no interest in the great man and his great art. I’m not a muse. I’m Lulu. That’s why you gave me the role. You understood me completely, and then you wanted me to be someone else?”
It’s always hard for men to bear when it only happens once. The first time is the confirmation. The first time, that’s: ‘It’s happening, she’s really saying yes, I’m not dreaming, it’s happening.’ But then it’s over before you believe it yourself. That’s why it has to happen again. Only the second time is really the first.
Do learn some English. Your beautiful French is no help to you here.” She leaned forward and took his right hand between both of hers. “Just look at you, with the face of a lovesick horse... That’s what I mean, how can anyone live with a man who stares at you like that? Also, you’re on the fat side. You should see what the others look like, I can’t help it, I just… need men to be more attractive.”
* he would never make a film on a glacier again... Then he was back there, tied to the steep slope, wind whipping his face while Fräulein Riefenstahl attempted to be an actress. At least he had managed to teach her a little. Listen inward, keep your hands steady; the bigger the emotion, the less you do.
* Lang was preparing the most expensive film of all time. He had given Pabst a personal tour through the artificial city: huge buildings towered over them and were enlarged even further by mirrors. With his somewhat silly monocle clenched in his eye, Lang had spoken of effects such as no one had ever seen, cars of the future, trains on absurdly high bridges, crowd scenes with thousands of people, a machine-person who turned into a woman... it would be a long time before anyone could rival him. <> Except for mountains. No matter how high Lang built, he would not achieve anything higher than the Alps. So Pabst had no choice but to go to the glacier.
“It will be a great success,” said Lang. “I saw the actors hanging there, on their ropes in the rock face, and I thought: God, am I glad I didn’t have to shoot that. Unlike you, I’m not immune to vertigo! Outside the studio I’m completely useless.”
“Metropolis is the best film ever made,” said Pabst.
“I know,” said Lang.
Both were silent.
Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money.
As he fled, the camera followed him down the street, so that while watching you had to hold on to something to avoid being swept away and losing your balance.
while his wife played the accordion and images they had recorded on their homemade cameras jerked overhead. It had made a deep impression on Pabst, he never forgot the fighting kangaroos, never the men with their twirling canes and never the name Molander.
Back then, almost everyone who wasn’t in service themselves had servants, because the country was so large and the poverty even greater; they were paid almost nothing. His mother suffered from having only one maid.
He had been surprised amid the bellowing of the French soldiers, who stood lined up with their rifles upright, as he went from one ship to the other, surprised as he spent the next weeks huddled below deck without seeing the sun, surprised as he disembarked in chains on a prison island near Brest, and still utterly bewildered as he moved into his camp barracks. <> Only later did he realize how lucky he had been. While the bone mills were grinding at the front, while his schoolmates were being slaughtered by a killing machinery the likes of which the world had never seen, for him it was all already over.
* The best thing about a lost world war: afterward there were few people and many opportunities. Wherever you looked, someone was missing, and wherever you wanted to go, there was room.
* the close-ups had astonished Pabst: you saw faces from a proximity that at first seemed preposterous. Only people you kissed did you usually see so close. And the painted backgrounds looked real and unreal at the same time, like something out of the strangest dreams.
* It was actually the camera operator who determined everything. Operators came alone and kept their secrets, each had his own camera, and among themselves they were enemies, who didn’t help each other or exchange ideas. The actors, on the other hand, didn’t take filming seriously, they came from theater rehearsal
* Some rules evolved: if someone went off to the right, he had to enter from the left in the next shot, or else he appeared to be going back, and if two people were talking to each other, neither of them should look into the camera, but one to the right and the other to the left past it; if they did it differently, it didn’t seem like they were looking at each other. And if something happened, and then immediately something else, the first event always seemed to cause the second: show a dog barking, followed immediately by a man falling down dead, and the dog killed the man with its yapping.
The film, assembled in this way, was copied four or five times in a small workshop on the outskirts of the city, no copy looking like the other because each had a different color, brightness, and contrast... Film was a new and disorderly medium, but that didn’t bother anyone—after all, the whole world lay in pieces. Only the future was bright.
All three were in transit and looked around with the typically absent-minded glances of refugees: you are never quite where you happen to find yourself; all that surrounds you seems like a sloppily constructed set, not worth remembering.
The conversation came to a halt. It was one of those moments when everything seems to have been said, when it suddenly feels like the present has been used up and nothing is left but a threatening future... And they knew that they, who barely knew each other and whom chance had thrown together, would never again come together in this group; some of them would be lucky, and the others would perish. <> And so it came to pass.
on the train: they become empty. The words lose their meaning. <> And the landscape does something similar. The hills and forests and castles and clouds and donkey carts are there, but everything seems flat, translucent to the yellowish-gray boredom of the train
When Papa is asked about his films, he usually mentions The Joyless Street and Pandora’s Box. Sometimes also The Threepenny Opera. But never, really never has Jakob heard him mention The Mistress of Atlantis.
Papa is silent for a moment, then he says: “You can see that I’m coming back.” <> Apparently that was the right answer. The policeman gives the passports back. “Heil Hitler,” he says, pulling the door shut and moving on.
but one form was missing a stamp,” he says. “The border guard said he could turn a blind eye, but not for free; how much money did I have on me? So I pulled out the five hundred reichsmarks I had hidden behind my belt, and the border guard said carrying cash was forbidden and he had to confiscate it. Then he said that unfortunately the stamp was still missing, so what could be done about that? And when I told him that now I had nothing left, he laughed and said: ‘Then please get off!’ ” <> The man with the mustache keeps wiping his face and shaking his head as if he himself were more surprised than horrified... “after all the humiliations and persecutions, even after they took my house away from me and beat me up in the street and threw my two children out of school—after all that I still didn’t expect something like this!”
even the story of this man, whose presence bothers Jakob greatly because it just isn’t right for adults to be so confused and upset, becomes monotonous over the rattling and rattling and rattling of the wheels.
he thinks about the many schools he has attended in recent years. There’s the Paris school with the serious teacher, Mademoiselle Grecque, in her strangely becoming sorrow.
the windows, whose panes were so old that they had flowed downward under the pressure of the years and were now several centimeters thick along the bottom edge and thin as fingernails along the top.
Since the previous year, when Austria had ceased to exist, Erika Pabst’s meals were only rarely warm... When they had sent the telegram to Erika’s son—COME QUICKLY STOP SERIOUS ILLNESS STOP HELP NEEDED STOP—and Erika had said that she wasn’t ill at all, Liesl had replied that it wasn’t about that; it was about finally getting her son to come back.
And what a joy it was, a dialect-heavy voice said from the doorway, that the gracious master and mistress were here, such a great, great joy! Jerzabek was wearing his party uniform again.
What a joy, repeated Jerzabek, and if one had only heard his voice and not seen his face and his smile made up of yellow teeth, one might have believed he really meant it... “Coming back and playing the great lord as if nothing has happened. But a lot has happened, and you don’t take that tone with Local Group Leader Jerzabek, or you’ll quickly find yourself somewhere else.”
Trude shot up, turned around, and opened the door. There, smiling rosy-cheeked under her headscarf, in the smock apron she always wore, stood Liesl Jerzabek. <> She had, she said, been listening to the master and mistress.
* And again his mind played a trick on him. Because when he saw Karl Jerzabek looking up at him, it seemed to him, quite naturally and out of old habit, as if he were at work and filming. It was a perfect shot: straight down with a short focal length and side lighting, so that the perspective shrunk the figure and seemingly increased the height at which Pabst was standing.
And then, as he stared down in horror, he suddenly felt like he was in a film after all. Because what was happening couldn’t really be happening: Jerzabek bent down and raised the lever that locked the wheels. Then he grabbed the ladder and began to rock it back and forth.
* drawing: The trick is to look at a thing as if it weren’t a thing and as if you didn’t know what it was. Then it turns into a collection of surfaces, some dark, others light, a pattern of shadow and light, or actually not even that, but just white and black, and when you put that on the sheet of paper, the thing appears there again as if by magic: a jug, a leaf, a hand, a dog’s head. <> The same goes for colors: Look closely, and the world recedes, becoming a mixture in which nothing is clean and everything runs together.
* If you really look, you will notice that shadows have not only the colors of the background on which they fall, but at the same time those of the body that casts them. Or you will notice that the world is full of reflections: almost every object holds the world that surrounds it on its surface, points of light, outlines, and glimmers—all images contain other images. To recognize this, you must in a sense become stupid. You must stop thinking.
the vast blue with patches of white that once, before you forgot all names to be able to paint, was the sky.
“Farmhouses are the citadels of our people” is the assignment. Their art teacher is Herr Kail, he wears a party uniform
he has to hurry—this morning, for example, the boy on his left just took his history notebook and copied from it, then threw it back on his desk without even saying thank you; and as if that weren’t bad enough, Herr Reib praised him in Latin class for a good translation, a very unfortunate combination of circumstances. He really has to do something.
