21

Menhirs and the Vanishing Area Paradox

My film Fitzcarraldo has a twofold origin—even if there is one man who helped build the jungle camps who likes to claim that he told me all the details of the life of the rubber baron over long nights. The particulars of the film are all mine. The same worker also claims he belonged to a Peruvian liberation group that had contact with Che Guevara in Bolivia. Success, they say, has many fathers. One of the key experiences was a chance occurrence while I was looking for a windblown coast as a setting for a dream sequence in Kaspar Hauser in 1974, eight years prior. Among the candidates were the Lofoten and the northern coast of Norway, but because that was so far, I started to drive along the coast of Brittany. One evening, with darkness already setting in, I stopped in a parking lot in Carnac and saw something amazing in my headlights. Like armies climbing out of the void, there were Neolithic stones lined up in long rows, uphill and down, thousands of them. For a long time in the darkness, I felt my way along the rows of menhirs, then crawled off to sleep in the car. My startlement was like the feeling I had had seeing the windmills in Crete. The next morning, I walked between the parallel ranks of chiseled blocks. There must be thousands of standing stones in and around Carnac, the heaviest of them weighing well over one hundred tons. At the kiosk where they sell tickets, I bought a guide, where I read the foolish claim that the transportation of these stones would have been impossible for men thousands of years ago, and therefore they could have been put there only by extraterrestrial visitors from some other galaxy. Cross about this, I decided I wouldn’t leave this place until I’d found a solution to the conundrum of how blocks of stone could be moved from some distance, then set up on end—as though I were a prehistoric man with this problem.

That same day, I came up with an idea of what I would do using only the available technology of prehistoric times: shovels, ropes, stone axes, animal grease for a lubricant, fire. For simplicity’s sake, I put the question to myself this way: I assumed I had a gigantic stone already hewn among the numerous rocks on this coast and I needed to transport it, again for simplicity’s sake, half a mile on the flat and to set it up somewhere. With the help of a thousand disciplined men, I could do it in a year. The main task would be to build a firm ramp half a mile long that would be close to level. Even if there was only a half percent incline, the ramp would be five meters high by the end. At that end, I would scrape together a small hill and dig a large crater into it. The enormous stone would be tunneled under crosswise at the beginning of the transportation process, and the tunnels would have round fire-hardened oak logs pushed into them. When the rest of the earth was removed, the block would be sitting on rollers. To get it to move would then be simple—it would be on wheels, as it were. At the end, the menhir would topple into the crater hole of the earthen hill, and after that, one would only have to shovel the earth of the hill away, leaving a little at its base for stability.

It would be harder on sloping ground, as here in Carnac. But here too the same principle of a fixed ramp and a crater would apply, only it would take a little more strength to move the stone uphill. For that, I would use a turnstile mechanism, winding a rope from a fixed trunk or pole as a way of applying energy to distance; I would get the large cross to turn and wind the rope on a kind of spindle. A plurality of such turnstiles should suffice to haul at least one hundred tons up a hill. That was the principle one could see at work in Fitzcarraldo. Groups of Machiguengas push against the long arms of the turnstiles, and on the ground, a hawser is wound around a post.

Many years later, when I was directing The Magic Flute in 1999 in Catania, I had Maurizio Balò, a wonderful set designer whom I used in many productions, create a set in the background where enslaved Egyptians can be seen erecting an obelisk. The libretto to The Magic Flute is set in a fantasy pharaonic Egypt, and I wanted a visual acknowledgment of the circumstance. The erecting of the obelisk is done in my production by means of rollers and turnstiles. Then a few years ago, I happened to see a series of engravings of the erection of the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square in Rome in 1586. I was astounded. There I saw a ramp and many, many turnstiles, the difference being that they were moved by horsepower and that pulleys and hoists were used for the great number of ropes. So fascinated was I by this discovery that I was given access to the Vatican library to view the files on the erecting of the obelisk. I talked and talked the responsible archbishop out of his wits until he gave way. The files contain detailed lists of the equipment used, horses and laborers, accidents and illnesses; and the best of all were the various proposals submitted at the time by technicians and architects for the putting up of the obelisk. The solution involving turnstiles won the contest and the obelisk may be admired to this day. To the amusement of anyone listening, I sometimes apply reverse chronology and claim that the idea was stolen from me. In Fitzcarraldo, admittedly, the majority of the power came not from local Indigenous peoples nor from horses but from our caterpillar, which had previously planed down the angle from sixty to forty degrees.

