2 The Director Plays Director

The “Making of” Documentary

When a self-conscious art-cinema movement emerged in the late 1950s, the director became the central subject of the “making of” documentary, and it is at that point that the posture of “being an auteur” can be assumed overtly and recognizably. And once the auteurist role assumes shape as a performative mode, we see instances of the film author’s self-construction and self-deconstruction, sometimes within the same film. The “making of” films undergird the institution of auteurism by highlighting and dramatizing the role of the film’s director, in fact staging the auteur as a role, which begs the question: Who is the auteur if not a role? In the discussion above of auteurs as actors, I brought to light the problems and questions and meaning surrounding selfhood that are introduced by the director’s physical appearance as a fictional character in one of his own films; in the analysis of “making of” films, the position of the auteur’s self-creating role within the institution of auteurist cinema comes to the fore. The “making of” films are, in these cases, as much about the “making of” the auteur as they are about the making of a film, with “making” in this context meaning both to forge a persona and to ensure a reputation, as in “the making of a man.” And ‘making,’ when the focus is on an auteur figure, emphasizes the primacy of agency.²

This is, however, more complex an issue than a simple fortification of the claim that the auteur is an artist or that any single individual is in fact an auteur. The “making of” films about auteurs most often include a dialogic structure, in which the director of the “making of” film, usually a younger or less prominent director, interviews and views the auteur at work. The ensuing dialogue carries more than a hint of dis-cipleship; the younger director (or a group of unnamed aspiring directors or film connoisseurs) wants to get at the heart of what makes this cinematic genius tick (in the “making of” films, the auteur is implicitly designated a cinematic genius either by the documentarian or himself or both). But in introducing the idea of an outside view, a split occurs within the auteur himself. Not only do the documentarian and the film audience have him in their sights, but he observes himself in the act of making a film, comments on his own actions, sees himself as a cinematic figure.

The “making of” documentary frames the director within the action of the film, shows him directing his actors, sometimes standing in for one of them, sometimes modeling a gesture for one of them, sometimes sitting as a silent listener to the side while an intense conversation takes place on-screen. Some of the films below, like The Making of Fanny and Alexander, are in fact films by the art-film directors themselves, and these can (unlike Bergman’s earnest film) become almost or outright mockumentaries, in part because an ironic voice seems inevitable. Lurking behind the behind-the-scenes is the phantom of the “real self,” the self whose existence distinct from the auteurist persona is implied through (ironic and/or observing) distance. Ultimately, in some cases, not only does the director’s selfhood undergo deconstruction (split into observing and performing figures), but the idea of the auteur itself becomes fraught—the presence of the director as director on-screen promises/threatens to unmask the “magic” aspect of auteurism. The Wizard of Oz’s line is “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain over there,” but the “making of” films, “real” or fictional, draw the curtain aside and let the man stand revealed—or so they claim.³

Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie (Ingmar Bergman gör en film, Vilgot Sjöman, 1963) follows Bergman, his actors, and his crew during the production of Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna, 1963).⁴ This documentary, originally made for Swedish television, offers the special treat of a collaboration between Bergman and a reverent acolyte Sjöman, who would later go on to make a matched pair of notorious mock documentaries: Jag är nyfiken: Gul (I Am Curious: Yellow, 1967) and Jag är nyfiken: Bld (I Am Curious: Blue, 1968). Sjöman’s treatment of Bergman stresses the older man’s stature as part of the Swedish cultural patrimony and global cinema’s pantheon, and offers a position for the viewer to occupy as fan or student. For Sjöman explains that he wanted to make this documentary in order to learn about the process of filmmaking, obviously with the idea that this knowledge would guide him in his own career, but also with the aim of satisfying the audience’s curiosity about how a film works—what lies behind the illusionist magic of film. At one level, then, Sjöman’s film proposes to be about filmmaking in general, any film by any director, with its sequences on how films are edited or how sound is added. But already in the title of the documentary, Bergman’s importance remains at the center, and though Sjöman conducts interviews with Bergman’s frequent collaborators, Sven Nykvist (cinematographer), actor Gunnar Björnstrand, costume designer Mago, and props director K. A. Bergman (no relation) among others, it becomes increasingly clear that the entire complex apparatus of people, props, sets, and machines exists solely to realize Ingmar Bergman’s “helhetsvision,” as Bergman calls it: his vision of all the parts as a whole.

A particularly striking and oddly moving illustration of how individuals become absorbed in the helhetsvision occurs in Sjöman’s interview with prop master K. A. Bergman, “a Mozart among prop masters,” as Bergman calls him. A small man with a deeply lined face, boyish shock of hair, and an oddly contorted posture, K. A. Bergman enters the scene carrying a couple of items he has collected from old Swedish churches. After Ingmar Bergman approves of one of them, Sjöman steps in to interview the prop master. “Is it true that Bergman decided to give one of the characters in the film the disease you suffer from?” he asks. In Winter Light, an important scene occurs between a priest and the sexton of his church, who is crippled by an unnamed ailment. The priest has lost his faith, believes that God has abandoned him, and treats this sexton dismissively on the several occasions when the man tries to engage him in conversation. Finally, toward the end of the film, they do sit and talk, and it turns out that the sexton’s crippling disease has taught him something significant about Christ’s passion. “Yes,” says the prop master. “He asked me if he could use it.” “Can I ask what it is?” presses Sjöman. And we hear that the prop master suffers from a terrible disease that slowly stiffens and cripples the body. But he also voices his belief that he has been helped with his disease, that he has actually gotten better—because of his work with Bergman.

The confluence of film, Christ’s passion, and the vision of the auteur links inextricably the notions of art and divinity. It is easy to commute the roles played by the priest and sexton to those played by the director and prop master—a priest and a director who have lost their faith in the God of their youths, a sexton and a prop master who offer a renewal of faith through suffering. During an interview in which Sjöman and Bergman discuss Bergman’s manuscript for the film, Sjöman notices the letters SDG added at the end. Bergman smiles, seems a little self-conscious. “Yes, that’s a little secret thing I do,” he says. (Not so terribly secret now.) “Bach used to write those letters on his compositions; they stand for soli Deo gloria (to God alone the glory). It might seem a bit presumptuous to do as he did; I don’t claim to be like him. What I mean by it is that I feel that what I am doing is like what a single builder on a cathedral does, an anonymous person who just adds his stone.” Sjöman challenges this (not surprisingly), and Bergman admits that it does matter to him what people think of him as an artist. And that there is a movement between two poles—celebrity, the cinematic auteur as artist with an overriding vision for a film, and anonymity, the person who stays behind the scenes, works as part of a team: “The actors,” says Bergman, “expose themselves terribly. I hide behind the camera.” And he gives credit to God (whose existence he elsewhere denies) as ultimate founder of the artistic vision, which takes us back to the auteur as Romantic artist (and Bergman as the son of a Lutheran pastor). And in this instance, Bergman is certainly not behind the scenes; he is front and center, engaging with his actors and technicians, standing at the focus of every sequence he occupies. In any case, Sjöman’s film reveals an almost frightening sincerity in Bergman’s self-projection as a director, one that Bergman performs self-consciously and Sjöman accepts wholeheartedly, with a palpable desire to draw closer to Bergman’s artistic flame.⁵