He also knows that Krauber will stand up for little red-haired Frummel whenever someone says something disparaging about his village of Altenberg, because these farm kids are predictable. What he doesn’t know, however, is how he can hurt the big, broad Hans Krauber in a quick, effective manner that is safe for himself.
In reality, however, he does it to make the stone disappear inconspicuously into his pants pocket. He doesn’t drop it on the ground, because that would be seen, but no one pays attention when your hand slips into your pocket—that looks perfectly natural. The magician Dai Vernon, a kind and elegant gentleman, once explained it to him...: The oldest rule of the art of deception: a large movement makes a small movement invisible.
So he puts his arm around Krauber, exactly as he has observed in the schoolyard. He pats him appreciatively on the chest. The gesture feels idiotic to him, but if it works for others, why not for him? Softly he asks whether this will stay between them. Whether he can count on it. Because only cowards go out and snitch.
The girls are more dangerous than his classmates, because they’re not bound by the snares of fairness. But lately they’ve been leaving him alone. They no longer ambush him, they now only rarely lock him in the closet, they no longer beat him up, and thankfully, they’ve now stopped hiding needles in his food. He has managed to become boring to them.
The Jerzabeks are now up in the living quarters, and the Pabsts are downstairs in the caretaker’s apartment, which Papa hardly ever leaves... And so Mama has to take care of everything. She washes the clothes in a tub of hot water on the stove, and not only theirs but also the Jerzabeks’.
I certainly understand the wish to live inconspicuously, lathe biosas, the beautiful ideal of Epicurus,
* “But Shakespeare is English.”
“On paper. He’s German at heart. All our theaters put on his plays. If you weren’t hiding from the world like a mole, you would have noticed that by now. Our best actors embody his characters so truthfully, so… profoundly that it should make England blush with shame.”
“Can a country blush?”
Krämer’s throat tightened. He felt hot. Once again he had said something that wouldn’t pass muster among educated people, once again the wrong word, the wrong nuance, the wrong allusion. Once again he had proved that he didn’t belong.
“You’re not under arrest,” Krämer repeated, looking Pabst in the face and smiling. Unless, of course, he thought, Hungermann had joined the party in the meantime. Then he would be powerless, then he could do nothing.
* “It’s bad,” Käutner said softly as they sat in his living room, “and then again not so bad. Ufa has remained surprisingly apolitical, they let everyone do their work, even banned screenwriters continue to write under pseudonyms. Of course, you have to be extremely careful not to say anything wrong, even more so since the beginning of the war. But once you get used to it and know the rules, you feel almost free.”
I then found her a fake husband myself: Rolf, a Swedish colleague. I wire them money every month; Göring approved the arrangement. So everyone benefits: I can shoot, Maria is safe, Rolf earns well.”
Pabst asked where she was living, Maria.
“Well, with Rolf,” said Rühmann. “Where else? He’s her husband, after all!”
* It didn’t help that he knew Berlin well, the streets seemed to have been treacherously rearranged; something about the way they met, formed corners, and curved was now so different and new that Pabst wondered whether he had somehow ended up in a distorted mirror world. Over in America he had so often dreamed of suddenly finding himself in this Berlin ruled by brutes, and now that he was there, it simply refused to seem real... while the street down below rolled away very straight into an endless distance, a chimney up above thrust itself into an oversize moon. This was how films had looked fifteen years earlier, and strangely enough this thought soothed him so much that he was able to walk on
* When the corridor finally ended and another corridor turned off at a right angle, not to the left, but now to the right, which made no geometric sense, Pabst was suddenly almost certain that they had at some point turned around and gone back and were in the first corridor again—a trick he himself had used repeatedly in long tracking shots.
He reached the desk, where the Minister stood up to make room, and in a blur the two men became one man, who sat down and said, “I’m really delighted.” <> “Likewise,” said Pabst. Since he had already said it, it came more easily to him now. It didn’t matter anymore.
“You misjudge the situation. I’m not arguing. If you had just the slightest idea what could be in store for you, you wouldn’t even try. It is what it is, and I say what it is, and all you say here is: I’m sorry! And you say: Now I know better! And: I have recognized my mistakes. And I want to do my part to build a new Germany. Well?”
Do you know how to reach me?”
Pabst stopped. “How?”
“You could call the ministry. You could write a letter. You could stand on the street, any street, and speak. Or you switch on the light at night and say out loud whatever you have to say. That works too. I’ll find out.”
Maybe the war would be over by then, and if not, sooner or later there would be an opportunity to flee to Switzerland. And Mama would go to a sanatorium. All he’d had to do was make a hand gesture and say a few words. It wasn’t just producers who could delay a film forever.
Of course Trude hadn’t wanted to come there. But these were the wives of influential men, it could be vitally important to know them. “I asked Henny to invite you to her book club,” Wilhelm had said, “I asked her very emphatically!”
So this was what she had become—a jealous wife. The reliable butt of the joke in hundreds of comedies. She, who had once seemed capable of anything, who had written plays... —she, who had turned heads on the street.. she, who at nineteen had married a rich and kind man, who had left that man only a few years later because he had become too boring for her—she, of all people
* “Absolutely,” said Henny Porten. “But is that all, Trude?”
“I like how the music critic writes his hymn to the violinist… his name is Fritz, isn’t it? Well, how when he writes the hymn while still at the concert, Fritz’s mother happens to be sitting next to him. The old lady looks over his shoulder and sees that her son is going to be famous and is so happy. That’s… a bit silly. But if you will, it’s also moving.”
“Yes, it’s moving,” said Heidrun Hippler. “And it’s truthful too, and powerful. And not silly at all.”
“Alfred Karrasch,” said Else Buchholz, “is Heidrun’s favorite author.”
“You must know, dear Gertrude,” said Heidrun Hippler, “when the novel was published, book reviews hadn’t been banned yet.
“I still stand by it,” Maria Lotropf said softly. “I prefer Wave, Colorful Pennant. Perhaps the most beautiful literary work the Curonian Spit has produced.” <> “You’re just an apolitical sort.”
“Where did you get these beautiful porcelain cups?” asked Gritt Borger. “If I’m not mistaken, they weren’t here last time.” <> “An antique shop on Feldmochinger Strasse,” said Else Buchholz. “A whole set. Eighty-five reichsmarks.”
“But what do you think of the last sentence?” asked Gritt Borger. <> Trude leaned forward, took a piece of cake, shoved it into her mouth, and gesticulated helplessly to show that she couldn’t speak at the moment.
“A circle like this is based on agreement,” said Else Buchholz. “On harmony. Where that is not the case… Dear Gritt, with all due respect, maybe we’ll carry on without you for a while.”
nod in agreement when he remarked that under the emperor of India there had still been good dumplings on the moon. Dumplings made of clouds, he added, just like the cotton candy in the Prater, and she didn’t contradict him. This is how we all talk here, thought the professor; having already discarded the world and its reason, we dream and fabricate and ramble and chat as if nothing concerned us anymore.
sanitorium: “Accept that you are here,” he then said. “Believe me, it’s a great mercy. I had to do a great deal to be allowed here. Outside they would have come for me long ago. But no one is looking here.
Griffith and Lang could compose images better than he could, and without a doubt Reinhardt was superior in working with actors, but no one could edit better. Ideally, a film was a single uninterrupted movement; every shot had to be connected with the next.
* The greatest director in the Reich doesn’t need any help, but she is prepared to listen to consultants when it comes to the question of what it is the actors should do with their faces. That’s a difference between feature films and sports or party rallies—the faces count!”
“Yes, faces,” said Pabst. “Film would be so much easier without them. Or hands, hands are tricky too…”
“Unless you’re saluting!”
There was only one solution, he thought. You had to move the camera, following the dancer’s steps in short tracking shots, pointing it at the spectators as if seeing them from her perspective, and then you had to cut it in such a way that viewers mainly saw this very audience and details of the dancer only for seconds at a time: her hair flying back, her hand with the castanets, sometimes very briefly her face. If you set this exactly to the rhythm of the music, each cut a tenth of a second after the beat—never right on it!—it could work.
So he spoke about the nature of music and the nature of dance. He quoted Schopenhauer. He made a few jokes and told an anecdote about an argument between two lighting technicians that had happened during the filming of Don Quixote in France, but he claimed it had been during the filming of Westfront.
“Look at the camera. Energy emanates from it. Warmth. Power. You’re missing something and can feel it, there’s an emptiness inside you. What you see is not just a beautiful woman. You see everything you don’t have. Everything that makes life inadequate. You feel everything that is missing in life as you look at the camera—not into it, look just past it. The camera stands for everything you lack.”
“When we made Palu,” he heard her telling the group, “he showed me everything. Listen inward, he said. Be completely still, Leni, be silent, listen to your soul. And only then, not before, not before, not before, do you speak! I’ve never forgotten.”
