"In my grandmother's dining room there was a glass-fronted cabinet,
"and in the cabinet, a piece of skin.
"It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery,
"with strands of coarse, reddish hair.
"It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin.
"On the card was some writing, in faded black ink,
"but I was too young then to read.
" "What's that?" "
" "A piece of brontosaurus." "
"My mother knew the names of two prehistoric animals -
"the brontosaurus and the mammoth.
"She knew it was not a mammoth.
"Mammoths came from Siberia.
"The brontosaurus, I learned, was an animal that had drowned
"in the Flood, being too big for Noah to ship aboard the ark.
"I pictured a shaggy, lumbering creature,
"with claws and fangs, and a malicious green light in its eyes.
"Sometimes, the brontosaurus would crash through the bedroom wall
"and wake me from my sleep.
"This particular brontosaurus had lived in Patagonia,
"a country in South America at the far end of the world.
"Thousands of years before, it had fallen into a glacier,
"travelled down a mountain in a prism of blue ice,
"and arrived in perfect condition at the bottom.
"Here, my grandmother's cousin,
"Charlie Milward, the sailor, found it."
HERZOG:In the footsteps of Bruce Chatwin,
we ended up at this shipwreck
in Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of South America.
This very wreck Chatwin had photographed more than four
decades ago and published it in his first book,
In Patagonia.
A few times in his life and in my life our paths
had intersected, and there were points,
landscapes, that we had explored independently,
unbeknownst to each other, sometimes with many
years in between.
This ship that never reached its destination, was one
of these points.
Charlie Milward was captain of a merchant ship that sank
at the entrance to the Strait of Magellan.
He survived the wreck and settled nearby at Punta Arenas,
where he ran a ship repairing yard.
The Charlie Milward of my imagination was a god
among men - tall, silent and strong, with black mutton-chop whiskers
and fierce blue eyes.
The brontosaurus went rotten on its voyage through the Tropics
and arrived in London a putrefied mess, which was why you saw
brontosaurus bones in the museum, but no skin.
Fortunately, cousin Charlie had posted a scrap
to my grandmother.
Chatwin was a writer like no other.
He would craft mythical tales into voyages of the mind.
In this respect, we found out we were kindred spirits,
he as a writer, I as a film-maker.
In this film here, I will follow a similar erratic quest for
wild characters, strange dreamers, and big ideas about the nature
of human existence.
These were the themes Chatwin was obsessed with.
We never had the intention
to make a biographical film on Bruce Chatwin.
In Patagonia brims over with dozens of wild stories, and we followed
a few of them.
Since the piece of skin was so important for Chatwin,
we travelled with our camera to the very cave where
it was discovered in 1895.
Chatwin came here as a pilgrim.
His book has made the cave famous.
Today, busloads of tourists seek out the extinct denizen of the crag.
TOURISTS CHATTER
We were lucky to meet Karin Eberhard, the great-granddaughter
of Hermann Eberhard, who had found the remains
of the mysterious prehistoric creature.
SHE SPEAKS IN GERMAN
"Please can I have the piece of brontosaurus?"
Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted
that piece of skin.
My grandmother said I should have it one day,
perhaps, and when she died, I said,
"Now, I can have the piece of brontosaurus."
But my mother said, "Ha, that thing? I'm afraid we threw that away."
It took some years to sort the story out.
Charlie Milward's animal was not a brontosaurus but the Mylodon,
or giant sloth.
He never found a whole specimen or even a whole skeleton,
but some skin and bones preserved by the cold,
dryness and salt in a cave on Last Hope Sound in Chilean Patagonia.
Like Bruce Chatwin, we went to the cemetery in Punta Arenas
in search of the grave of Charlie Milward the sailor.
Later in his life,
Charles Millard became British consul in Punta Arenas.
He built this phenomenally ugly house for himself.
Chatwin made a pilgrimage to the museum in La Plata in
Argentina, some 3,000 kilometres further to the north.
Here, the big remaining piece of the Mylodon skin
that Hermann Eberhard had kept hanging on his tree, is on display.
Scientists established that this specimen had died
around 10,000 years ago.
Around that time, the giant sloth became extinct altogether.
Amazingly, some of its faeces, the size of footballs,
were preserved almost fresh.