A similarly Romantic auteurist documentary, this time made for Italian television, is Andrei Tarkovsky’s and Tonino Guerra’s Viaggio in Tempo (Voyage in Time, 1983). Marred by spotty cinematography, uneven sound editing, and a lack of narrative line or discernable structure of any kind, this documentary about the making of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) nevertheless conveys a similar reverence for the auteurist’s vision and the near-sacred domain of auteurist cinema. Loosely organized around the search for the proper locations for Tarkovsky’s film about a Russian exile in Italy, Voyage in Time seems at first glance to focus primarily on voyages through space. But as Bergman also stresses in Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, Tarkovsky argues that film consists of segments of time, with particular attention to rhythm, pauses, and silence (Tarkovsky’s autobiography, which is more a treatise on his filmmaking philosophy than an account of his life, is entitled Sculpting in Time.) As it turns out, this film about a film is in fact more about the auteur Tarkovksy, with Guerra occupying Sjöman’s disciple position. Like Sjöman, Guerra poses questions to the master regarding his artistic practice, though rather than coming from Guerra himself, these questions are posed in the format of “young people want to know”—that is, Guerra reads ostensibly from letters sent to Tarkovsky by young Italians. This offers Tarkovsky the opportunity to expound at length (in Russian, which Guerra apparently does not understand) on his philosophy of filmmaking, a philosophy that approaches—yes—religion. Filmmaking demands sacrifice, he insists (see Herzog, below). Filmmaking is a duty, something demanded of the filmmaker, something he must do for the benefit of the public (see Herzog and Bergman, in Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie). One of the letters asks Tarkovsky about his cinematic influences, which gives him the opportunity to place himself and his own work within the catalogue of great auteurs of Russia and Italy and—Sweden. Tarkovsky establishes here a direct link between himself and Ingmar Bergman, a compliment Bergman repays in The Magic Lantern, when he confesses that despite repeated attempts, he has never been able to approach Tarkovsky’s mastery when it comes to filming dreams. This kind of reference to other auteurist directors as “masters” (which we find in Truffaut’s Day for Night and more extensively explored and interrogated in Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, below) serves to establish more firmly the Romantic notion of the cinematic auteur. Already with Truffaut’s manifesto at the initiation of the movement, it was important to claim the existence of an artistic tradition and line of descent, and the structure of many of these autuerist documentaries—that is, auteurist teacher and documentary disciple—makes clear the intent to uphold cinematic auteurism alongside great poetry or painting.

Throughout the long sequences in which Tarkovsky speaks, passionately, articulately, without pause or stumble, as if scripted, the Russian director paces restlessly, runs his hands through his hair, stares out the window as if in despair. Guerra remains invisible, outside the frame; it is as if Tarkovsky is talking to himself. In other sequences, the two explore potential locations, and a tension emerges between them. Guerra wants to show Tarkovsky the beauties, the marvels, of Italy, while Tarkovsky complains that they are only looking at tourist attractions, places that would appear on postcards. Guerra responds that in order to film Italy adequately, Tarkovsky should understand something of the country’s enormous cultural heritage. Tarkovsky, in contrast, wants nothing to do with Italy’s past. He wants to get at something else in the Italian landscape, something that will allow him to fantasize about Russia, to impose Russia and Russia’s cultural history on the Italian landscape. As the documentary achieves a kind of climax, it becomes clear that Tarkovsky’s vision will dominate—he is, after all, primarily concerned with finding a setting for Nostalghia, a film about a Russian who finds himself in lonely exile in Italy, and who begins to find traces of Russia everywhere he turns. (For his part, Bergman sets Winter Light in Dalarna, a rural province in northwestern Sweden, where he spent time with his maternal grandmother during the summers: “I wanted to approach a Swedish reality, a completely naked Swedish reality,” is his comment in Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie. This reality is also, obviously, the landscape of nostalgia for Bergman, a landscape he revisits in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern.)

Voyage in Time, then, gives the viewer a prelude to Nostalghia and makes clear the autobiographical source of that film’s vision. For Tarkovsky would never return to Russia again after the making of Nostalghia—eventually he dies in exile. And there is a kind of melancholic foreshadowing of that fate in the atmosphere that comes to dominate Voyage in Time. At the outset of the documentary, Guerra welcomes Tarkovsky into his home. The two have already finished filming the documentary we are about to watch. Guerra says that he has written a poem for Tarkovsky; he wrote it in dialect, he explains, but he will read it in Italian so that Tarkovsky might understand a little (Tarkovsky speaks a few words of Italian in the documentary). The poem Guerra reads describes a bird that arrives in Italy “with snow-covered wings,” and as it turns out, the cage cannot contain the bird—the bird rises and the cage vanishes. Of course the bird is the visitor from the frozen North, the Russian director. And the cage of Italian history and Italian culture and Italian language cannot contain him—they vanish in his film. But this poem is read at the outset of the film and forms the starting point for the film’s narrative of tension between Italy and Russia, Guerra and Tarkovsky. This is, in other words, not primarily a “making-of” documentary, but like Sjöman’s film of Bergman, a stage on which the auteur’s self-projection can take place. Similarly, the film Nostalghia (which features one of Bergman’s foremost actors, Erland Josephsson) presents Tarkovsky’s subjective vision (empty fields, an unpaved country road baking in the sun, claustrophobic, hospitallike corridors, steam floating above black hot springs) as a prototypical image of Russia as experienced by Russians in exile. Self-projection becomes the projection of a collective consciousness, in other words, as it does in Bergman (“One makes something that is necessary not only for oneself but for others,” Bergman assures apprentice Vilgot Sjöman in Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie).

A third instance of this kind of directorial performance takes place in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, a documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (both films were released in 1982). Here the relationship between the documentary filmmaker and his auteurist subject is mostly submerged; we hear Blank’s very American voice posing questions from the position occupied by the camera, approximately, so we tend to assume that the documentary filmmaker is there as interlocutor, though he does not identify himself or come out from behind the camera until the credits, when a labeled photograph of him appears. There are also voice-over narratives by a woman and a man, which overshadow Blank’s presence as an interviewer. The absence of an earnest fellow director on-screen to partner with the auteur marks a difference: unlike Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie and Voyage in Time, Burden of Dreams does not present itself as a pedagogical moment for young directors. On the contrary, the film is more of a cautionary tale: do not try this at home. Herzog fairly revels in violent setbacks, emotional crises, and financial disasters. Still, like Bergman and Tarkovsky, Herzog definitely snatches the opportunity provided by the documentary camera to voice his philosophies of film, art, and the universe in general. The role Herzog performs in Blank’s film is as studied as anything his actors produce in Fitzcarraldo, as he speaks in a voice colored by barely withheld anguish about the rigors of filmmaking in the remote Amazon forest, the impossibility of pulling a ship over a mountainous isthmus (an impossibility he imposed upon himself and his actors and crew), and the “obscenity” of the jungle (“I don’t hate it,” Herzog nearly spits in his vehemence. “I love it. But I love it against my better judgment”).