I also know how much we directors depend on good actors.”
“Sarah Bernhardt,” said Benitz, “supposedly once said to a director—”
“Benitz, I don’t like it when people interrupt me. We depend, I was about to say, on actors who don’t need everything explained to them. For whom one word is enough, or even”—she looked Pabst in the face with a skull-like smile—“a glance?”
Benitz had turned ashen.
“But it’s important to remember,” said Pabst, “that acting, as we understand it today—”
“Is it because I’m a woman? That no one is letting me finish today?”
“To make him look evil!”
“I know… a few evil people. And they’re not usually sharply lit from below so you can tell.”
“You don’t say. What kind of evil people do you know, Georg?”
Let it go, he thought, remember that she can put you in a camp. And this time it worked, and he listened to himself and simply said: “If there’s
a light source down there, that is, if you spotlight him from below, then you have to do the same to yourself. You’re in the same room.”
“I don’t have to do anything. Don’t forget why you’re here.”
“And why is that?”
“Dialogue direction. Pronunciation. Speech tempo.”
Pabst rubbed his aching temples. “I think it’s fine as is.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t do another take?”
“Well, all right, then let’s do another one.”
“But what would you like me to do differently, Georg?”
“Nothing. All very good.” He hesitated. “Maybe a little slower with: ‘It’s true, sir.’ ”
“Why is that?”
“No?”
“I think it was perfect.”
her voice never sounded natural, she never emphasized a word differently, and not a single strand of her full, shiny black hair ever fell differently than before.
“One more time?” she asked. Pabst couldn’t remember how many takes it had been. He shrugged and shouted “Roll film!” and he saw that the clapperboard already had the number 11 on it. And then the number 16. And now a 21.
“But that’s enough for now,” she said.
“When you imagine,” said Wilzek. “On top of everything else. That they then also have to stand there and stare at the boss. Lustfully. That they’re ordered to do that. On top of everything else.”
“Everything else?”
“Poor bastards.”
Pabst put the glass down on the floor, but his hand was suddenly shaking so badly that it fell over.
“Where did you think we got the extras? You’ve never heard of Maxglan?”...
“There’s nothing we can do. We didn’t make it happen. We can’t keep it from happening. It has nothing to do with us.”
* When you can’t do something and at the same time have no choice but to do it, there’s only one solution: have someone else do it. Someone who looks like you and who uses your body, but who has no difficulty shooting two bullets into the head of a small screaming deer. Someone who can raise the rifle, squint one eye, breathe out fully, then hold his breath, and who doesn’t care at all that the moaning thing in front of him is breathing and suffering terrible pain and is so terrified that its fear is visible—it looks like a dark cloud, the fear.
Jakob realized that killing has something in common with painting—both work best when you forget that things are more than just color and shadow. Both are best done when you think away the inside.
Jakob considers for a moment whether he has to hit him now, but he decides that it’s not strictly necessary: it’s common among Hitler Youth members to speak disdainfully about parents. <> “Maybe she wasn’t completely sober either,” Jakob says, to be safe, because if he mocks his mother himself, he doesn’t have to start a fight just because someone else does. “We have to find the caretaker.”
“What’s a Saint Vitus dance?” asks Jakob.
“Dancing like you’re possessed by the devil,” says Papa. “First people watch, then they join in. They can’t help themselves.”
“That could be seen as an allusion,” says Wilzek.
“I didn’t hear that,” says Krämer.
There we had an English writer, very famous over there, huge print runs, very superficial writing of course, no depth, far from true art, but a clever man... ‘But what am I supposed to do?’ he asks me. ‘I can’t write German books about weight lifters and horses.’
“And you’re paying for his stay at the Adlon all this time?” asks Heuser. <> “No, that’s the best part! He’s earned so much with his plays! We froze the royalties immediately in thirty-three, and since then they’ve been yielding good interest at the Berliner Volksbank. The whole thing pays for itself.” Krämer flushes with pride and pleasure.
Krauss. He closes his eyes, listening within, and says in a suddenly changed voice: “Only once did love soften the Ruler of Shadows, and still at the threshold, sternly, he called back his gift.” He falls silent and makes small swinging motions with his right hand, apparently following verses that he doesn’t speak but only thinks. <> And then something strange happens: Jakob feels as if he too hears the verses—not as words, but as soft, sad music. But how is it possible for a person who can’t form a thought or finish a sentence to achieve such a thing solely with his facial expression and a movement of his hand? You can’t look anywhere else but at his soundlessly murmuring lips. (Friedrich Schiller's poem "Nänie,")
* Gestapo: Jakob watches them intently. He wants to remember them so that he can draw them, they’re both so lean and tall and healthy, and their faces are so blank, as if nothing at all were looking out of their eyes. He feels furtive envy. To be free of thoughts, while healthy and very strong. How wonderful that must feel.
“Lottery win for Kurt Heuser,” says Basler. <> Jakob sees Papa breathe a sigh of relief. Tension also falls away from Krauss, and Wilzek’s hunched shoulders sink back down.
And just like that the two of them are gone, having taken Heuser with them. Jakob rubs his eyes. He feels something strange happening: even now, although he usually never forgets a face, he can no longer remember what they looked like. He can no longer recall their voices either,
“I don’t know anything about this man,” says Jakob. “But there must be a reason. Otherwise they wouldn’t have come.”
His father silently folds his glasses and puts them into his breast pocket.
“They’re the best men in the Reich. They know what they’re doing.”
* “You’re right,” he finally said. “But only half right. Because all this will pass. But art remains.”
“Even if that’s the case. Even if it remains, the… art. Doesn’t it remain soiled? Doesn’t it remain bloody and dirty?”
Yes, this once her words struck him deeply. He looked hurt, battered, downright wounded.
“Maybe it’s not so important what one wants. The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in. These are my circumstances now. And you know, they’re not that bad! I have good scripts and high budgets and the best actors. The Comedians is my best film in a long time, Paracelsus will be better than anything Lang is making over there.
------
The honor would be all mine, I assured him, but nevertheless, etc.
For its part the ministry, in the person of Krämer, gave me to understand that it would consider the entire evening less than a success if I were not among the attendees, etc., etc.
Things grew rather desperately polite before Krämer saw fit to remind me, in an apologetic tone, “But you are a prisoner of war.”
though the language barrier constituted, in our case, a sort of no-man’s-land where pleasantries went to die, and yet his courtesy was never anything but elaborate.
One detested the Germans, their thuggery, their pogroms, their murderous lust for power, yet one could not fail to admire their attention to detail.
“Ah, Sparta, yes—but we have seen such improvements in equipment.”
“To make the pictures move, I suppose, one had to turn the amphora.”
“By hand.”
“And every one a peplum!”
Feeble jokes, but we were joking, and she smiled.
“We always have film premieres here. Or in Prague. No blackouts, no bombs.” <> “But, my dear fellow, sooner or later, as any writer or director can tell you, everybody bombs.”
* “Critics? We have no critics! Criticism is a Jewish genre that no one needs. Instead we have art appreciation! Look.” He stopped a tall, bespectacled man and said: “May I introduce you? Guido Merwetz. Once a feared critic. Now one of our subtlest describers.”
In fact, I should dearly have loved to storm out of the place, with great strides and billowing coattails, and vanished into the vast, black night. But that would have required me to squeeze past all the knees of the gentlemen and ladies in my row, considerably diminishing the effect of my tempestuous exit. And then, where in that vast, black night would I have gone?
He reached for her hand, apparently to deliver a kiss upon it, but she had already raised this very hand in a German salute, to which he instantly responded in kind, except that by then she had already lowered her arm again to receive his kiss; but the tomfoolery ceased when she left her hand down, he lowered his, grasped hers, and with a smile of deathly self-control, brought his lips to hover just above her alabaster skin.
It’s always a pleasure to see professionals at work. No matter the setting or circumstances, be it plumbers, bus drivers, waiters, or a director—when people excel at their craft, it gives one the feeling that the world isn’t such a vale of tears after all.
There was nothing joyful about it, neither mirth nor freedom: forward and back, to the right and to the left they jumped, their bodies twitching and writhing, seemingly unleashed, yet in perfect unison and with desperate faces. No one deviated in the slightest. <> Paracelsus entered, a large sword in his hand. He watched them dance, with a diagnostic eye, then he gave a mighty shout.
* “Indeed, I do!” She held her cigarette to the small, trembling flame shielded by my hand. “Only, I have seen enough of masterpieces. If there were one less in the world, I shouldn’t miss a thing.”