Chatwin himself had found some small pieces of excrement and a few
strands of hair of the creature back in the cave.
This is how the animal looked.
It stood almost ten-feet tall.
Bruce Chatwin had a deep fascination for prehistory,
obviously for dinosaurs, but more so for early branches
of human evolution, which came some 60 million years later.
He visited one of the most famous palaeontologists,
Richard Leakey, who in Kenya had excavated the skull of a hominid
dating 1.5 million years back in time.
And, by sheer coincidence, Chatwin was present in South Africa
at the very moment when the earliest evidence of human use of fire,
about a million years ago, was discovered.
Chatwin loved this museum.
He fell in love with this particular extinct species of armadillos,
and to me he once made a cryptic remark about a flying octopus
that I did not understand until I saw it.
The little cabinet of curiosities, of Bruce's childhood home,
does not exist any longer.
And so, you could see,
when you looked at these objects in the cabinet,
each one of them would have been a story for Bruce,
a kind of emblem of a place he might want to visit,
and so you had a compass point with all the compasses of the places
he then did visit, a Victorian compass.
You had the fish head, the arrow hooks from Patagonia,
from his cousin, Charlie Milward.
You had this object, which is the only object left
in his collection in the Bodleian, it's the one object that is
here with the notebooks,
and it has...
..an inscription on the bottom, which...
..is possibly a motto for Bruce's...
Just one second here.
It has an inscription on the bottom,
"I am starting for a long journey."
This slightly potbellied Victorian traveller.
And that could be Bruce's motto.
His life, in a sense, is a search for the countries
from which these objects originated.
Including the piece of skin, as you describe it.
And so, in a parody of Jason and the Fleece,
Bruce set off for his first book to try and find the origin
of this fur, the kind of Golden Fleece, if you like.
It's a kind of comic version of it
on which this would be the
clothes line on which he would hang all his stories of how he got there.
And so this Victorian cabinet full of these objects,
and if you want to see Bruce's journey first of all mapped out,
it's mapped out in childhood, when he's looking up to see
the sloth skin and the compass and the fish-hooks from Patagonia,
so each of these objects had a drama which attracted Bruce
and which made him want to go to the source of it.
I think one of the things... Ended up in great books.
And ended up in great books. I mean, one of the things,
as I was working through
in the Bodleian Library, the notebooks - he used
to do cloud formations.
These are plants, telephone numbers, scraps of conversation.
There's a mountain scene.
This is him going to Captain Eberhard at he cave where the
Mylodon, the giant sloth skin he found.
This is the end of In Patagonia.
Of course...
..in a way, describing certain things,
he encountered facts.
In the pedantic part of the reviewers who blamed him
for making things up, they were wrong.
In my opinion, they were wrong because Bruce,
sure, he would take facts, but he would modify them,
but he would modify them in such a way that they would resemble
more truth than reality.
Bruce didn't tell a half-truth, he told a truth and a half.
He embellished what was there, to make it even truer.
There was also an attraction from early on in Chatwin's life
for mysterious landscapes, landscapes of his soul.
This stone, for some, radiating paranormal energies,
forms part of a vast Neolithic complex at Avebury in Wiltshire.
From his nearby boarding school in Marlborough,
the young Bruce would ride his bike here all the time.
SPIRITUAL CHANTING
Part of this complex is Silbury Hill, the largest
Neolithic structure in the world.
This is where he was somehow centred.
This was his pivot, his mythical place of origin.
Everything is an echo of this.
CHANTING CONTINUES
So, it's crossing, because I think the force is going that way.
Can you show us again here, do you feel the force,
is it like electric?
No, it just crosses.
So if I went this way now, in theory, it will cross again.
See?
Show us again how it crosses.
It just - it's that easy, it just settles down,
it just...
And you can see 'em wavering.Yeah.
So there, I'm fine, nothing's happening,
but as soon as I start to walk,
they cross.
And now it's trying to go the other way because it knows,
I think, the force is going that way.
And what forces are they?
They're just possibly magnetic forces that run round the world.
There's lots of them and Wiltshire is quite prevalent.
They've got quite a lot of ley lines running through Wiltshire,
possibly why they settled here. Perhaps our ancestors could feel
it and that's why they moved here. Who knows?
I can sort of visualise him completely, here.
You know, we used to come here.
I can see him walking around.