Reading Herzog’s published diary from the time he was filming Fitzcarraldo, one finds that he has already rehearsed in the pages of his journal a number of the ideas he gives to Blank about the jungle and the nature of filmmaking, among other things. Like Tarkovsky’s, Herzog’s remarks are not extemporaneous observations. The director focuses with an unsettling intensity on setting a particular tone of deliverance, cultivating a laserlike, unwavering gaze. And in the shots Blank makes of the shooting of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog not infrequently inserts himself into the action—not placing himself before his own film’s cameras, but clearly conscious that Blank’s camera will capture him working among his actors as they perform the Sisyphean tasks required by his script and by the repetition of unsuccessful takes.

“The burden of dreams” is Herzog’s own term for the drive to realize his admittedly far-fetched visions of enormous sacrifice and physical hardship offered up for the sake of art.⁶ He emphasizes that it is a compulsion, something he must do—again, like Bergman and Tarkovsky: “It is my duty to make my films.” He scoffs at the American producers who suggest that he might use a model ship and a botanical garden in San Diego in order to produce the effects he wants for his film: “And I said, the unquestionable given has to be a real steamship over a real mountain, not for the sake of realism, but for the sake of the stylization of a great operatic experience” (my translation).⁷ Herzog’s film does not capture the reality of the Peruvian tropical forest, in other words, but the way in which the forest reflects his inner vision—and the ship towed over a mountain is, as he later says, “the film’s central metaphor,” an image of the operatic, the outsized, the extravagant, the insane, the Romantic. Herzog’s film is the opera that Fitzcarraldo wants to stage; or rather, Blank’s film of the making of Herzog’s film fully captures the operatic sense Herzog means to convey, with Herzog himself as the tragic figure at the center: “People have lost their lives. . . . I shouldn’t make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum right away.” The operatic effect can only be accomplished through actual blood sacrifice, through the movement of a real ship over a real mountain, but in order for this to come across, Blank’s film must be made, to show that Herzog is there, at the center of the film’s artistic sacrifice. Of course, it would be Herzog’s aim to convey in his own film, spiritually somehow, the real blood and sweat and grit that went into the making of Fitzcarraldo.⁸ But ultimately it is Blank who provides the necessary proof, the images of a battered cameraman, injured during the shooting of a scene shot on “the most dangerous rapids in Peru” or of Herzog, holding the spear that had gone through the throat of one of his aboriginal extras: “You can see some blood there.” In Herzog’s films, Tarkovsky’s demand for cinematic sacrifice becomes materially realized.

Herzog, even more than the other auteurs of this study, has received documentation for and provided extensive commentary on his own work, sometimes with the apparent intent of precluding anything that might be said by critics, scholars, or other interlopers on the subject. Brad Prager, one of the scholars who nevertheless decided to go ahead and offer (a fine and comprehensive) analysis of Herzog’s work, explains that “Herzog has provided so much extra-textual information that it is difficult or even impossible not to draw it into consideration,” and in particular Herzog has traced a lineage for himself from the German Weimar filmmaking tradition, going so far as to remake F. W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire film Nosferatu in a version that “take[s] some shots and sequences directly from Murnau’s original.”⁹ Through this type of quotation (and his writing on the importance of Weimar film to his contemporary German filmmakers), Herzog, like Tarkovsky, places himself within a select group of auteurs, but he also gestures toward a national cinematic tradition, as Tarkovsky does in citing other Russians as his mentors (and in making Nostalghia) and Bergman does by casting veteran Swedish director Victor Sjöström as the protagonist of Wild Strawberries. In Herzog’s case, because we are thinking of German nationalism, a specific problematic issue emerges: recent German history. In Burden of Dreams, Herzog seems to allude to that past in an oblique yet frightening way when he describes to Les Blank’s camera the kinds of rumors that circulated among the native Amazonians whom he employed as extras in Fitzcarraldo. Herzog claims, for instance, that the natives were afraid that the film crew had come to exterminate them, to “cook the grease in their bodies.” It is difficult to avoid seeing a parallel with this rumor and the idea that the Nazis rendered the fat in the bodies of their Jewish victims in order to make soap, and Herzog, while dismissing the rumors, seems to relish retelling them as part of his bloody-minded auteurist persona.

Mockumentary

More than twenty years after the release of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog returned to the screen to assist director Zak Penn in the making of a mockumentary entitled Incident at Loch Ness (2004). The film consists of a documentary, Herzog in Wonderland (purportedly directed by an actual director, John Bailey), a “making of” film that follows Herzog as he supposedly films yet another documentary called Enigma at Loch Ness. The mockumentary as genre operates within the stylistic parameters of the documentary, and in this Incident at Loch Ness proves no exception. The cues to the viewer indicate that the film is factual reportage, while the content more or less subtly reveals that the work is a fiction—a fiction that challenges the “factual” nature of documentary texts and often satirizes some over-earnest corner of the culture.¹⁰ For instance, This Is Spinal Tap (1984) mocks the high seriousness of heavy-metal bands and rock-star culture, A Mighty Wind takes on folk-music culture (2003), and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) lampoons the (less than) diplomatic interface between the United States and a developing nation. But Incident at Loch Ness presents a rather unique form of mockumentary: auteurist self-satire. Herzog appears in the film as himself, and he is very recognizably himself. He discusses the same philosophy of film set forth in Burden of Dreams, now transferring his observations to his new “documentary” on Loch Ness. Of Fitzcarraldo, he said, “Everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams,” meaning the reality of his own dream, which lurked behind the illusionistic reality of the jungle. In Incident at Loch Ness, he avers that Nessie, the monster of Loch Ness, is nothing more than the product of a collective dream: “We need this illusion,” echoing the remarks he makes elsewhere on the necessity, the duty, of making his films, a sentiment in harmony with those expressed by Bergman and Tarkovsky.

The opening of Incident at Loch Ness takes place at Herzog’s modest home in Los Angeles, on Wonderland Road (thus the title of Bailey’s “documentary”). Herzog explains that he is about to embark on a new film project in Scotland with the object of unmasking the fakery surrounding the Loch Ness Monster, and he also shows the documentary filmmaker around his study, telling stories about the various souvenirs he has kept from other film projects, including the blood-stained spear he displayed in Burden of Dreams. And in showing the documentary camera the spear, he repeats the story about it from Burden of Dreams, not failing to observe once more that there is still a little poison on the spear (as well as blood). For anyone who has seen Burden of Dreams, this exact repetition of the story creates a peculiar impression; it makes Herzog look like a nearly doddering old man, mired in former glory and almost laughably bloodthirsty. It is only the audience’s ultimate recognition of the film as belonging to the mockumentary genre that unmasks this repetition for what it is: a mere performance of senile self-aggrandizement. Throughout The Incident at Loch Ness, Herzog plays a parody of himself, deadly serious about his auteurist goals, insistent on the necessity for physical hardship and accuracy of representation, ornery and stubborn, resistant to the commercial aims of his (supposed) producer, Zak Penn. The two men spar with each other from beginning to end, with Penn trying to sneak various Hollywood gambits past Herzog’s iron-clad European authorial control: Penn wants to insert a fake Nessie, a crackpot pseudoscientist commentator, a supposed sonar expert who wears an American-flag bikini and is actually a Playboy bunny. Ultimately a “real” Nessie attacks, killing two of the crew and sinking their boat, leaving only Herzog behind to don a wetsuit and descend into the murk to capture images of the monster. Echoes from Fitzcarraldo and the story of the deaths related to that film (as well as the destroyed ship of that earlier film) are obvious. Penn’s film posits an auteurist stance that rejects commercial filmmaking absolutely; in other words, playing out the notion that art cinema strives to place itself in opposition to Hollywood, a notion that Herzog has supported repeatedly in nonsatiric circumstance. But what does it mean when he participates so readily in a parody of that same position?