My theory that in prehistoric times they must have used the method of the hollow hill for siting a menhir seems to be borne out by the great menhir at Locmariaquer in Brittany. This stone is by some way the largest of its kind. Stood on end, it must have been more than twenty meters tall and have weighed at least 330 tons. It was presumably hoisted up in the fifth or sixth millennium BCE. Today it is in four pieces on the ground, but to me it seems impossible that it broke on the ground because its biggest and heaviest piece is lying in one direction and the other three are some distance away, pointing somewhere else. Speculation about it is vague and contradictory. My conjecture is as follows: when the stone was dropped in the crater hole of the man-made hill, the top third broke off from the sheer weight of the impact, presumably against the lip of the crater, which will have had the effect of a calculated breaking point. Perhaps there were preexisting cracks in the stone. When a cat leaps out of a third-floor window, it remains unhurt; an elephant in a zoo can be deterred from running away by a concrete ditch three feet deep because the animal would break its bulky leg bones because of the inertia of its colossal mass. So the top of the stone splintered against the angle of the hill in three parts, all pointing in one direction. My guess is that in those far-off times our ancestors dug away the hill from the thickest part of the rock because that was so much bigger than any other known standing stone. It is possible that that part stood for thousands of years then fell in a different direction due to erosion. That might explain the angle of the parts on the ground and the distance of the individual pieces. People have suggested an earthquake, which is hard to imagine in Brittany and has not been confirmed for any time we know. One entry in a ship’s log in 1659 describes taking the standing stone as a point of reference, and the mighty lower part could still have been upright then. I pursue the progress of the research with curiosity, ready at any time to revise my ideas.

The story of Fitzcarraldo was brought to my attention by Joe Koechlin. He came to see me in Munich and urged me to return to Peru; everyone was waiting and hoping that, after Aguirre, I would make another jungle film. He had a very exciting story line for me concerning the rubber baron Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald, who toward the end of the nineteenth century was the wealthiest businessman in the entire region. This Fitzcarrald had employed more than three thousand woodworkers and a small army of overseers. When he died in a canoeing accident, he had just turned thirty-five. To me, it didn’t sound like material for a film; it was just the story of a notorious exploiter, and Joe and I sat together a while longer. As he left, Joe pulled the door shut after him, then popped his head in and said that there was one detail he had forgotten. Fitzcarrald had once moved a steamship across a flat land bridge from one river to another. In the middle of the jungle, engineers had broken up the ship, which weighed some thirty tons, into dozens of parts and carried them across to a parallel river where they were reassembled. I got Joe to sit down again. In my head, everything began to cohere: fever dreams in the jungle, a three-hundred-ton steamship carried over a mountain, turnstiles manned by Indigenous peoples to wind it up as it was done in the Stone Age, the voice of Caruso, grand opera in the jungle. When soon after I disembarked from an airplane in the steam heat of Iquitos, there were vultures circling overhead and pigs wallowing in mud right next to the landing strip—one of them was rotting; it had been struck by a plane—I involuntarily recoiled. Good god, not another film like that! But the project, just like all the others, blew me away. I had no choice. I say that because it is often assumed that I must be obsessional. No, I’m not. Nor is it true that I had got enough money together to embark on another film. In fact, I risked all the money I had in the world to get the thing off the ground. After a very short time, I was so reduced that I was living in a converted chicken coop with a papier-mâché ceiling just a little higher than the top of my head. Rats scuffed around at night. Finally, I was left with no food. But I always made sure I had excellent shampoo and the finest soaps because it helps one’s self-esteem in the jungle if you bathe in a river and smell good afterward. In the Indigenous market in Iquitos, I swapped my shampoo and soap for three kilos of rice, which I proceeded to live on for the next three weeks. I accepted necessities and not much else, and saw it as my duty to follow a grand vision.