CUCKOO CALLS
Cuckoo.
CUCKOO CALLS
This is Elizabeth Chatwin, Bruce's widow.
She took us to Llanthony Priory in Wales, a hideaway
during their early courtship.
The landscape around here became one of the essential locations
where he would find his inner balance.
Bruce was a nomad, but he was always drawn back
to this place, the Black hills in Wales.
But this is a dreaming place.
I mean, these hills.
His inner landscape.
His inner landscape, yeah.
The landscape of his soul.
I think so.
Landscape of his soul, yes.
But apart from the idyllic landscapes that gave a feeling
of home, of belonging, Bruce Chatwin was searching
for strangeness.
He always liked my first feature film, for this.
In it, a protagonist, a German World War II soldier
on a reconnaissance mission, suddenly becomes insane
when he stumbles across this valley of 10,000 windmills.
Bruce, in our conversations, mentioned this scene often.
He coined the term "deranged landscape" for it.
The quest for strangeness
was recognised by others who knew Chatwin.
In Australia, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel,
whom he adored, wrote in a letter to him a quote from the poet Rilke
that sums it up.
My letter ended, "I'm reminded of the words of Rainer Maria Rilke,
"..That at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us,
"to have courage for the most strange, the most singular
"and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.
"I'm glad to have met you."
It was you who wrote that to him.
Yes. To him, yes.Uh-huh.
As Bruce was after the brontosaurus skin, this was the skin
of MY fascination.
My quest was rather for weird creatures of pure science fiction
that looked as if they had landed in what today are the remains
of a Hollywood intergalactic spacecraft.
This wreck from Star Wars is collecting dust in Coober Pedy
in the Australian Outback.
Australia was where our paths crossed for the first
time, in 1983.
I was preparing my film, Where The Green Ants Dream,
and Bruce Chatwin was researching Aboriginal songs for his book,
The Songlines.
We were both fascinated by Aboriginal mythology.
As Bruce never recorded his book The Songlines,
I will read the passage for him.
"On the surface of the Earth the only features were certain hollows,
"which would one day be water holes.
"There were no animals and no plants,
"yet clustered round the water holes
"there were pulpy masses of matter, lumps of primordial soup,
"soundless, sightless, un-breathing, unawake and unsleeping,
"each containing the essence of life or the possibility
"of becoming human.
"Beneath the Earth's crust, however, the constellations glimmered,
"the sun shone, the moon waxed and waned, and all the forms of life
"lay sleeping, the scarlet of a desert pea, the iridescence
"on a butterfly's wing, the twitching, white whiskers
"of old men kangaroo, dormant as seeds in the desert
"that must wait for a wandering shower."
CHATWIN: In central Australia, I'm concerned with something
which are called the songlines, or the dreaming tracks.
The Australian Aboriginals have this idea that the whole
of the land is covered with song and this is something which I find
absolutely, totally incredible, because I think it gives one
insights as to how language, song,
thought, poetry,
came into being originally.
I have a white fella's understanding of songline gained from literature
and conversations with Aboriginal people.
Yes, I'm a musician, and Bruce Chatwin, of course,
coined the term "songlines".
He didn't like the term "dreaming tracks",
and wanted to find something,
I guess, more poetic.
Aboriginal people were, especially in Central Australia,
were travelling across a very dry landscape and needed a way
to navigate from A to B.
They didn't use GPS and what have you.
So they used mnemonics, a poetry,
a storytelling that got them
from A to B.
These look like...It's coming apart, some notebooks
of the songlines. Is this his attempt to draw a songline?Yes.
Can you take the next page, next to it?
And here...
..very, very strange...
"System of bringing knowledge", he has here.
Yeah.
And delineating lines that were formed by dreams and by song.
And for the Aborigines, of course, it's not just song,
it's orientation in space and it's...
The whole identity, the link they have with the land.
A very graphic image he has.
He goes with some Aborigines in a car and they're singing
the songlines themselves but as the car gets faster,
they quicken the speed of the song. Yes.
They have to hurry through the tracks.
I think Bruce never quite understood and didn't pretend to understand
what a songline was.
When I asked him to describe it in sounds, he tried, "Oh, it's a low,
"rather beautiful ahhh."
He said this sound which didn't sound like anything I ever heard
again, when the Aborigines were singing songlines to me.