The more outlandish Penn’s attempts at popularization become, the more the viewer begins to suspect that The Enigma of Loch Ness might be a fictional film, and certainly toward the end, when Nessie attacks, even very naive viewers would doubt seriously that the film’s content was factual. But the marketing of the film carefully concealed its mockumentary status; the viewer does not receive any explicit hint that the “true documentary” categorization of either Herzog in Wonderland or The Enigma of Loch Ness is in question. On the contrary, Herzog remains absolutely in character, and there is a way in which the claim of factuality finds support from the observation that The Enigma of Loch Ness scarcely exceeds Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre: The Wrath of God (both purportedly “historical” films”) in its fantastic subject matter. Even the voice-over commentary by Herzog and Penn, packaged as an “extra” on the DVD, maintains the pretense of nonfiction: Herzog and Penn continuously bicker with each other, and Herzog issues a scathing condemnation of Penn for having sullied his pure work of documentary art with Hollywood fakery: “I understand why your wife left you. I would leave you, too.”¹¹

The most significant joke here is of course on Herzog himself, and, more broadly, the auteurist movement in which Herzog has seemed to play so sincere a part. If one accepts the Herzog persona in Burden of Dreams as a nonfictional performance (and certainly he seems utterly sincere), one has to believe that some foundation-shaking transformation occurred in Herzog’s thinking about cinematic auteurism in the twenty years between Burden of Dreams and Incident at Loch Ness. Perhaps the older director became aware of the easily parodied nature of his earlier self-projection, had a change of heart? But this seems less likely if we take into consideration Herzog’s self-representation in My Best Fiend (1999). There are only five years separating Incident at Loch Ness from the 1999 documentary about Herzog’s highly dramatic (and dramatized) relationship with actor Klaus Kinski, and there is little to distinguish Herzog’s demeanor in Les Blank’s documentary and Herzog’s My Best Fiend. In both, a high seriousness prevails, and in both Herzog gives his speech about the obscenity of the jungle, among other repetitions (the later film contains some footage from Blank’s). What seems most likely is that Herzog is always, from the beginning, aware of the way in which his auteurist persona verges on the absurd. He travels at the extreme edge of filmmaking, pressing himself and his crew and his subjects beyond what is reasonable, beyond what is real, even as he insists on an often-dangerous materiality and actuality in his work. He is not stupid; he understands how bizarre his ventures appear from the perspective of conventional thinking or commercial entertainment. And he is willing to make a parody of his eccentricity, if only to underscore how far outside the bounds of normalcy his auteurist project lies. Let those who would mock him understand, he seems to say, that he knows best of all how ridiculous a task he has undertaken in his art.

Paradoxically enough, it is with Incident at Loch Ness, a silly little film, that my discussion of auteurist self-projection in these director-as-director films becomes particularly complex and potentially interesting. For in the mockumentary Herzog clearly performs himself ironically; he displays a consciousness of himself as both actor and director, and he uses the existing record of his image as auteur in order to establish some distance between that projected image and some other, “real” self that exists outside the frame of all of his films. The hundreds of pages he writes in his Fitzcarraldo diaries and in his voyage narrative, On Walking in Ice, the many interviews he has given, the films in which he has appeared as himself (there are more than fifty)—Incident at Loch Ness undercuts them all. Certainly he plays a serious clown in other instances (see Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, a short film from 1980 in which Herzog does just that), but in Incident at Loch Ness he plays himself as director, and in so doing deconstructs the relationship between himself and his directorial self-image. And he portrays himself as he knows others see him—his critics and his fans alike—showing that he, too, is a spectator bemused by the high seriousness of pronouncements like “I would not want to live in a world where there were no people like lions,” even as he is also quite sincere.

One might imagine that once Herzog had made Incident at Loch Ness, he had deconstructed his cinematic image once and for all, sending his projected self up as a bombastic, overblown, self-important charlatan. That is what the mockumentary seems to say. It would appear that Herzog has joined the side that describes the auteur as a construct, a front for commercial activity. In Incident at Loch Ness, he gives us a glimpse of his own self-performance and blows it up, laughs it off. And yet he does not give up the persona he has created and lampooned. In 2005, Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man opens in theaters to great acclaim. And Grizzly Man returns to the question of cinematic authorship thoughtfully, carefully. Timothy Treadwell (born Timothy Dexter), the film’s protagonist, is also one of Grizzly Man’s authors. His footage of the bears and foxes and Alaskan wilderness, almost always with himself, extravagantly posturing, in the foreground, makes up the bulk of Herzog’s film. Herzog describes Treadwell as an environmentalist and filmmaker, and in his voice-over narrative, he characterizes the troubled young man as a conscientious and gifted filmmaker: “I want to step in to his defense and [recognize Treadwell] as a filmmaker; he captured some remarkable moments.”

Anyone familiar with Herzog’s repeated cinematic themes recognizes Treadwell immediately as a Herzogian figure; in the first clips Herzog chooses to show from Treadwell’s footage, the young man announces that he “live[s] on the precipice of death.” Treadwell’s ultimate sacrifice thus becomes a sacrifice to his art, to his authorship, not only of his frankly amazing (and disturbing) wildlife documentary, but of himself. We know from the beginning that Treadwell will in fact die, that he will be attacked and eaten by one of the bears he so lovingly films, and thus he achieves the apotheosis that anchors Herzog’s artistic vision. Herzog seems to identify with Treadwell as a filmmaker, but he also sees him, I would argue, as another Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s maniacal actor/avatar. Remarking that Treadwell is both director and actor in his footage, Herzog observes, “I have seen [Treadwell’s] madness before on a film set.”

With his long blond hair and stage grimaces, with his fits of rage (which Herzog highlights toward the end of the documentary), Treadwell seems a near reincarnation of Kinski’s on-screen image. But Herzog focuses so closely on his own relationship to Treadwell in order to distinguish himself finally from the younger man. Like Treadwell, Herzog goes into the wild to make his films. Like Treadwell, Herzog sees the relationship between sacrifice and meaning. But Herzog points out that he does not romanticize nature in the way Treadwell does. He does not see himself (or any humanness) reflected in the eyes of the grizzlies, “only stupidity.” Herzog wants to establish that he makes art, is aware of his art as art, and it is his awareness of art that keeps him out of the belly of the grizzly, so to speak. In a way, the message of Grizzly Man echoes that of Incident at Loch Ness in a different modality: I am not the person you see in my films. I am not Treadwell, not Kinski.