“ ‘Nuns fret not at their pensive citadels, and hermits are contented with their rooms,’ ” I said, smiling weakly. “ ‘And bumblebees inside their foxglove bells.’ And… that’s not exactly it, but—you know what I mean.”... “ ‘The prison into which we doom Ourselves no prison is.’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52299/nuns-fret-not-at-their-convents-narrow-room
The camera rose weightlessly, looking down on the crowd—this is precisely what all art speaks of: the world is longing. Human life is unfulfilled. The deepest expression of this is music... The music knew all this, and the camera knew it too, as it circled the characters in constant motion; it was a gaze from nowhere, from beyond time, on all this helpless, desperate striving... in reality it spoke of how nothing was ever enough, how everything always fell short. How so much would never be ours.
“Only if the hall isn’t big enough! One-third too big looks like a mistake, five times too big, that’s style!”
Had they stayed in France, they would now be just as much under German rule! If he were in the United States, Jakob would now be in the American army and equally in danger, perhaps in Europe, perhaps in the Pacific. The time was out of joint, everywhere, and you had to find a way to do your work.
* Pabst had the walls put at a slant and the paintings redone:... He had the shadows of the family seated at the table painted: sharp, elongated, and with thin limbs, they stretched across the floor and up the slanted wall. “If the actors sit still and only move their mouths, no one will see that the shadows are painted on!
* “But don’t you find it strange, Pabst, that we’re making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse? ... “Times are always strange. Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.”
He believes every word was written on Wegener’s note. In the next shot, after the lighting had been reset and the camera repositioned, her note read: She’s telling the truth, and his: He believes nothing.
“The special fund is for morale-boosting films!” <> “If there ever was one, The Molander Case is a morale-boosting film!”
Extras: There they were, motionless because they had been ordered to be, silent because they were not allowed to speak, row after row, some there in the room and some beyond the mirrors, trying to sit upright because they had to, but many could not, and some were coughing, which they were not allowed to do but could not suppress either. The smell was terrible.
“No one,” he said softly. “Not a single person. Will be harmed because of us. No one has been… The film must be finished.” <> Franz shook his head. He wanted to reply, explain, say something, but all he could muster was the word: “No!” And again: “No!” And: “Not this.”
next to him a woman of indeterminate age wearing a silk headscarf, probably to cover a shaved head. Here too the costume people had done what was necessary; ... There was no time for a lunch break. This pace was possible only because everything had been meticulously planned, because Pabst had mastered his craft so well, and because none of the extras ever went outside or asked for water or food.
Dr. Sämann turned his head. He had recognized Franz long ago. He smiled as he had once done when he stood by Franz’s bed and placed his cool hand on his forehead. With feigned bafflement he shrugged.
“If we don’t finish editing Molander, it was all for nothing.” Pabst stopped and looked at Franz through his reflective glasses. “Everything!”
“You mean, the extras? Even that was for nothing?”
“Those weren’t extras, those were soldiers.”
So now Franz sat at the rewinder, in front of him the counter, with large film reels to his right and left, cranking meter by meter, cutting, splicing. No wrong cut could be made on the negative; each mistake would have cost a frame, making for a jerky transition.
* Pabst had become so attuned to film editing that it seemed to him he could continue out here, as if everything he saw were up for manipulation. It struck him as odd that he couldn’t simply shorten the long way along the river on that street... then already the moment when they triumphantly crossed the bridge into the city; so much useless time, so much empty trudging, it could be done better!
Where the man was pointing, there was a staircase. It seemed to Pabst as if it hadn’t been there just before, but that was impossible; such major continuity errors didn’t occur.
* At first he did not understand the meaning of what he saw. He did not understand that the decision about the kind of story had been made; he also did not yet understand that he was now condemned to that future he had just thought he could escape, a future of narrow limits and meager circumstances, a future of small and dispensable movies. He understood only that the two army rucksacks, which looked exactly the same and exactly like all other army rucksacks, had been switched
a young lead actor of preposterously oily professionalism.
“They’re all polite again now,” said David Bass. “And why not! You must have seen Pabst’s Trial, his big statement against anti-Semitism.
Then he had practically stopped speaking. He had sat for hours in the library, in his old armchair, not smoking because there was no more tobacco, holding the empty cigarette case with Griffith’s initials, and replaying that film, which he could still see before him, frame by frame, scene by scene.
As long as Pabst was in the room, she could negotiate on his behalf, could accept or decline things; no one minded if he didn’t talk.
He still knew The Molander Case by heart, but individual scenes were already fading, and he could recall the faces of some supporting characters only with difficulty.
As she did every time she descended, Trude had to push back an attack of cold panic. When writing, she had imagined the cave as a deep, symbolically rich place, but not as something that felt so oppressively real. Walking on the muddy floor, through the smell of mold and moss, and seeing the mineral formations sprouting from the walls like a stony premonition of life, while at the same time realizing that the mountain above consisted of a hundred million tons of heavy stone, she found it all far from symbolic.
the assistant director, Ilse Schrewitz: The small, gray-haired woman had been treated with a strange awkwardness by everyone ever since it had become known that she had hidden a Jewish family in her cellar throughout the entire war. It wasn’t that anyone held it against her. It was just that no one knew what to make of the fact that she was a completely different person than anyone had suspected.
Buffalo, drawn with only a few strokes, their legs and horns clearly recognizable. Among them ran little men with spears. Closer inspection revealed how artfully each of them was executed; one threw his spear, another held an ax over his head. From above, where the sky must have been, yellowish lines fell, snow or rain or falling stars... And there, in front of the charging animals, surrounded by other men bowing before him, falling to their knees, holding out offerings to him, stood a twisted creature. Its back was crooked, one shoulder higher than the other. Where its head should have been were a few red spots, above which hovered two staring eyes. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to belong among these people; it looked as if it came from far away or an even more ancient time. A being from eons past, a brutal and evil creature they tried to appease with offerings.
“Do you recognize him?” asked Pabst.
“Of course.”
“Did he speak such a strong dialect even back then?”
“He’s still in prison, isn’t he?”
“He’ll be out soon. ..
“Well then,” said Trude. With mild horror she looked at the small picture, painted so many thousands of years ago, that mockingly returned her gaze. “It wasn’t really Hitler who ruled. Not Goebbels or Göring or any of them. It was always him.”
“Our tanks had an average lifespan of four days.”
It’s all in his films. The anger and the ambition and the cunning and the violence. When he was directing, he always knew what people had to do. But he himself never really knew what he was supposed to do.”
Jakob not painting anymore: “A soul is quite sensitive. Today I couldn’t act as… freely and lightly in movies as I used to, because of the things that happened to me. Life bends everyone, but it breaks some brutally and early. You and me, for example.”
“My father got it from Griffith.”... “Griffith. I knew him well. Take it back, I don’t want it.” She fills the glass again and pushes it toward him... does he realize that he has left the cigarette case with her after all.
All the buildings in Vienna are gray now, except for a few that are dark brown. The whole city seems covered with dirt. In winter the sky is stony and low, in summer yellowishly damp. Even that was different once. If you’re old enough, you know that in this city of garbage, coal smoke, and dog shit, even the weather is no longer what it was.
reads from his card: “Franz Wilzek became a director only late in life. Before that he was the assistant of G. W. Pabst.” <> Why is he suddenly talking about me in the third person?
“He had his own theory of film editing. That a cut must always be based on a movement, creating an unbroken flow from the first shot to the last.
I look at the screen. See myself looking off somewhere—of course, the monitor isn’t the camera, you have to look into the camera to see yourself looking out from the monitor, except then you obviously can’t see yourself because you’re looking into the camera, not at the monitor.
* I still see them: black-and-white people in a concert hall. From high above I’m looking down on them, as if I were flying, a crystal chandelier is shining brightly, I’m sitting next to the camera on the arm of a long crane. They’re all facing forward, because they’re not allowed to look up.
“He was an extra. In the concert hall… In hall seven, in the studio in Barrandov, when you were shooting The Molander Case.”... “My father survived,” he says. “In case you want to know.”
“Great,” said Pabst. He knew you could never go wrong using this word with Americans, just as it was always safe to compliment their shoes.
It was a terrible script, he protested, a completely dreadful melodrama. He couldn’t do it.
The two men looked at him for a few seconds with expressionless faces.
“But there’s a circus in the movie,” Jake then said.
“And immigrants,” said Bob.
Back when he had filmed The Joyless Street, everyone had told him that you couldn’t make a movie out of mere everyday life. German films were about dragons and vampires and ghosts and romantic shadows, not about girls driven by hunger to sell their bodies, not about inflation, not about desperate people on a Vienna street
* Here there was no such thing as no, Lubitsch had explained to him; even if you wanted to tell someone he wasn’t right, you first had to tell him how right he was.
Garbo: her memory had never been good; usually while filming, someone stood next to the camera holding a card with her lines written in large letters. That was why she had developed a certain restlessly searching gaze, which appeared very mysterious on-screen.
Excessive beauty was hard to bear, it burned something in the people around it, it was like a curse. Sometimes it seemed to her that she would soon have to hide from the world. Then she would do nothing but sit by the window and look at her birds.