Nah. I don't think that the song created the landscape.
I think
that the landscape was created...
..by the Al Tierra.
And the Al Tierra was born from the those words of songs...
Mikey Liddle uses here the terming around the language for dreamtime.
..that carried the existence of the animal travelling
through, to create the landscape.
The animals, the trees, growing in that landscape.
So, that's a hard one.
The egg or the chicken?
The song or the landscape?
It's a wonderful mystery and I get great pleasure
about thinking about it.
They're magnificent songs.
They're magnificent...
..magnificent, erm...
..procedures of communication that are performed by...
skin names...
..different categories of the songlines.
And then they're passed over, because that's as far as I can go.
Them people take it on now.
I know that,
and they know that.
They have to take it on from there.
I know the rest of that song, but it's them people's
responsibility to do that.
HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
And does a plane leave a songline in the sky?
Our songlines are
our way of contributing to the health of the planet.
In which way?
When our old people sing, they reinvigorate sites.
Erm, and it invigorates them at the same time.
Our old people had a really, really close connection,
and still do, with the country.
And erm, look, something in me sort of believes that...
..when the last song man or song woman...
..passes, whether it be in Aboriginal Australia,
whether it be in the Amazon forests, whether it be in Africa,
Asia, wherever, something profound's going to happen.
I don't know what that is, but I think that our songlines
I guess kind of hold the Earth together in a mysterious way.
We are here in the Strehlow Centre, named after the eminent scholar
Theodor Strehlow, who spent decades collecting
knowledge and songs of Aborigines.
This brought Bruce Chatwin to Australia.
His monumental book, however, contains elements of secret
knowledge meant only for the initiated.
Even the painting on the cover should not be seen by everyone,
and we were asked to show only part of it and out of focus.
Now, as this book is available for everyone,
I can read it and I can look into knowledge that shouldn't be for me?
It was not meant for me.
Is that a problem for you?
Yes, I think it is a problem.
And it's becoming more of an increasing problem.
Look, I guess...
..this material, I think TGH Strehlow had some
perceptions that the knowledge would die out.
Erm, now there's no doubt that some elements of Aboriginal
culture have eroded.
But we are still here.
We are still singing many of these songs.
We are still performing ceremonies every year.
We still have a really deep connection to country.
But they're not meant for me, for example, not meant
for my camera?
Yeah, well, a lot of the material in this is restricted
men's material. It's restricted knowledge.
Erm, this document, songs in detail, it provides you with
translations of songs.
And...Should the book be locked away?
Should it be hidden away?
Well...
Should it be burned?
Look, I don't think so.
Theodor Strehlow looks here like an outdoorist man,
but growing up in Hermannsburg in Central Australia,
as the son of a German Protestant missionary,
he was fluent in German, English, Aranda, Latin and ancient Greek.
With Songs Of Central Australia, he left one Earth-shattering thought
of the most singular books ever written.
Chatwin describes it as "great and lonely".
It is based on his field diaries, but connects philosophy,
ancient literature, mythologies of seemingly unrelated cultures.
This was also Chatwin's way of connecting the most improbable
varieties of ideas and encounters.
This became Chatwin's unique style of storytelling.
What I remember about the person, I don't know if this is the same
for you, he was like a kind of fiery ball of light shedding flickering
illuminations on obscure pieces of knowledge,
on connecting countries, people, books, text.
I've often wondered if he was a kind of precursor of the internet.
He offered connections.
No, he was the internet. He was the internet.He was the internet at a
time when, technically, it did not exist.
He was the internet.
In Alice Springs, not far from the Strehlow Centre,
we met Peter Bartlett, a very well-read man,
who has lived with Aborigines since he was a young man.
He's a speaker of Warlpiri and a fully initiated member
of this tribe.
He has read and reread The Songlines and could, as he says,
write a thousand pages of commentary about it.
He told us about his experience with Aboriginal songs.
Some of these performances that I heard when I was young,
were just so powerful.
So it was a real mystery to me why...
Was it more powerful than Wagner and Verdi?
Oh, yeah, you know, men would be screaming those songs out.
And it would be like a competition between
ten football teams, you know?
And you'd have voices that would, really supreme singers
that could put their voice right over hundreds
of men singing intensely.
And stomp, you know, all the percussion sounds
that they'd be making.