At one of the film’s crucial moments, Herzog sits with a close friend of Treadwell’s in her home in California. She has the audiotape that was made inadvertently of the final grizzly attack, in which Treadwell’s girlfriend tries and fails to fight off the bear as it kills Treadwell. We learn that the tape reveals her struggle, his pain and dying, and finally, the bear’s fatal attack on her as well. But we don’t get to hear it. Herzog listens to the tape, which Treadwell’s friend has never played for herself, through headphones. His back is turned to the camera; we see only a partial view of his face from behind him as he listens. Clearly he is deeply shaken by what he hears; he appears to wipe away tears. He clasps the hands of the horrified woman across from him and makes her promise never to listen to the tape, to destroy it. In this way the central sacrifice of the film is occluded. It is not represented on-screen. And this is the place Herzog wants to mark a difference from his own earlier projected self-image. He is not so bloodthirsty, he would seem to claim, that he wants us to see blood sacrifice. To know about it, to think about it, to represent it as a metaphor for the sacrifices demanded of art—but not to experience it. In this way he divorces himself from Treadwell and a possible misreading of his own motives.

The complex silliness of Incident at Loch Ness has a forerunner in Federico Fellini’s Intervista (1987), though it is clear from the start that this mockumentary is an elaborate fiction, a send-up of the Italian director’s excesses and auteurist persona; there is no attempt to make the film’s action seem “real.” Like the Herzog in Wonderland frame narrative of Incident at Loch Ness, Intervista professes to be a documentary about Fellini and his filmmaking methods, focused through the lens of an interview Fellini grants to a group of young and enthusiastic Japanese journalists. The journalists serve as the parodic equivalent of the young people who write their questions to Tarkovsky, or the young Vilgot Sjöman interviewing Bergman. Fellini takes them on a “wonderland” tour of the studio grounds of Cinecittà in Rome, the actual location for many of Fellini’s films, and the journalists follow him closely as he directs an autobiographical film about his arrival as a young man at Cinecittà for the first time. Starry-eyed and with a pimple on his nose (Fellini insists on placing the pimple, which he claims to remember clearly, on the actor’s nose himself), the young “Fellini” encounters a world of filmmaking at Cinecittà that already looks . . . Felliniesque. A huge epic film occupies the studio grounds, replete with elephants and a pouting, Rubenesque female star, under the maniacal direction of a Mussolini-like auteur. The doubling within the film of young and old Fellinis, Fellini’s sly references to a number of his films (including 8½, which is itself already a send-up of his auteurism), and the presence of the screaming epic director/dictator all indicate a high level of self-irony, a desire to expose auteurism as a pose, merely a role, and one of questionable value at that. At one point the young Japanese woman who poses all the questions on behalf of her group wonders where Fellini finds all the wonderfully grotesque figures for his films. There is then a quick cut to a Roman subway car, and the camera pans over the faces of the passengers—most of them perfect Fellini “grotesques.” Thus this moment in the film argues that the touted “Felliniesque” is no style, but simply realism. This joke, though delicious, is not entirely honest, of course. Part of Fellini’s signature resides in the ability to transform the natural into the grotesque, and when Woody Allen picks up on this trademark gesture in his Stardust Memories (1980), no critic failed to recognize the move as “Felliniesque.”¹²

While Fellini (and, at moments, Herzog) clearly has fun with his auteurist persona, and to some degree both men call the entire inflated auteurist institution into question, it is not as easy to see this strain of fun in François Truffaut’s work. After all, it was Truffaut who first articulated the art-cinema director’s manifesto. Yet La nuit américaine (Day for Night) contains subtle hints at a deconstruction of auteurism and of Truffaut’s auteurist self-projection in particular, even while seeming to maintain an air of high seriousness around “film art.” In Day for Night, Truffaut plays Ferrand, a director who is making a film called Je vous présente Pamela (Meet Pamela), a piece of mildly entertaining fluff (though called, quite sincerely, a “tragedy” by the actors and crew) involving an affair between a young woman and her fiancé’s father. The insistence of treating what is clearly a popular genre film as an art film presses the audience of Day for Night toward a reading of the film as a kind of mockumentary. Within the film we see “real” relationships fictionalized in a way that calls to mind nonfictional situations: an actress who speaks about her work with Fellini is in fact Valentina Comtese, a well-known Italian actress who has acted for Fellini; the young English sensation brought over from America is played by Anglo-American actress Jacqueline Bisset, who had recently achieved success in Hollywood; the voice on the telephone that is said to belong to Ferrand’s composer is played by Truffaut’s composer, Georges Delerue; Truffaut’s protégé, Jean-Pierre Léaud, plays an actor, Alphonse, who in turn portrays the betrayed fiancé in the film-within-the-film. This complex doubling—of director, of actors in two different roles in two different films, of scandalous stories—creates a lack of stability in the viewer’s sense of what is “real” within the framework of the film(s), thus opening up the question of what is “real” in our perceptions generally: what counts as real, and why?

The French title La nuit américaine refers to a cinematographic illusion in which action that is filmed during the daytime is shot with a filter in order to produce the impression that it is taking place at night. The English-language title emphasizes this sleight-of-hand substitution with the English term equivalent to “nuit américaine”—“day for night”—and I would argue here that the entire film circulates around the acts of substitution inherent in filmmaking. In autobiographical narrative films, as I have noted above, the medium necessitates the introduction of an actor in place of the director when the director wishes to represent himself at a younger age; thus Jean-Pierre Léaud’s standing in for Truffaut as Antoine Doinel in a number of films. But once Truffaut arrives at the making of Day for Night, he has come to the place in his filmmaking career when the character has achieved the same age as the director: he grows into himself cinematically, so to speak. So in Day for Night, Truffaut plays himself, though at a remove—that is, as the director “Ferrand,” as Antoine Doinel is also at a slight remove from the biographical Truffaut, both in terms of his name, some of the narratives attached to that name, and of course in terms of the body representing the name.

Day for Night depicts, arguably, the making of a film that does not conform to an art-house film profile.¹³ And in any case Truffaut, in his portrayal of the director Ferrand, thoroughly undermines the idea of the art director’s control over his work. We see the director stymied by limitations of time and money, the caprices of actors, equipment failures, wardrobe emergencies, and so on. A cat that has been enlisted for a small role refuses to perform adequately. Emotional chaos reigns: the actors and crew hop in and out of one another’s beds with an abandon that makes the action of the film-within-a-film appear tame. Ultimately one of the actors (played by Jean-Pierre Aumont) dies in an accident, necessitating a complete rewrite of the film’s conclusion, not by Ferrand but by his female assistant. And Ferrand in any case has written the script day by day up to the film’s conclusion, giving the actors their lines late on the night before they are to film their scenes. At one point he gives his star actress lines that neither he nor his assistant has written, but a verbatim quotation of a private and rather intimate conversation with the actress. In short, Truffaut’s own theory of auteurism finds little support in the way the production of Ferrand’s film unfolds. Although the director is the center of every small decision, things consistently slip out of his control, and there is no hint of the kind of visionary artistry represented in films like Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie or Tarkovsky’s Voyage in Time or Burden of Dreams. But Day for Night does lead the viewer to consider the extent to which even “visionary” filmmakers fail to exercise full control over their productions: Burden of Dreams is, after all, a litany of disasters, Tarkovsky struggles to make himself understood in a foreign environment, and even Sjöman’s film on Bergman, with its neat structure and emphasis on order, notes that Bergman’s films are highly collaborative, with actors and technicians exercising the power to upset Bergman’s “unified vision.”¹⁴ Truffaut’s film simply underscores the auteur’s anxiety about an inevitable lack of mastery in situations where his collaborators and producers and audience are meant to understand him as a master. Thus, though the viewer may discern that Ferrand is not the true auteur he pretends to be, Truffaut’s film more subtly wonders whether anyone can make the claim of “unified vision” (that is, authorial mastery) for his films.