* even worse than the cold had been her stage fright, her nerves, her discomfort with her thin, freezing body. And that was when he came up with the idea of having the cameraman crank faster whenever her face was in view. It was a real magic trick: each of those slow-motion close-ups showed a play of expressions so enigmatic and impenetrably ambiguous that you couldn’t look away. She had it done the same way in her subsequent films.
Once life has broken you, you’ll give up, but things haven’t reached that point. He had explained this to her with a seriousness she had never known people making moving pictures could possess. Movies—until recently that had been spectacle and eye-rolling, cowboys with pistols, duels between knights, ghosts in the night, and clowns fleeing from policemen. But when he spoke, it suddenly sounded like theater, like a novel, like true art.
In the past, situations like this had agitated her greatly. She could imagine what it must be like to be God or an archangel and constantly feel the prayers rising from the depths. Each one by itself could be fulfilled, but precisely because there were so many, there was nothing to do but ignore them all.
“That life here is very good if you learn the game. We escaped hell, we ought to be rejoicing all day long. But instead we feel sorry for ourselves because we have to make westerns, even though we’re allergic to horses.”... Hollywood isn’t them anymore, it’s us! Siodmak, Preminger, Lubitsch, Joe May, me.
“She’s trying to get a visa to England. No chance. Only Nobel Prize winners and trained butlers get one. And Sigmund Freud.”
Pabst seemed even more agitated than he was. Krämer turned away and quickly walked off. He heard Pabst saying something else, but he didn’t stop. The message had been delivered, the mission fulfilled.
She began to scold him—though in the way Americans did, that is, softly, with a fixed smile and clenched jaw,
Louise Brooks: “Sure, she’s the biggest star in the world, and I’m just your last hope. If anything else had worked, you wouldn’t have called me, Mr. Pabst.
Then they usually say, ‘What am I rich for anyway? I don’t have to put up with this!’ Soon only well-off men came along, but they found me too expensive; to live in the way to which I’ve grown accustomed, you have to be really rich. And then came men who not only had no money, but also wanted my money. What was I supposed to do? They were the best looking and were funny, and I had the most splendid time, and then my money was gone too!”
* secondly, I have no interest in the great man and his great art. I’m not a muse. I’m Lulu. That’s why you gave me the role. You understood me completely, and then you wanted me to be someone else?”
It’s always hard for men to bear when it only happens once. The first time is the confirmation. The first time, that’s: ‘It’s happening, she’s really saying yes, I’m not dreaming, it’s happening.’ But then it’s over before you believe it yourself. That’s why it has to happen again. Only the second time is really the first.
Do learn some English. Your beautiful French is no help to you here.” She leaned forward and took his right hand between both of hers. “Just look at you, with the face of a lovesick horse... That’s what I mean, how can anyone live with a man who stares at you like that? Also, you’re on the fat side. You should see what the others look like, I can’t help it, I just… need men to be more attractive.”
* he would never make a film on a glacier again... Then he was back there, tied to the steep slope, wind whipping his face while Fräulein Riefenstahl attempted to be an actress. At least he had managed to teach her a little. Listen inward, keep your hands steady; the bigger the emotion, the less you do.
* Lang was preparing the most expensive film of all time. He had given Pabst a personal tour through the artificial city: huge buildings towered over them and were enlarged even further by mirrors. With his somewhat silly monocle clenched in his eye, Lang had spoken of effects such as no one had ever seen, cars of the future, trains on absurdly high bridges, crowd scenes with thousands of people, a machine-person who turned into a woman... it would be a long time before anyone could rival him. <> Except for mountains. No matter how high Lang built, he would not achieve anything higher than the Alps. So Pabst had no choice but to go to the glacier.
“It will be a great success,” said Lang. “I saw the actors hanging there, on their ropes in the rock face, and I thought: God, am I glad I didn’t have to shoot that. Unlike you, I’m not immune to vertigo! Outside the studio I’m completely useless.”
“Metropolis is the best film ever made,” said Pabst.
“I know,” said Lang.
Both were silent.
Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money.
As he fled, the camera followed him down the street, so that while watching you had to hold on to something to avoid being swept away and losing your balance.
while his wife played the accordion and images they had recorded on their homemade cameras jerked overhead. It had made a deep impression on Pabst, he never forgot the fighting kangaroos, never the men with their twirling canes and never the name Molander.
Back then, almost everyone who wasn’t in service themselves had servants, because the country was so large and the poverty even greater; they were paid almost nothing. His mother suffered from having only one maid.
He had been surprised amid the bellowing of the French soldiers, who stood lined up with their rifles upright, as he went from one ship to the other, surprised as he spent the next weeks huddled below deck without seeing the sun, surprised as he disembarked in chains on a prison island near Brest, and still utterly bewildered as he moved into his camp barracks. <> Only later did he realize how lucky he had been. While the bone mills were grinding at the front, while his schoolmates were being slaughtered by a killing machinery the likes of which the world had never seen, for him it was all already over.
* The best thing about a lost world war: afterward there were few people and many opportunities. Wherever you looked, someone was missing, and wherever you wanted to go, there was room.
* the close-ups had astonished Pabst: you saw faces from a proximity that at first seemed preposterous. Only people you kissed did you usually see so close. And the painted backgrounds looked real and unreal at the same time, like something out of the strangest dreams.
* It was actually the camera operator who determined everything. Operators came alone and kept their secrets, each had his own camera, and among themselves they were enemies, who didn’t help each other or exchange ideas. The actors, on the other hand, didn’t take filming seriously, they came from theater rehearsal
* Some rules evolved: if someone went off to the right, he had to enter from the left in the next shot, or else he appeared to be going back, and if two people were talking to each other, neither of them should look into the camera, but one to the right and the other to the left past it; if they did it differently, it didn’t seem like they were looking at each other. And if something happened, and then immediately something else, the first event always seemed to cause the second: show a dog barking, followed immediately by a man falling down dead, and the dog killed the man with its yapping.
The film, assembled in this way, was copied four or five times in a small workshop on the outskirts of the city, no copy looking like the other because each had a different color, brightness, and contrast... Film was a new and disorderly medium, but that didn’t bother anyone—after all, the whole world lay in pieces. Only the future was bright.
All three were in transit and looked around with the typically absent-minded glances of refugees: you are never quite where you happen to find yourself; all that surrounds you seems like a sloppily constructed set, not worth remembering.
The conversation came to a halt. It was one of those moments when everything seems to have been said, when it suddenly feels like the present has been used up and nothing is left but a threatening future... And they knew that they, who barely knew each other and whom chance had thrown together, would never again come together in this group; some of them would be lucky, and the others would perish. <> And so it came to pass.
on the train: they become empty. The words lose their meaning. <> And the landscape does something similar. The hills and forests and castles and clouds and donkey carts are there, but everything seems flat, translucent to the yellowish-gray boredom of the train
When Papa is asked about his films, he usually mentions The Joyless Street and Pandora’s Box. Sometimes also The Threepenny Opera. But never, really never has Jakob heard him mention The Mistress of Atlantis.
Papa is silent for a moment, then he says: “You can see that I’m coming back.” <> Apparently that was the right answer. The policeman gives the passports back. “Heil Hitler,” he says, pulling the door shut and moving on.
but one form was missing a stamp,” he says. “The border guard said he could turn a blind eye, but not for free; how much money did I have on me? So I pulled out the five hundred reichsmarks I had hidden behind my belt, and the border guard said carrying cash was forbidden and he had to confiscate it. Then he said that unfortunately the stamp was still missing, so what could be done about that? And when I told him that now I had nothing left, he laughed and said: ‘Then please get off!’ ” <> The man with the mustache keeps wiping his face and shaking his head as if he himself were more surprised than horrified... “after all the humiliations and persecutions, even after they took my house away from me and beat me up in the street and threw my two children out of school—after all that I still didn’t expect something like this!”
even the story of this man, whose presence bothers Jakob greatly because it just isn’t right for adults to be so confused and upset, becomes monotonous over the rattling and rattling and rattling of the wheels.
he thinks about the many schools he has attended in recent years. There’s the Paris school with the serious teacher, Mademoiselle Grecque, in her strangely becoming sorrow.
the windows, whose panes were so old that they had flowed downward under the pressure of the years and were now several centimeters thick along the bottom edge and thin as fingernails along the top.
Since the previous year, when Austria had ceased to exist, Erika Pabst’s meals were only rarely warm... When they had sent the telegram to Erika’s son—COME QUICKLY STOP SERIOUS ILLNESS STOP HELP NEEDED STOP—and Erika had said that she wasn’t ill at all, Liesl had replied that it wasn’t about that; it was about finally getting her son to come back.
And what a joy it was, a dialect-heavy voice said from the doorway, that the gracious master and mistress were here, such a great, great joy! Jerzabek was wearing his party uniform again.