And you'd have these top singers that could take their voices right
over the top.
You know, so, yeah, no, and it would all be done
in darkness, with stars.
HE SINGS SOFTLY
Peter Bartlett introduced us to his Warlpiri mentor,
Robin Granites.
The words, I know the tune, the tune is all right,
but it's the wording that...
There are a lot of songs, right? Yeah.
But there are these words that...
Are the lyrics of the songlines eroding, or should we rather suspect
that he does not want to reveal everything to our camera?
What about that one I used to sing? Maybe it's the wrong one for you?
That Ngaanyatjarra one.
Maybe.
PETER SINGS
ROBIN JOINS IN
PETER SINGS AGAIN
HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE
HE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE
This here is the mission station in Hermannsburg.
Bruce was searching here for something profound.
A whole world embedded in ancient Aboriginal songs.
It does not feel right to me how the missionaries transformed
the culture of song into Lutheran piety.
THEY SING IN OWN LANGUAGE
The furnishings date back to Theodor's father,
Carl Strehlow, the Lutheran pastor.
Everything here seems to be frozen in time.
THEY CONTINUE SINGING
I was always in search of this elusive manuscript,
which he had said he'd written, he'd spent, himself, seven years
writing, called The Nomadic Alternative.
Which was the key of his theory about nomadism,
about walking, about how walking cures you,
which you must have talked with him about.
The library allowed us to touch it, to read from it, look into it.
I can show it, it's for real.
It is... This is called... You have searched for it.
I'd searched for this for seven years.
I found it literally in the last summer I was here.
It's called The Nomadic Alternative, and it was the manuscript that Bruce
was commissioned to write when he was a young...
After he'd left studying archaeology at Edinburgh,
he was commissioned to do this book on his theory
about walking and nomadism.
Of course, I had a similar worldview that with nomadic
existence, with the demise of nomadic life, city life,
sedentary life, would come in place, meaning huge amount of human
beings, technology, all of which is now probably working
at the destruction of the human race.
And he was quite sure that humanity was fragile,
that we had maybe 100,000, a little more than 100,000
years as Homo sapiens, but we may not have that much left,
that we might disappear like other species have disappeared.
So, what did you think of his theory of nomadism,
as you understood it?
I had an immediate rapport, because in my thinking
and in my experiences on foot, I had made exactly the same
ideas, impressions, experiences.
These here are the last nomadic people of Tierra del Fuego,
photographed a mere 100 years ago.
Bruce Chatwin had seen these photos while he was in Patagonia.
For him, it was clear that we could not revert
to the times of nomadism, but he was fascinated by the fact
that humans in East Africa, where we originated as Homo sapiens
around 150,000 years ago, travelled the longest distance
humans could possibly go.
From East Africa, to the Near East, spreading to Asia and Siberia,
crossing the Bering Strait into Alaska and, from there,
all the way down through the Americas to the southernmost tip
of South America.
10,000 years ago, they left their imprint in a cave
under an overhang.
Bruce Chatwin and they had the same vista.
Is there still an echo of their voices?
ANCIENT SINGING
A never-ending wind is still the same,
and so are the animals they hunted, mostly guanacos.
The depictions of animals are lively and fairly realistic.
But how the prehistoric nomads looked, remains a mystery.
This here could be a dancer, a hybrid between man and frog.
Frogs appear to have been important totemic creatures.
The hands of these long-gone people are the direct imprint
of their presence, almost forensic evidence.
But the longer you look, the more unreal,
the more mysterious, they become.
The photos, 10,000 years later, have already become inexplicable.
This one has been interpreted as showing a shaman who,
with his hands outstretched, tells his people of a lunar eclipse.
This one is one of my favourites.
The painted man in the foreground is supposed to be a spirit
among the living.
No-one today has any idea about what is going on here.
It seems to be a ceremony performed by naked men.
In this one, the only thing we know is that these men are not dead.
This may be a ritual performance of death.
What the paintings of faces and bodies mean,
we do not know either, but they point to a complex system
of beliefs and ceremonies.
SINGING CONTINUES
Nomads, their bodies and faces painted,
always fascinated Bruce Chatwin. Even when he was only days away
from death, he wanted to see my just-finished film
on Woodaabe tribesmen in the southern Sahara.