At the same time, the spirit of auteurist filmmaking thoroughly infuses the film. Ferrand, in directing his actors, cajoles them, takes hold of their hands, positions their bodies, models their roles for them by performing the actions he wants them to perform—that is, literally taking the actor’s place, and subsequently the actor takes his, and hits the marks the director just hit for him. An illustration of this occurs if one considers a pair of stills from Day for Night: in one, the director models a gesture for his actor; in the second, the actor performs the gesture. The thing that distinguishes Day for Night is that the viewer of the first photograph cannot know with any certainty whether it is Truffaut the director or Ferrand the director who models the gesture, but, in any case, the actor takes the director’s place.

During a phone call with his film’s composer, Ferrand receives a package of books. The camera lingers on the opening of that package, and the covers of the books receive close-up focus. The package contains works on Bergman, Hitchcock, Godard, Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini, and others. Because it is Truffaut who plays the role of the director, the viewer is led to imagine the connection between the person we see on the screen and the person we know to be a “real” film author: François Truffaut. It seems a bit odd that the arrival of the package, which the film clearly means to foreground in the viewer’s visual field, takes place during a telephone conversation in which Ferrand listens to a piece his composer has written for Meet Pamela. In her commentary on Day for Night, which is included on the DVD version distributed in the United States, Annette Insdorf notes that the telephone conversation takes place between Ferrand/Truffaut and the actual composer for Truffaut’s films, Georges Delerue, and that the music presented as an original composition for Meet Pamela was in fact a Delerue piece for an earlier Truffaut film, Two English Girls. Insdorf imagines that the original narrative setting for the composition, a romance, finds its parallel not in the narrative line of the film Meet Pamela so much as in the narrative line for Day for Night: the romance of cinema, film as obsession. In displaying the names of the auteurs who have inspired Truffaut while Delerue’s romantic piece plays on the soundtrack, the film suggests a romance between Truffaut/ Ferrand and those directors, and by using Delerue as a voice actor in the film and alluding to an earlier film by Truffaut, the scene makes subterranean claims for Truffaut’s work in film as a solid auteurist corpus, to be ranked alongside those of the auteurs identified on the covers of the books Ferrand has received.

Another gesture toward auteurism occurs in a series of three dream sequences. When the harried Ferrand goes to his solitary bed after long days of handling detail after detail, large and small, he tosses and turns and moans. These images of troubled sleep, overused to the point of parody, are followed by short black-and-white dream sequences, in which a young boy hurries along a featureless city street, tapping a walking stick on the pavement as he trips along. It is only in the third sequence that we see the boy’s ultimate goal: he is on his way to a movie theater that has closed for the night. There he stretches his walking stick through the iron gate to pull into his grasp a display of promotional stills for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. The purloined stills recall an earlier Truffaut sequence from The 400 Blows, when Antoine Doinel and his friend make off with a seductive promotional photograph of Harriet Andersson from Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika. But while the theft of Harriet Andersson’s image might be interpreted as a simple expression of lust, stealing Citizen Kane stills could only indicate a youthful obsession with a particular kind of cinema, one that is recreated stylistically in the aesthetic look of the dream sequences. And the dream sequences in Day for Night recall Bergman more directly as well; Ferrand’s tossing and turning and the dreams’ black-and-white cinematography and abstract urban cityscape both point back to the surreal, opening dream sequence of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), though Ferrand’s dream is considerably less original cinematically.

Film is the object of desire, film is illusion, film strives to produce an appearance of reality that is not reality, because, as Ferrand notes later in the film, reality is rife with boredom: “There are no traffic jams in films,” he tells Alphonse, the character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud.¹⁵ If there is no boredom in the “reality” produced by cinema, there is a surplus of boredom in the making of films, which Day for Night attempts to show without exhausting its own audience. Takes are repeated seven, ten, thirty-seven times when lines or marks are missed or camera angles are not perfect or lighting requires adjustment. Even after Ferrand declares that one take is “perfect,” he adds, “Let’s do it one more time.” Day for Night spares its audience the actual repetition of action in many cases by using the well-known device of displaying the number of the take without forcing us to watch it. Still, there is enough repetition in the film to give the spectator a good idea of how film distills the tediousness of filmmaking into the dense and seamless action sans boredom that cinema claims as “reality.” But if, as Day for Night so insistently reminds us, film is illusion and nothing more than the mock appearance of reality, how are we to understand the presence of the “real” director within a cinematic setting? And how do we understand the role Truffaut plays: Ferrand’s high seriousness about his identity as an auteur, his relation to other auteurs, as he makes an apparently trivial film over which he has little control?

“You wanted to expose me . . . but you exposed yourself”

I will close the series of analyses in this chapter with a documentary by Danish auteur Lars von Trier: The Five Obstructions (De fem benspaend, 2003). In fact, an older Danish filmmaker, Jørgen Leth, receives sole official credit for the film. This was one of von Trier’s many conditions in defining the film’s form, but ultimately The Five Obstructions is directed by both men, with the final responsibility in von Trier’s hands—or no one’s. The film is not supposed to be “about” von Trier in the way that an autobiographical narrative is supposed to be about its author, but inevitably it turns into an account focused on von Trier and his identity as a director. At the same time, the film confuses the whole notion of subject, both in terms of what it is “about” and how it formulates authorial subjectivity. It is about the power struggle inherent in filmmaking, the definition of an individual’s vision in a collaborative project, the way in which any film is not only the auteur’s projection of desire but the viewer’s as well. The Five Obstructions, loosely described, offers a view of influence between cinematic auteurs that parallels the literary relationships described by Harold Bloom in his Anxiety of Influence (1973). Bloom concerns himself with the great English poets, tracing patterns of influence from one generation to the next, with an accent on the notion of “generation”—that is, we are dealing with father/son relationships here, on a mythic scale. In Bloom’s analysis, great artists, like Zeus overthrowing the Titans, must challenge the dominant power of the poets who go before them, through a kind of imitation or repetition that also involves various forms of transformation, reversal, or “misreadings.” Essentially, the poetic tradition cannot be ignored, but neither can it be allowed to stand. As the father/ son model indicates, Bloom’s reading, though not Freudian, treats the poets as persons, not bodies of work, though in a later foreword to his work, in which he defends his theory against deconstruction, he moves to replace “poet” with “text.” Nevertheless, the figure of the poet remains the strongest metaphor of his argument, so I would like to let it stand. Each potential new genius poet, then, the ephebe, arrives on the scene as a warrior, a challenger. Lars von Trier’s public persona and his position in the Danish film canon would certainly fall into line with the kind of artist Bloom describes: the enfant terrible, armed and dangerous.

