29

Hypnosis

After I was first made to speak my own commentary in the film on the ski-jumper Steiner and appear in the film as the chronicler of his story, I came to see a good side of this task, which I had first resisted. There is something authentic and inimitable about speaking one’s own words that any audience will immediately recognize and that no schooled actor or professional speaker can match. I found my way into this role without much forethought, but I didn’t want to do it like an amateur either, so I strove for precision and effect. An additional factor was that in my feature film Heart of Glass I wasn’t sure how I could show a whole village sleepwalking into a wholly predictable catastrophe. The film’s subject is a real figure, a cowherd in the Bayerischer Wald in the late eighteenth century who had the gift of prophecy and, like Nostradamus, had visions of a world on fire and the end of mankind. The village lives by glassmaking, but the glassblowers have lost the secret of making ruby glass. Their search drives them all mad and culminates in arson and murder. The glass factory burns to the ground. How could I find a stylistic medium whereby all the actors seem to be in a trance? How do sleepwalkers walk and talk? I had the idea of possibly hypnotizing them all, but then first I would have to find out if people under hypnosis can open their eyes without waking and if two or more people under hypnosis are capable of talking to each other. I hired a professional hypnotist for tests and was very encouraged by the early results. Yes, people in deep hypnosis can indeed open their eyes without waking; and, yes, they can communicate with each other as well. But then the hypnotist started getting on my nerves. He gave himself airs and claimed that he, with his special gifts, could draw down and deflect upon others a cosmic aura. The condition of hypnosis was something he could produce by focusing his own inner vibrations. He was technically good at his job, but when people come up with this kind of New Agey twaddle, I get irked. I took on the role of the hypnotist myself; I had studied enough and made myself familiar with the literature. The self-important New Ager later founded an institute where he specialized in hypnotizing young women and dispatching them to ancient Egypt as temple dancers. They then spoke what he claimed was the language of the pharaohs, but Egyptologists listened to their babble and confirmed that it was just meaningless sounds and had nothing to do with any known language. In fact, anyone can hypnotize. The cause of the mystifications is that we know very little about the mechanics of the brain switching off in hypnosis and sleep. All we really know is that we have to proceed methodically. There are simple techniques, fixing the eyes of the subject, say, with the point of a pencil. That is accompanied by a certain intense and suggestive way of speaking. In my later film voice-overs and commentaries, I was to draw on this way of speaking.

There are certain preconditions for hypnosis. The subject must have given his or her consent and be willing to follow the prompts. If someone isn’t especially imaginative and mentally flexible enough to follow suggestions, hypnosis becomes very difficult if not impossible. Very old people, rigid in their thinking, are difficult to hypnotize. Small children, four-year-olds, say, full of energy and with limited attention spans, are similarly not easy to hypnotize—and probably one shouldn’t try to anyway. One has no authority over hypnotized persons. Murdering under hypnosis happens only in bad films and novels because the basis of our nature isn’t affected. If you give a hypnotized subject a knife and tell them to kill their mother, they will simply refuse. Subjects remain capable of lying. Hence the law doesn’t accept evidence provided under hypnosis. Also important is that returning the subject to normal consciousness must be done slowly so they reenter the world free of fear and with joyful expectancy. But I too was in for some surprises. One musician was a little unsure when he answered a newspaper ad and turned up for a test. All the invitees knew they had come for a test, that I was putting together a group of actors, so the young man asked me if he could bring his girlfriend. I put her at the back of the room as an observer and told her not to follow my vocal prompts. But after a few minutes, she was the first to lapse into hypnosis. There was an incident during the filming as well: one of the actors felt so relaxed in his condition that he refused to follow my instructions and come around step by step. I needed a very long time to wake him. In my film Invincible, decades later, the pianist Anna Gourari, who was playing the female lead alongside the strongest man in the world, expressed strong doubts that she could be hypnotized on camera. We had a few witnesses, and a short time later she was in such a deep trance that it took me a long time to wake her.

There is a primitive sketch that tells me if a person is “gifted” for hypnosis. Just as there are people who can learn very quickly to ride a bike, say, so there is a basic adeptness for hypnosis.

You have in front of you an open book. Is the book facedown so you see its cover? Or is the book open facing you? In the event that you see the book as facing you, I take away the sketch for a moment, then produce it again and suggest seeing it with the book facedown. If you find it easy to rethink the picture and see it differently, then you are a good candidate for hypnosis. The same goes, of course, if you saw the book as facedown. Can you see it face toward you?

Later, I experimented with films that showed to subjects I had hypnotized. One viewer, for instance, felt able to circle the main figure in Aguirre like a helicopter while the landscapes became purely imaginary. I was interested how such visions were produced; we know so little about the processes of dreams and visions. But the risks of working with large groups of hypnotized individuals are too great, and the responsibility is too great because in rare cases there may be psychotic reactions.

But there is at least a memory of my role as hypnotist in the timbre of my voice in documentaries. What matters, though, is not the voice itself but what the voice has to say. It is the content that spooks the audience. What I write and record could never appear, say, in a National Geographic film. At the end of my film on volcanoes, Into the Inferno, you see the streams of lava erupting from the interior of the earth, and my voice reminds the listener that deep under our feet there is glowing magma “that wants to burst forth and it could not care less about what we are doing up here. This boiling mass is just monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles, and vapid humans alike.” Sentences like that demand the appropriate intonation. I accept then that my voice in German has the South German twang of my first language, Bavarian. And I accept too that I speak English with a strong accent, maybe not quite so strong as Henry Kissinger’s English but still sufficiently so for there to be a number of imitators on the Web who in “my” voice read fairy tales or give advice for living. There are dozens of imitators, but none of them has really caught my sound. My voice has found a great community of fans, which combined with my view of life asks to be imitated. I am a grateful victim of such satirists.