Each year, they meet in the middle of nowhere,
and the young men elaborately adorn their faces.
They compete for beauty in front of the women,
and showing the whites of their eyes and their teeth is considered
the highest mark of their beauty.
These images were the last Bruce ever saw before he lapsed
into his final coma.
All these tribal cultures are in their last days.
Bruce wrote about their abrupt encounters
with Western civilisation.
I'm reading now an excerpt of Chatwin's In Patagonia
that he did not read in his recording.
"Bernalladias relates how, on seeing the jewelled cities of Mexico,
"the conquistadors wondered if they had not stepped
"into the Book of Amadis, or the fabric of a dream.
"His lines are sometimes quoted to support the assertion
"that history aspires to the symmetry of myth.
"A similar case concerns Magellan's landfall
"at San Julian in 1520.
"From the ship they saw a giant dancing naked on the shore,
"dancing and leaping and singing.
"And while singing, throwing sand and dust on his head.
"As the white men approached, he raised one finger to the sky,
"questioning whether they had come from heaven.
"When led before the captain general, he covered his nakedness
"with a cape of guanaco hide."
The faces of these tribal people seem to betray a similar shock
of encounter with a mythical vessel.
An exact replica of Magellan's ship sits on dry land in Punta Arenas.
But the myth lives on.
Is the ship not tossed by raging waves?
Does a storm whip it along?
Do the ropes in the rigging sing a siren's song in the wind?
Are these ice floes a mortal hazard for the ship rounding the rocks
of Cape Horn?
Have the conquistadors failed in their mission to convert
the natives to Christianity?
Or has it remained a hollow promise?
Retracing Chatwin's journey, we cross the Beagle Channel into Chile.
This here is the Chilean customs and immigration building
on the Isla Navarino, the last large island
before the end of the continent.
Chatwin was in search of traces of the nomadic people of Patagonia.
We came across a group of archaeologists who were
digging up an ancient campsite.
This area was sporadically inhabited by wandering tribes.
Over hundreds, maybe thousands of years,
they left layer upon layer of seashells,
vaguely visible here as distinct strata.
BAND PLAYS
Modern-day Navarino Island is trying to preserve the history
of ancient nomads.
These Chilean students are the future now.
They're marching in celebration of the founding day
of Puerto Williams, the only settlement on the island.
As recently as the late 19th century, people from here
were exhibited in a zoo in Paris.
They all died out through epidemics
or were killed by white settlers.
The murderers gave this photo the title In The Field Of Honour.
Scores of Yagans, Selknams, Kaweskar and other indigenous groups
were buried in this tribal cemetery.
This end of a civilisation frightened Bruce Chatwin.
He wanted conversation.
He was into speech, as if by manic compulsion.
To me, it was as if he was speaking to push his untimely death away.
He was talking, talking, talking
at the top of the table.
And everybody laughed a lot.
No. It was nice.
It was just so sad that he didn't live,
you know, because I can imagine what he would still be...
I mean, he had so many books already still in his head
that he wanted to write.
Do you hear his voice, still?
Oh, I can, yes, I can, if you say that,
I can hear it in my head.
Yeah.His laughter.
Mmm?His laughter?
Oh, yeah. Laughter. Yeah.
His shrieks?Shrieks, yeah! I was going to say shrieks.
Exactly. Yeah.
He loved telling jokes and he loved telling adventures and so on.
His storytelling.
He would go to a party and walk in,
with me trailing behind,
and he would walk straight, and then immediately
he was surrounded, you know, like this,
with people who wanted to talk to him.
He'd go into the house already talking.
Erm, he was a talker.
He was interested in characters, and in stories
and in mimicry, and in,
as you say, these shrieks were... one wanted to bottle them, in a way
because they were both painful and exciting,
and encouraging.
They were...
They were the essence of something.
Yes, I remember his voice and everything when we met
in Melbourne. Pretty much from the airport,
we started to tell stories to each other.
And it was a marathon, literally
a marathon of two days, two nights.
Of course, we slept in between, five, six hours.
The moment we met at breakfast, he would continue,
I would continue.
Of course, it was hard to squeeze in a story,
because he was nonstop.
And his way to imitate voices was...
Still in my... I remember one story he told about
interior-of-Australian Aborigines,
a very wealthy American couple arrives in a private plane.