Lars von Trier perhaps initially attracted the most international attention for his role as a cofounder of Dogme, an anti-Hollywood filmmaking movement that demands austere production values (no artificial lighting, no constructed sets, no nondiegetic sound). But Dogme also expresses an explicitly anti-auteurist sensibility; the original “manifesto” proclaimed the failure of the French New Wave and its worship of the Romantic artist (Dogme Manifesto). One of the demands placed on the Dogme directors is that they not include a credit line for themselves—no “a film by Ingmar Bergman,” Frederico Fellini’s 8½. Instead, if the film follows the rigid requirements of the movement, it receives a Dogme certificate and the right to identify the work as a Dogme film in a credit line. It is ironic, then, that von Trier emerged as a significant auteur with strong and self-acknowledged artistic ties to earlier auteurs: Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and, as The Five Obstructions makes evident, fellow Dane Jørgen Leth.¹⁶ It is also ironic that, instead of omitting the credit line, von Trier insists that Leth take it, thus calling into question more broadly the factual status of authorial credit.

In The Five Obstructions, Lars von Trier lays down his ground rules for Jørgen Leth. The Danish title of the film, De fem benspaend, evokes a more physical and personal situation than the English translation. “Benspaend” refers to stretching out a leg to trip someone up, so we are not just talking about any five “obstructions” here—this is about an intentional and slyly malicious action designed not only to impede someone’s progress but to bring that person down. As von Trier says to Leth after Leth has returned from dealing with von Trier’s first “benspaend,” “You look too good! Someone who has been tripped up is supposed to look battered!” In the film, von Trier stretches out his leg (metaphorically) to trip up Leth, his model and his victim. And the relationship to Bloom’s analysis of poetic misprision is almost overdetermined in the film. Von Trier proclaims his artistic debt to the older director, who in 1967 made a short film that von Trier cites as one of the most influential in his own career as a filmmaker: The Perfect Human (Detperfekte menneske). “I’ve seen it, probably, twenty times,” von Trier says to Leth at their first meeting, looking hard at the older director, who avoids his gaze. “Ah, fantastic,” Leth responds evenly. The stage has been set for misprision. But rather than simply rehearsing the younger poet’s compulsion to misread and transform the work of his predecessor, von Trier forces Leth to misread and transform his own work, with von Trier’s narrative about the process functioning as both a frame for and a misprision of Leth’s film.

The Five Obstructions opens with a meeting between Leth and von Trier on von Trier’s home ground, the Zentropa studios in Denmark. It is here that von Trier announces the rules of engagement: they are going to make a film together, or rather, a series of five films, all of which will be rereadings of von Trier’s favorite Leth film, The Perfect Human, “a little gem we will ruin,” von Trier explains. Leth laughs. “A good perversion,” he says. Each time Leth remakes it, von Trier will determine the conditions, designed to “trip up” the older director, to force him to make a bad film, an unaesthetic film, a banal film, a mediocre film, an empathetic film (von Trier’s claim is that Leth rejects empathy on the grounds that it is unaesthetic). As our film goes on, von Trier’s aims receive clearer and clearer articulation. He explains to Leth that there is an ethical hole in Leth’s films—von Trier experiences “a degree of perversion . . . in [Leth’s] distance” from his material, a distance that he wants to force Leth to relinquish by making the older director confront “a truly harrowing experience.” At the end of the film, von Trier unveils his “true” strategy: a “Help Jørgen Leth” project. According to von Trier, rather than providing a forum for allowing the younger director to overthrow his auteurist predecessor, the five obstructions were designed to jar Leth out of his depression and inertia and return him to filmmaking. Further, von Trier claims to want to pry Leth loose from his (“perverted”) mode of maintaining distance from his filmed subjects in order to aestheticize them. The relationship depicted between the directors in the film, then, is meant to mirror that of therapist and patient, a gambit hinted at early in the process when von Trier explains to Leth that any preference about filming that Leth reveals will be turned against him as a “benspaend,” though Leth should not hesitate to allow this to happen, since von Trier is acting as a therapist would: “A therapist needs to see all your cards in order to treat you,” von Trier explains.

For the purposes of my argument, The Five Obstructions provides a complex and fascinating look at the filmmaker’s relationship to the role of authorship. Lars von Trier announces that the film (The Five Obstructions, that is) will be a collaborative project between the two authors, though it is based on Leth’s The Perfect Human. Further, at the end of the film, a fascinating fifth “benspaend” requires that Leth, directed by von Trier, read a fictional letter written by von Trier, a letter purporting to be from Leth to von Trier. It begins, “Dear, silly Lars.” The letter will be read in voice-over as sequences of images are shown; these sequences will be put together by a third person, “Camilla,” who, as far as the viewer knows, has never appeared in the film. One assumes that her full name, Camilla Skousen, is listed in the credits as “editor.” Leth stresses, in his description of the fifth “benspaend” to an invisible interlocutor who films him off-set and during the filmmaking process, that von Trier will not see what “Camilla” puts together until the film is finished. “Camilla” not only includes sequences that the audience has never seen before (along with others that we recognize from the documentary footage taken of Leth and von Trier)—but she also renders the sequences in black-and-white, so that they mirror the austere black-and-white of Leth’s original The Perfect Human. With the addition of Camilla (as well as the implied but silent presence of the camera operator/interviewer who follows Leth everywhere, even listening to him as he cogitates in bed), we have a film that both insists on the sanctity of the auteurist paradigm and fully deconstructs it.

The crowning moment of authorial confusion occurs as Leth reads “his” letter to “dear, silly Lars.” “You thought you could trip me up,” he says, “but I eluded you.” And “no matter how close you got, you could not see behind my eyes or through the skin of my hand.” This is in direct contradiction to what Liv Ullmann says about what happens when Ingmar Bergman goes in for a close-up. The convention of cinematic camerawork wants to claim that the close-up leads the viewer into a “mindscreen,” to borrow Bruce Kawin’s term; in other words, we are led to believe that we can see what the filmed subject is thinking or feeling. “Leth” (the fictional Leth, the one von Trier projects) denies von Trier’s similar naive belief: that von Trier could access Leth’s thoughts and feelings with an intrusive camera. The “real” Leth voices a similar sentiment earlier in the film when he scoffs at von Trier’s belief that exposing Leth to a “harrowing experience” will shock Leth into empathy. “Pure Romanticism,” mutters Leth to the anonymous camera that trails him throughout the film. One might respond that the whole project, the “Save Jørgen Leth” project, rests on the Romantic notion that some film directors can be heralded as visionary auteurs. Leth does not make this claim for himself, but von Trier makes it for him by citing The Perfect Human as the wellspring of von Trier’s career as a filmmaker.

It is dizzying and somehow eerie to listen to Leth read the letter von Trier composed for him. For as Leth reads the letter, which the viewer knows to be von Trier’s composition, he quotes von Trier addressing him—that is, Leth pretends to be speaking as “I,” but the real “I” behind the text is von Trier speaking for Leth, and the pronominal shifts within the letter conspire to stir up still more confusion: “I know what you thought. You thought, ‘This is Jørgen. What kind of creature is Jørgen? Jørgen is a wretch, just like me. He’d made the film you felt more akin to than any other. So I must be from the same family as Jørgen,’ you thought.” The “you” of the letter is of course von Trier, but it is really von Trier speaking to himself, using Leth as a mouthpiece. The claim that von Trier and Leth “must be from the same family” underscores the idea that this is a Bloomian poetic relation of descent from father epigone to son ephebe, from Leth to von Trier, and the notion of “kinship” with a film indicates the investment of cinema with a kind of subjecthood of its own.