What a joy, repeated Jerzabek, and if one had only heard his voice and not seen his face and his smile made up of yellow teeth, one might have believed he really meant it... “Coming back and playing the great lord as if nothing has happened. But a lot has happened, and you don’t take that tone with Local Group Leader Jerzabek, or you’ll quickly find yourself somewhere else.”
Trude shot up, turned around, and opened the door. There, smiling rosy-cheeked under her headscarf, in the smock apron she always wore, stood Liesl Jerzabek. <> She had, she said, been listening to the master and mistress.
* And again his mind played a trick on him. Because when he saw Karl Jerzabek looking up at him, it seemed to him, quite naturally and out of old habit, as if he were at work and filming. It was a perfect shot: straight down with a short focal length and side lighting, so that the perspective shrunk the figure and seemingly increased the height at which Pabst was standing.
And then, as he stared down in horror, he suddenly felt like he was in a film after all. Because what was happening couldn’t really be happening: Jerzabek bent down and raised the lever that locked the wheels. Then he grabbed the ladder and began to rock it back and forth.
* drawing: The trick is to look at a thing as if it weren’t a thing and as if you didn’t know what it was. Then it turns into a collection of surfaces, some dark, others light, a pattern of shadow and light, or actually not even that, but just white and black, and when you put that on the sheet of paper, the thing appears there again as if by magic: a jug, a leaf, a hand, a dog’s head. <> The same goes for colors: Look closely, and the world recedes, becoming a mixture in which nothing is clean and everything runs together.
* If you really look, you will notice that shadows have not only the colors of the background on which they fall, but at the same time those of the body that casts them. Or you will notice that the world is full of reflections: almost every object holds the world that surrounds it on its surface, points of light, outlines, and glimmers—all images contain other images. To recognize this, you must in a sense become stupid. You must stop thinking.
the vast blue with patches of white that once, before you forgot all names to be able to paint, was the sky.
“Farmhouses are the citadels of our people” is the assignment. Their art teacher is Herr Kail, he wears a party uniform
he has to hurry—this morning, for example, the boy on his left just took his history notebook and copied from it, then threw it back on his desk without even saying thank you; and as if that weren’t bad enough, Herr Reib praised him in Latin class for a good translation, a very unfortunate combination of circumstances. He really has to do something.
He also knows that Krauber will stand up for little red-haired Frummel whenever someone says something disparaging about his village of Altenberg, because these farm kids are predictable. What he doesn’t know, however, is how he can hurt the big, broad Hans Krauber in a quick, effective manner that is safe for himself.
In reality, however, he does it to make the stone disappear inconspicuously into his pants pocket. He doesn’t drop it on the ground, because that would be seen, but no one pays attention when your hand slips into your pocket—that looks perfectly natural. The magician Dai Vernon, a kind and elegant gentleman, once explained it to him...: The oldest rule of the art of deception: a large movement makes a small movement invisible.
So he puts his arm around Krauber, exactly as he has observed in the schoolyard. He pats him appreciatively on the chest. The gesture feels idiotic to him, but if it works for others, why not for him? Softly he asks whether this will stay between them. Whether he can count on it. Because only cowards go out and snitch.
The girls are more dangerous than his classmates, because they’re not bound by the snares of fairness. But lately they’ve been leaving him alone. They no longer ambush him, they now only rarely lock him in the closet, they no longer beat him up, and thankfully, they’ve now stopped hiding needles in his food. He has managed to become boring to them.
The Jerzabeks are now up in the living quarters, and the Pabsts are downstairs in the caretaker’s apartment, which Papa hardly ever leaves... And so Mama has to take care of everything. She washes the clothes in a tub of hot water on the stove, and not only theirs but also the Jerzabeks’.
I certainly understand the wish to live inconspicuously, lathe biosas, the beautiful ideal of Epicurus,
* “But Shakespeare is English.”
“On paper. He’s German at heart. All our theaters put on his plays. If you weren’t hiding from the world like a mole, you would have noticed that by now. Our best actors embody his characters so truthfully, so… profoundly that it should make England blush with shame.”
“Can a country blush?”
Krämer’s throat tightened. He felt hot. Once again he had said something that wouldn’t pass muster among educated people, once again the wrong word, the wrong nuance, the wrong allusion. Once again he had proved that he didn’t belong.
“You’re not under arrest,” Krämer repeated, looking Pabst in the face and smiling. Unless, of course, he thought, Hungermann had joined the party in the meantime. Then he would be powerless, then he could do nothing.
* “It’s bad,” Käutner said softly as they sat in his living room, “and then again not so bad. Ufa has remained surprisingly apolitical, they let everyone do their work, even banned screenwriters continue to write under pseudonyms. Of course, you have to be extremely careful not to say anything wrong, even more so since the beginning of the war. But once you get used to it and know the rules, you feel almost free.”
I then found her a fake husband myself: Rolf, a Swedish colleague. I wire them money every month; Göring approved the arrangement. So everyone benefits: I can shoot, Maria is safe, Rolf earns well.”
Pabst asked where she was living, Maria.
“Well, with Rolf,” said Rühmann. “Where else? He’s her husband, after all!”
* It didn’t help that he knew Berlin well, the streets seemed to have been treacherously rearranged; something about the way they met, formed corners, and curved was now so different and new that Pabst wondered whether he had somehow ended up in a distorted mirror world. Over in America he had so often dreamed of suddenly finding himself in this Berlin ruled by brutes, and now that he was there, it simply refused to seem real... while the street down below rolled away very straight into an endless distance, a chimney up above thrust itself into an oversize moon. This was how films had looked fifteen years earlier, and strangely enough this thought soothed him so much that he was able to walk on
* When the corridor finally ended and another corridor turned off at a right angle, not to the left, but now to the right, which made no geometric sense, Pabst was suddenly almost certain that they had at some point turned around and gone back and were in the first corridor again—a trick he himself had used repeatedly in long tracking shots.
He reached the desk, where the Minister stood up to make room, and in a blur the two men became one man, who sat down and said, “I’m really delighted.” <> “Likewise,” said Pabst. Since he had already said it, it came more easily to him now. It didn’t matter anymore.
“You misjudge the situation. I’m not arguing. If you had just the slightest idea what could be in store for you, you wouldn’t even try. It is what it is, and I say what it is, and all you say here is: I’m sorry! And you say: Now I know better! And: I have recognized my mistakes. And I want to do my part to build a new Germany. Well?”
Do you know how to reach me?”
Pabst stopped. “How?”
“You could call the ministry. You could write a letter. You could stand on the street, any street, and speak. Or you switch on the light at night and say out loud whatever you have to say. That works too. I’ll find out.”
Maybe the war would be over by then, and if not, sooner or later there would be an opportunity to flee to Switzerland. And Mama would go to a sanatorium. All he’d had to do was make a hand gesture and say a few words. It wasn’t just producers who could delay a film forever.
Of course Trude hadn’t wanted to come there. But these were the wives of influential men, it could be vitally important to know them. “I asked Henny to invite you to her book club,” Wilhelm had said, “I asked her very emphatically!”
So this was what she had become—a jealous wife. The reliable butt of the joke in hundreds of comedies. She, who had once seemed capable of anything, who had written plays... —she, who had turned heads on the street.. she, who at nineteen had married a rich and kind man, who had left that man only a few years later because he had become too boring for her—she, of all people
* “Absolutely,” said Henny Porten. “But is that all, Trude?”
“I like how the music critic writes his hymn to the violinist… his name is Fritz, isn’t it? Well, how when he writes the hymn while still at the concert, Fritz’s mother happens to be sitting next to him. The old lady looks over his shoulder and sees that her son is going to be famous and is so happy. That’s… a bit silly. But if you will, it’s also moving.”
“Yes, it’s moving,” said Heidrun Hippler. “And it’s truthful too, and powerful. And not silly at all.”
“Alfred Karrasch,” said Else Buchholz, “is Heidrun’s favorite author.”
“You must know, dear Gertrude,” said Heidrun Hippler, “when the novel was published, book reviews hadn’t been banned yet.
“I still stand by it,” Maria Lotropf said softly. “I prefer Wave, Colorful Pennant. Perhaps the most beautiful literary work the Curonian Spit has produced.” <> “You’re just an apolitical sort.”
“Where did you get these beautiful porcelain cups?” asked Gritt Borger. “If I’m not mistaken, they weren’t here last time.” <> “An antique shop on Feldmochinger Strasse,” said Else Buchholz. “A whole set. Eighty-five reichsmarks.”
“But what do you think of the last sentence?” asked Gritt Borger. <> Trude leaned forward, took a piece of cake, shoved it into her mouth, and gesticulated helplessly to show that she couldn’t speak at the moment.