The wife in high heels takes a photo of an Aborigine
squatting on the ground, an old man.
And he, full of contempt, spits at her feet.
And she immediately noticed she should have asked him
for permission, and apologises, and asks, "Can we give you a gift
"or something, maybe not money, but something practical
"that you can use? What can we send you?"
And the Aborigine, without missing a beat, says...
MIMICKING AMERICAN ACCENT: "Four Toyota pick-up trucks."
That's how Bruce spoke.
And then he would imitate the voice of the woman
who didn't know what to do now.
Back in Patagonia, mountains were not Bruce's terrain.
They were mine, as I had grown up in the mountains of Bavaria.
But his leather rucksack would play an important role here.
He himself had walked with this rucksack for thousands of miles.
I always drink here.
I made my feature film Scream Of Stone
on Cerro Torre, and the protagonist, as an homage to Bruce Chatwin,
who had died the year before,
carries it throughout the film.
At one point during production it would acquire significance for me.
Cerro Torre is one of the ultimate challenges for climbers.
Aside from the prohibitive rock faces, it is the raging storms
that pose the danger.
In a way, the film, for me, had to do with the death of Chatwin.
When I saw Bruce, there was only a skeleton and the eyes,
glowing out of a skeleton.
And Elizabeth left and the first thing he said,
"Werner, I'm dying."
And I looked at him and I said, "Bruce, I can see that."
Almost matter-of-fact.
And then he said,
"I want to die now. Help me, help me, help me.
"Can you kill me off somehow?"
And I said to him,
"Do you mean I...
"..I'm going to bash in your head
"with a baseball bat, or do I shoot you?"
And he said, "Maybe some sort of medicine or something?"
I said, "Why don't you talk to Elizabeth?"
"No, I cannot talk about this. She's so Catholic."
And, erm...
..so my only present to him was not a gun to shoot him,
but I showed him the film.
And he would see ten minutes of it and then lapse into a delirium,
and then see another ten minutes and he would...
he would all of a sudden come back
and be totally clear,
and he would shout out to me, "I've got to be on the road again,
"I've got to be on the road again!"
And he looked at his legs, that were only spindles,
and he says, "But my rucksack is too heavy."
And I said, "Bruce, I can carry your rucksack,
"I'm strong enough. I'll come with you."
And then somehow he apparently, after two days, when I was there,
he was embarrassed to die in front of me,
and he said, "Can you please leave?"
And he said, "You must carry..."
Can we show it?
So, that's his rucksack.
Elizabeth, actually going back to England,
it was in England, sent it to me.
And I have used it.
I've used it a lot.
The film carries a mood of precariousness.
Everything can end in sudden death.
Bruce always loved my film Fitzcarraldo, where I actually moved
a big steamboat over a mountain.
He always loved when cinema was authentic in its purest form.
Here, it is obvious that my actor, Stefan Glowacz,
the best freeclimber of his time,
uses no safety devices at all.
He refused everything.
No rope, no carabiners, nothing.
It's cloudy, as always. You know that better than me.
But, you know, for me it's incredible just to sit here
with you, you know? It's a real pleasure.
I'm living here since when you make the movie, in the '90s.
Yes, but I'm not the protagonist.
No, no, no, no. OK. Protagonist is Bruce Chatwin.
His rucksack.
No, but...That's his rucksack.
The production of the film was full of hardships
that became part of the story.
It was the storms that troubled us most.
And after 10, 12 days' pandemonium of storms,
we had a crystal clear light,
a completely blue sky morning.
And I said, we flew up with the helicopter,
it would take weeks
to climb up there.
We flew up in the helicopter,
made the mistake that our reserve
rescue team did not fly first.
The helicopter dropped us and then disappeared.
And then, weather, an incredible storm hit us.
In a minute, my moustache was ice.
And it was 20 degrees below zero.
And maybe 200-kilometre storm.
Well, we dug a hole into the ice, just like a barrel of wine,
and crawled in and sat there.
And we were 55 hours -
two days, two nights and half a day,
something like that.
And it was storm, storm, white out.
I could not see you at this distance any more.
And no sleeping bags?
Nothing. No tent, no food.
I had two little chocolate bars that I distributed at the beginning.
But, again, it's not that...
I'm not the protagonist, Bruce Chatwin is.No, I know...