In the letter, von Trier has Leth refer to the fact that he is reading von Trier’s words: “You’ve got me now. This text is yours, you’re forcing me to read your words. So let’s get it over with. Dear Lars, thank you for the obstructions; they’ve shown me what I really am: an abject human human.” Leth goes on to confess his “sins,” the ones that von Trier has attributed to him, of excessive distance, of using his films as a shield from the world. But then, once the confession has been made, von Trier’s letter makes Leth turn again and say, “Was that nice? Does it make any difference? Maybe you put words in other people’s mouths to get out of saying them yourself.” And of course that is precisely what von Trier is doing here. Rather than voicing the letter’s sentiments himself, he has Leth read them. And it is not so much Leth’s confession that concerns him. It is von Trier’s own confession, disguised as Leth’s. A great deal is made in the film and especially in the final letter of the idea of discipline, “chastising,” as the film translates it. The original Danish word is “tukte,” which alludes not only to discipline and punishment, but formation, as in the pruning of a plant. “Just as you wanted to be chastised [pruned, disciplined],” Leth reads, “You would now chastise Jørgen.” The lack of authenticity, of engagement with which von Trier means to confront Leth (“My films are a bluff,” Leth is forced to say in reading the letter), turns out to be von Trier’s flaw: “The dishonest person was you, Lars…. You wanted to expose me, but you exposed yourself.”

The uncanny action of using Leth as a vehicle for confession reflects in general the way that film engages the work and voices and bodies of others to enact the auteur’s vision. In that sense, Leth resembles closely the actors I will discuss in the next chapter: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Klaus Kinski, Liv Ullmann, all of whom become avatars for the auteur whose vision and self-image they represent. But Leth is a special case, because he is not “merely” an actor; he is also a director, an art-cinema author, von Trier’s epigone. By engaging Leth in this way, von Trier challenges the boundaries between auteurs and the predecessors whose work influences them. He can only repeat and misread Leth’s original, “perfect” work. At the same time, Leth finds himself living entirely through interpretation, framed by von Trier. (The card for the last film reads “The Fifth Obstruction: A Film by Jørgen Leth,” though von Trier has been the film’s most authoritative directorial presence.) When it becomes unclear where one vision begins and the other leaves off, the highly subjective nature of auteurist cinema falls into disarray and moves into an intersubjective context, which is then further complicated by the addition of the invisible “Camilla” and the invisible and anonymous documentary cameraman. The Five Obstructions stands as something like a documentary while always, at the same time, posing significant threats to the idea of “knowing” anything. The film closes with a return to a quotation from the original Perfect Human, a film structured around a series of random, repeated questions and statements. “How does the perfect human fall?” asks the narrator (that is, Leth). And in Leth’s 1967 original, the perfect human, played by the young and brilliant Clas Nissen, falls beautifully, gracefully. In one of the obstruction remakes, von Trier forces Leth to act the part of the perfect human, and the much older and much less graceful Leth has to fall to the ground, after much hesitation. It seems a performance of the personal humiliation of aging. At the end of the film, we see that sequence again: “How does the perfect human fall? This is how the perfect human falls.” And we watch Leth awkwardly fold onto the ground, but we know that we are supposed to be thinking not only of Leth and his aging body, but of von Trier and the “fall” he takes in trying to entrap Leth.

The director as director within a film, whether the film is meant to be a documentary (Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie), a mockumentary (Incident at Loch Ness), a fictional film (Day for Night), or something not entirely definable (The Five Obstructions), plays a role. That role may claim to be a nonfictional self-representation (as in Tarkovsky’s portrayal of Tarkovsky in Voyage in Time) or an acknowledged or obvious self-parody (as in Fellini’s Intervista), or something in-between (what is Herzog doing, precisely, in Burden of Dreams?), but an assumption circulates in each case that the viewer recognizes the auteurist director and can create a net of associations between the persona on the screen and the accumulated projections of the director as they exist in his films and in other forms of self-representation. But an interesting twist takes place as well: while building on the director’s reputation, these films also call it into question, first through a frequently employed dialogic structure (the director is placed in dialogue with another director, an apprentice, or his audience) and then through the mirroring process that can take place when the director views himself in the act of filmmaking. Even as the director’s identity as artist and the validity of auteurism is given full play, critiques circulate in many cases both of the individual director and of auteurism as an institution, a paradox made possible by the doubling (and sometimes tripling or quadrupling) of directorial presence. What becomes clear in this type of film is that the director as auteur is always the self as another—and another, and another—by virtue of the collaborative process of filmmaking and film spectatorship, as well as the inherited tradition of auteurist film.

In the opening dream sequence of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, the viewer encounters two objects that call to mind one of Victor Sjöström’s important works of the Swedish silent period, The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen, 1921): a clock and a hearse. Isak Borg wanders the streets of Stockholm’s Old Town on a sunlit summer night. Looking to see what time it is, Borg is perplexed by a clock that hangs outside an optician’s office: the clock has no hands. A few moments later, a hearse, drawn by black horses, comes careening around the corner, clattering on the medieval cobblestones. The hearse collides with a lamppost and one of its wheels catches. As the springs of the hearse squeak and moan and the horses struggle to free the wheel, the casket the hearse is carrying slides out onto the street and breaks open. When Borg cautiously approaches and looks into the casket, he encounters his own corpse, which suddenly comes to life and tries to drag him into the casket. In Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage, based on writer Selma Lagerlöf’s rendering of a folktale, a dissolute man finds himself doomed to collect the world’s dead souls for a year when he dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Featured prominently in the opening scene of Sjöström’s film is a church-tower clock (striking midnight to introduce the timeless reign of the protagonist’s death) and a hearse, which comes to collect David Holm, the year’s phantom coachman, played by Sjöström himself. Holm receives a second chance (like Charles Dickens’s Ebeneezer Scrooge) when he is confronted with his own history and image and is able to achieve self-understanding and a change of heart, with the assistance of a dying Salvation Army nurse. There are ways in which Wild Strawberries is a restaging of The Phantom Carriage, with its emphasis on the conversion of an uncaring man (Borg) through the agency of two women: his daughter-in-law and a childhood love, Sara, who exists both in his flashbacks and in a present-time reincarnation in the form of a young female hitchhiker. Each film is, in its own way, a road movie with a Damascus conversion theme. And the moment Sjöström looks into the broken casket and sees himself acts as an emblem for the way in which the director sees himself through and with others: Borg as Sjöström, Sjöström as Bergman, Borg as Bergman’s father, Bergman as Sjöström. As it turns out, the auteurist vision of “helhet” (wholeness) tends to unfold in these settings into multiplicity and uncertain identity. This process takes a slightly different form in the relationship between the auteur and the actor, which we will see in the next chapter.