“A circle like this is based on agreement,” said Else Buchholz. “On harmony. Where that is not the case… Dear Gritt, with all due respect, maybe we’ll carry on without you for a while.”
nod in agreement when he remarked that under the emperor of India there had still been good dumplings on the moon. Dumplings made of clouds, he added, just like the cotton candy in the Prater, and she didn’t contradict him. This is how we all talk here, thought the professor; having already discarded the world and its reason, we dream and fabricate and ramble and chat as if nothing concerned us anymore.
sanitorium: “Accept that you are here,” he then said. “Believe me, it’s a great mercy. I had to do a great deal to be allowed here. Outside they would have come for me long ago. But no one is looking here.
Griffith and Lang could compose images better than he could, and without a doubt Reinhardt was superior in working with actors, but no one could edit better. Ideally, a film was a single uninterrupted movement; every shot had to be connected with the next.
* The greatest director in the Reich doesn’t need any help, but she is prepared to listen to consultants when it comes to the question of what it is the actors should do with their faces. That’s a difference between feature films and sports or party rallies—the faces count!”
“Yes, faces,” said Pabst. “Film would be so much easier without them. Or hands, hands are tricky too…”
“Unless you’re saluting!”
There was only one solution, he thought. You had to move the camera, following the dancer’s steps in short tracking shots, pointing it at the spectators as if seeing them from her perspective, and then you had to cut it in such a way that viewers mainly saw this very audience and details of the dancer only for seconds at a time: her hair flying back, her hand with the castanets, sometimes very briefly her face. If you set this exactly to the rhythm of the music, each cut a tenth of a second after the beat—never right on it!—it could work.
So he spoke about the nature of music and the nature of dance. He quoted Schopenhauer. He made a few jokes and told an anecdote about an argument between two lighting technicians that had happened during the filming of Don Quixote in France, but he claimed it had been during the filming of Westfront.
“Look at the camera. Energy emanates from it. Warmth. Power. You’re missing something and can feel it, there’s an emptiness inside you. What you see is not just a beautiful woman. You see everything you don’t have. Everything that makes life inadequate. You feel everything that is missing in life as you look at the camera—not into it, look just past it. The camera stands for everything you lack.”
“When we made Palu,” he heard her telling the group, “he showed me everything. Listen inward, he said. Be completely still, Leni, be silent, listen to your soul. And only then, not before, not before, not before, do you speak! I’ve never forgotten.”
I also know how much we directors depend on good actors.”
“Sarah Bernhardt,” said Benitz, “supposedly once said to a director—”
“Benitz, I don’t like it when people interrupt me. We depend, I was about to say, on actors who don’t need everything explained to them. For whom one word is enough, or even”—she looked Pabst in the face with a skull-like smile—“a glance?”
Benitz had turned ashen.
“But it’s important to remember,” said Pabst, “that acting, as we understand it today—”
“Is it because I’m a woman? That no one is letting me finish today?”
“To make him look evil!”
“I know… a few evil people. And they’re not usually sharply lit from below so you can tell.”
“You don’t say. What kind of evil people do you know, Georg?”
Let it go, he thought, remember that she can put you in a camp. And this time it worked, and he listened to himself and simply said: “If there’s
a light source down there, that is, if you spotlight him from below, then you have to do the same to yourself. You’re in the same room.”
“I don’t have to do anything. Don’t forget why you’re here.”
“And why is that?”
“Dialogue direction. Pronunciation. Speech tempo.”
Pabst rubbed his aching temples. “I think it’s fine as is.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t do another take?”
“Well, all right, then let’s do another one.”
“But what would you like me to do differently, Georg?”
“Nothing. All very good.” He hesitated. “Maybe a little slower with: ‘It’s true, sir.’ ”
“Why is that?”
“No?”
“I think it was perfect.”
her voice never sounded natural, she never emphasized a word differently, and not a single strand of her full, shiny black hair ever fell differently than before.
“One more time?” she asked. Pabst couldn’t remember how many takes it had been. He shrugged and shouted “Roll film!” and he saw that the clapperboard already had the number 11 on it. And then the number 16. And now a 21.
“But that’s enough for now,” she said.
“When you imagine,” said Wilzek. “On top of everything else. That they then also have to stand there and stare at the boss. Lustfully. That they’re ordered to do that. On top of everything else.”
“Everything else?”
“Poor bastards.”
Pabst put the glass down on the floor, but his hand was suddenly shaking so badly that it fell over.
“Where did you think we got the extras? You’ve never heard of Maxglan?”...
“There’s nothing we can do. We didn’t make it happen. We can’t keep it from happening. It has nothing to do with us.”
* When you can’t do something and at the same time have no choice but to do it, there’s only one solution: have someone else do it. Someone who looks like you and who uses your body, but who has no difficulty shooting two bullets into the head of a small screaming deer. Someone who can raise the rifle, squint one eye, breathe out fully, then hold his breath, and who doesn’t care at all that the moaning thing in front of him is breathing and suffering terrible pain and is so terrified that its fear is visible—it looks like a dark cloud, the fear.
Jakob realized that killing has something in common with painting—both work best when you forget that things are more than just color and shadow. Both are best done when you think away the inside.
Jakob considers for a moment whether he has to hit him now, but he decides that it’s not strictly necessary: it’s common among Hitler Youth members to speak disdainfully about parents. <> “Maybe she wasn’t completely sober either,” Jakob says, to be safe, because if he mocks his mother himself, he doesn’t have to start a fight just because someone else does. “We have to find the caretaker.”
“What’s a Saint Vitus dance?” asks Jakob.
“Dancing like you’re possessed by the devil,” says Papa. “First people watch, then they join in. They can’t help themselves.”
“That could be seen as an allusion,” says Wilzek.
“I didn’t hear that,” says Krämer.
There we had an English writer, very famous over there, huge print runs, very superficial writing of course, no depth, far from true art, but a clever man... ‘But what am I supposed to do?’ he asks me. ‘I can’t write German books about weight lifters and horses.’
“And you’re paying for his stay at the Adlon all this time?” asks Heuser. <> “No, that’s the best part! He’s earned so much with his plays! We froze the royalties immediately in thirty-three, and since then they’ve been yielding good interest at the Berliner Volksbank. The whole thing pays for itself.” Krämer flushes with pride and pleasure.
Krauss. He closes his eyes, listening within, and says in a suddenly changed voice: “Only once did love soften the Ruler of Shadows, and still at the threshold, sternly, he called back his gift.” He falls silent and makes small swinging motions with his right hand, apparently following verses that he doesn’t speak but only thinks. <> And then something strange happens: Jakob feels as if he too hears the verses—not as words, but as soft, sad music. But how is it possible for a person who can’t form a thought or finish a sentence to achieve such a thing solely with his facial expression and a movement of his hand? You can’t look anywhere else but at his soundlessly murmuring lips. (Friedrich Schiller's poem "Nänie,")
* Gestapo: Jakob watches them intently. He wants to remember them so that he can draw them, they’re both so lean and tall and healthy, and their faces are so blank, as if nothing at all were looking out of their eyes. He feels furtive envy. To be free of thoughts, while healthy and very strong. How wonderful that must feel.
“Lottery win for Kurt Heuser,” says Basler. <> Jakob sees Papa breathe a sigh of relief. Tension also falls away from Krauss, and Wilzek’s hunched shoulders sink back down.
And just like that the two of them are gone, having taken Heuser with them. Jakob rubs his eyes. He feels something strange happening: even now, although he usually never forgets a face, he can no longer remember what they looked like. He can no longer recall their voices either,
“I don’t know anything about this man,” says Jakob. “But there must be a reason. Otherwise they wouldn’t have come.”
His father silently folds his glasses and puts them into his breast pocket.
“They’re the best men in the Reich. They know what they’re doing.”
* “You’re right,” he finally said. “But only half right. Because all this will pass. But art remains.”
“Even if that’s the case. Even if it remains, the… art. Doesn’t it remain soiled? Doesn’t it remain bloody and dirty?”
Yes, this once her words struck him deeply. He looked hurt, battered, downright wounded.
“Maybe it’s not so important what one wants. The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in. These are my circumstances now. And you know, they’re not that bad! I have good scripts and high budgets and the best actors. The Comedians is my best film in a long time, Paracelsus will be better than anything Lang is making over there.
------
The honor would be all mine, I assured him, but nevertheless, etc.
For its part the ministry, in the person of Krämer, gave me to understand that it would consider the entire evening less than a success if I were not among the attendees, etc., etc.
Things grew rather desperately polite before Krämer saw fit to remind me, in an apologetic tone, “But you are a prisoner of war.”
though the language barrier constituted, in our case, a sort of no-man’s-land where pleasantries went to die, and yet his courtesy was never anything but elaborate.
One detested the Germans, their thuggery, their pogroms, their murderous lust for power, yet one could not fail to admire their attention to detail.
“Ah, Sparta, yes—but we have seen such improvements in equipment.”