I never trusted textbooks at school. If you think about the history of physics, the repeated attempts to explain the universe would make you dizzy. For two thousand years, it was accepted, following Aristotle, that air weighed nothing. Aristotle weighed an empty pig’s bladder, then the same pig’s bladder fully inflated. They weighed the same. It was only when one included the understanding of buoyancy that things appeared differently. That applies in many ways. We continually receive new dietary advice, with one trend following on the heels of the last. Much of what they say about cholesterol is no doubt correct but not its utter demonization; without cholesterol, we would be dead in short order. In the United States, the top line on every plastic water bottle always says: “Total fat—0” and the same with cooking salt: no fat, zero, as though that means something. When my star Christian Bale systematically and under medical supervision lost sixty-five pounds over six months to be able to play Dieter Dengler, who was found half starved after his flight from North Vietnamese captivity, I set myself out of solidarity to lose half of what Bale was losing. I was repeatedly asked how I did it, what diet I had followed; and Americans in particular thought that it was an incredibly radical, positively sensational prescription: I just ate half of what I normally would eat. What was so difficult in the case of Christian Bale, though, was the fact that we had to film the story in reverse because simply by eating a lot after the first day of a shoot it’s relatively easy to put the lost weight back on again in the space of five weeks. To play deepening despair backward is something that takes an actor of really extraordinary quality to do.

I don’t like to accept anything as a given. This is how I view the so-called vanishing area paradox. In my dentist’s waiting room in LA, I one day leafed through a Scientific American, which is a serious and much-respected periodical. On one of its pages was a graphic showing a paradox defying all logic and experience. Sixteen individual parts make a pattern that, if you assemble the same pieces in a different order, suddenly leaves a blank in the center of the same plane. Because my name was called at that instant, I tore out the page. I wanted to resolve the paradox myself without help.

How can something unimaginable be possible? I have never closed my mind to that question. For instance, I follow with keen interest the way that in the world of quantum physics a particle that has the choice between passing through window A of a grid or window B may, in certain circumstances, pass through both windows at the same time. Perhaps I should add that I don’t claim to understand this physics. But I receive regular invitations from the community of particle physicists who admire my films as much as rock musicians, skateboarders, and various other enthusiastic denominations do. I have spoken with mathematicians who are interested in the fantastic element of my landscapes just as I am interested in their application of algebra to unthinkable spaces and planes. In my 2020 film, Fireball, there is a sequence of quasiperiodic crystals, tiny traces of which were found in fragments of a meteorite that came down in Siberia not far from the Bering Strait. Crystals follow rigid symmetries; this has been understood for two centuries or more; anything else is unthinkable and not allowed. But in the seventies, the British mathematician Roger Penrose evolved a sort of geometry that proved the unimaginable. The most astonishing thing remains that in 1453 some Persian craftsmen created an arrangement of tiles on the outside wall of a shrine in Isfahan that is quasiperiodic without knowing the mathematics at the root of such a pattern. I have met Penrose and have since acquired even more respect for the unimaginable. But I was intrigued that Scientific American should describe the paradox of the vanishing area as insoluble. After all, Aristotle hadn’t been challenged for two thousand years purely because he was Aristotle.

After long pondering the conundrum, I left geometrical thinking. I tackled the paradox in another way because it resisted all my real-world experience. I simply asked myself the question: Is this even a paradox at all? And then I finally took a closer look at the two depictions. Why were there two frames when one would have been sufficient? Wherever the edges of the steplike forms touched the frame, the inner area in one or other of the two figures was almost unnoticeably convex and concave in the other. The paradox wasn’t a paradox—it was just a hoax. The total of the slight enlargements and slight diminishments in the area was exactly the size of the small rectangle in the second graphic. It took me two months to get there; others could have done it in minutes. The sort of time you might wait for your dentist, say.