“To make the pictures move, I suppose, one had to turn the amphora.”
“By hand.”
“And every one a peplum!”
Feeble jokes, but we were joking, and she smiled.
“We always have film premieres here. Or in Prague. No blackouts, no bombs.” <> “But, my dear fellow, sooner or later, as any writer or director can tell you, everybody bombs.”
* “Critics? We have no critics! Criticism is a Jewish genre that no one needs. Instead we have art appreciation! Look.” He stopped a tall, bespectacled man and said: “May I introduce you? Guido Merwetz. Once a feared critic. Now one of our subtlest describers.”
In fact, I should dearly have loved to storm out of the place, with great strides and billowing coattails, and vanished into the vast, black night. But that would have required me to squeeze past all the knees of the gentlemen and ladies in my row, considerably diminishing the effect of my tempestuous exit. And then, where in that vast, black night would I have gone?
He reached for her hand, apparently to deliver a kiss upon it, but she had already raised this very hand in a German salute, to which he instantly responded in kind, except that by then she had already lowered her arm again to receive his kiss; but the tomfoolery ceased when she left her hand down, he lowered his, grasped hers, and with a smile of deathly self-control, brought his lips to hover just above her alabaster skin.
It’s always a pleasure to see professionals at work. No matter the setting or circumstances, be it plumbers, bus drivers, waiters, or a director—when people excel at their craft, it gives one the feeling that the world isn’t such a vale of tears after all.
There was nothing joyful about it, neither mirth nor freedom: forward and back, to the right and to the left they jumped, their bodies twitching and writhing, seemingly unleashed, yet in perfect unison and with desperate faces. No one deviated in the slightest. <> Paracelsus entered, a large sword in his hand. He watched them dance, with a diagnostic eye, then he gave a mighty shout.
* “Indeed, I do!” She held her cigarette to the small, trembling flame shielded by my hand. “Only, I have seen enough of masterpieces. If there were one less in the world, I shouldn’t miss a thing.”
“ ‘Nuns fret not at their pensive citadels, and hermits are contented with their rooms,’ ” I said, smiling weakly. “ ‘And bumblebees inside their foxglove bells.’ And… that’s not exactly it, but—you know what I mean.”... “ ‘The prison into which we doom Ourselves no prison is.’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52299/nuns-fret-not-at-their-convents-narrow-room
The camera rose weightlessly, looking down on the crowd—this is precisely what all art speaks of: the world is longing. Human life is unfulfilled. The deepest expression of this is music... The music knew all this, and the camera knew it too, as it circled the characters in constant motion; it was a gaze from nowhere, from beyond time, on all this helpless, desperate striving... in reality it spoke of how nothing was ever enough, how everything always fell short. How so much would never be ours.
“Only if the hall isn’t big enough! One-third too big looks like a mistake, five times too big, that’s style!”
Had they stayed in France, they would now be just as much under German rule! If he were in the United States, Jakob would now be in the American army and equally in danger, perhaps in Europe, perhaps in the Pacific. The time was out of joint, everywhere, and you had to find a way to do your work.
* Pabst had the walls put at a slant and the paintings redone:... He had the shadows of the family seated at the table painted: sharp, elongated, and with thin limbs, they stretched across the floor and up the slanted wall. “If the actors sit still and only move their mouths, no one will see that the shadows are painted on!
* “But don’t you find it strange, Pabst, that we’re making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse? ... “Times are always strange. Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.”
He believes every word was written on Wegener’s note. In the next shot, after the lighting had been reset and the camera repositioned, her note read: She’s telling the truth, and his: He believes nothing.
“The special fund is for morale-boosting films!” <> “If there ever was one, The Molander Case is a morale-boosting film!”
Extras: There they were, motionless because they had been ordered to be, silent because they were not allowed to speak, row after row, some there in the room and some beyond the mirrors, trying to sit upright because they had to, but many could not, and some were coughing, which they were not allowed to do but could not suppress either. The smell was terrible.
“No one,” he said softly. “Not a single person. Will be harmed because of us. No one has been… The film must be finished.” <> Franz shook his head. He wanted to reply, explain, say something, but all he could muster was the word: “No!” And again: “No!” And: “Not this.”
next to him a woman of indeterminate age wearing a silk headscarf, probably to cover a shaved head. Here too the costume people had done what was necessary; ... There was no time for a lunch break. This pace was possible only because everything had been meticulously planned, because Pabst had mastered his craft so well, and because none of the extras ever went outside or asked for water or food.
Dr. Sämann turned his head. He had recognized Franz long ago. He smiled as he had once done when he stood by Franz’s bed and placed his cool hand on his forehead. With feigned bafflement he shrugged.
“If we don’t finish editing Molander, it was all for nothing.” Pabst stopped and looked at Franz through his reflective glasses. “Everything!”
“You mean, the extras? Even that was for nothing?”
“Those weren’t extras, those were soldiers.”
So now Franz sat at the rewinder, in front of him the counter, with large film reels to his right and left, cranking meter by meter, cutting, splicing. No wrong cut could be made on the negative; each mistake would have cost a frame, making for a jerky transition.
* Pabst had become so attuned to film editing that it seemed to him he could continue out here, as if everything he saw were up for manipulation. It struck him as odd that he couldn’t simply shorten the long way along the river on that street... then already the moment when they triumphantly crossed the bridge into the city; so much useless time, so much empty trudging, it could be done better!
Where the man was pointing, there was a staircase. It seemed to Pabst as if it hadn’t been there just before, but that was impossible; such major continuity errors didn’t occur.
* At first he did not understand the meaning of what he saw. He did not understand that the decision about the kind of story had been made; he also did not yet understand that he was now condemned to that future he had just thought he could escape, a future of narrow limits and meager circumstances, a future of small and dispensable movies. He understood only that the two army rucksacks, which looked exactly the same and exactly like all other army rucksacks, had been switched
a young lead actor of preposterously oily professionalism.
“They’re all polite again now,” said David Bass. “And why not! You must have seen Pabst’s Trial, his big statement against anti-Semitism.
Then he had practically stopped speaking. He had sat for hours in the library, in his old armchair, not smoking because there was no more tobacco, holding the empty cigarette case with Griffith’s initials, and replaying that film, which he could still see before him, frame by frame, scene by scene.
As long as Pabst was in the room, she could negotiate on his behalf, could accept or decline things; no one minded if he didn’t talk.
He still knew The Molander Case by heart, but individual scenes were already fading, and he could recall the faces of some supporting characters only with difficulty.
As she did every time she descended, Trude had to push back an attack of cold panic. When writing, she had imagined the cave as a deep, symbolically rich place, but not as something that felt so oppressively real. Walking on the muddy floor, through the smell of mold and moss, and seeing the mineral formations sprouting from the walls like a stony premonition of life, while at the same time realizing that the mountain above consisted of a hundred million tons of heavy stone, she found it all far from symbolic.
the assistant director, Ilse Schrewitz: The small, gray-haired woman had been treated with a strange awkwardness by everyone ever since it had become known that she had hidden a Jewish family in her cellar throughout the entire war. It wasn’t that anyone held it against her. It was just that no one knew what to make of the fact that she was a completely different person than anyone had suspected.
Buffalo, drawn with only a few strokes, their legs and horns clearly recognizable. Among them ran little men with spears. Closer inspection revealed how artfully each of them was executed; one threw his spear, another held an ax over his head. From above, where the sky must have been, yellowish lines fell, snow or rain or falling stars... And there, in front of the charging animals, surrounded by other men bowing before him, falling to their knees, holding out offerings to him, stood a twisted creature. Its back was crooked, one shoulder higher than the other. Where its head should have been were a few red spots, above which hovered two staring eyes. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to belong among these people; it looked as if it came from far away or an even more ancient time. A being from eons past, a brutal and evil creature they tried to appease with offerings.
“Do you recognize him?” asked Pabst.
“Of course.”
“Did he speak such a strong dialect even back then?”
“He’s still in prison, isn’t he?”
“He’ll be out soon. ..
“Well then,” said Trude. With mild horror she looked at the small picture, painted so many thousands of years ago, that mockingly returned her gaze. “It wasn’t really Hitler who ruled. Not Goebbels or Göring or any of them. It was always him.”
“Our tanks had an average lifespan of four days.”
It’s all in his films. The anger and the ambition and the cunning and the violence. When he was directing, he always knew what people had to do. But he himself never really knew what he was supposed to do.”
Jakob not painting anymore: “A soul is quite sensitive. Today I couldn’t act as… freely and lightly in movies as I used to, because of the things that happened to me. Life bends everyone, but it breaks some brutally and early. You and me, for example.”
“My father got it from Griffith.”... “Griffith. I knew him well. Take it back, I don’t want it.” She fills the glass again and pushes it toward him... does he realize that he has left the cigarette case with her after all.