Yeah, but you talk something about your rucksack in that moment,
what happened?I sat on the rucksack for all this time.
And it sheltered me, because you lose a lot
of temperature when you sit... On ice.On ice, yeah.
People say, "It saved your life." No, that's nonsense, because the two
others were just sitting on ice as well, and they did not die.
And then they tried to come towards us.
And... That was not possible.No.
Well, they tried.
But they were taken down by an avalanche.
And one of them snapped his finger, and took his gloves off and threw
it in the storm, and asked for the waiter to pay for his cappuccino.
So they had to take him down.
After 55 hours, we saw a bit of the sky.
Our helicopter was able to take us out.
Since then, Bruce's rucksack is more than just a memory of him.
Both Bruce and I explored the world on foot.
I myself, believing in the power of walking,
have travelled on foot from Munich to Paris as a pilgrimage
to save my mentor, Lotte Eisner, from dying.
My diaries of this march were published under the title
of Walking In Ice, and Bruce often carried my book
in his rucksack.
It has a value that you cannot describe.
Bruce always liked my dictum when I said to him,
"The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot."
During our first encounters in Australia, I told Bruce
about my interest to make a feature film based on his book,
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
A Brazilian outlaw steps on the shores of West Africa
and becomes the biggest slave trader of his time.
I got a call from Bruce a year or whatever later.
And he says, "David Bowie wants to buy the rights."
And I said, "My God, no, no, no, not David Bowie.
"I have to do it." And I immediately went into it.
You actually discovered, I think, for the first time,
you discovered this, my screenplay.
This is your screenplay, with Bruce's annotations
all over it. Which he never sent to me!
Never did that, never sent it to me.
Here, you can see there's... even the names have annotations.
Then, for example, here, and...
It's full of annotations!
Do you think they... Would they have helped?
I do not know.
I have not read it.
It's the first time I'm holding this in my life.
First time I have his annotations to my screenplay.
I'm going to read what Bruce writes about you, when he goes out
to watch you film it.
He describes you as "a compendium of contradictions.
"Immensely tough, yet vulnerable.
"Affectionate and remote.
"Austere and sensual.
"Not particularly well adjusted to the strains of everyday life
"but functioning efficiently under extreme conditions.
"He was also the one person with whom I could have a one-to-one
"conversation, on what I would call
"'the sacramental aspect of walking.'"
It sounds like he's treating you as a kind of brother.
In a way, he was.
And you see, he was already so ill that he couldn't travel
when I invited him.
"No, I cannot travel," and then he said, "I am doing
"a little bit better, but I need a wheelchair."
I wrote back to him, "Bruce, a wheelchair
"in the terrain we are filming in is of no help.
"It's too rugged.
"But I will give you four hammockeers and one shadow bearer."
I mean, they had these huge umbrellas, the kings had them carry
and they would wobble around above you.
And that was kind of irresistible for Bruce.
He came and he was in fairly good shape.
And he witnessed...
He was actually walking, never used the hammocks.
He witnessed crazy moments with 800 female warriors.
I mean, we had them for six weeks in military training,
by an Italian stuntman.
It was complete craze!
There was a moment where these ferocious young women,
and they're very, very articulate and very tough,
they were paid a day late.
And there was a near riot.
And there was an incredible outburst by them, and one of the production
guys kicked one of them.
And then, I mean, it went, it became dangerous.
Out of the way! Attack!
Attack!
Bruce mentions the incident in his book, What Am I Doing Here?
He describes me as "a monument of sanity, in a cast
"of nervous breakdowns."
After I had calmed down the mayhem, Bruce writes,
"Werner, exhausted, says to me, 'This was only an arabesque.'"
Bruce describes Klaus Kinski as a kind of adolescent
with long white hair.
And often, after Bruce died, we would think that,
what would he be like had he lived?
And this image of Klaus Kinski in Cobra Verde came to mind.
That he would be a bit like that.
No! Don't let him get away!
Stop him! Hold him!
Stay back.
His wives will strangle him now. Stay back.
Well, Kinski was particularly difficult.
It was our last film, where Kinski was, pretty much,
out of control
and wouldn't do certain things and be violent.
I mean, there was physical violence also, which is impermissible.
Not on my set.
And Bruce witnessed some of it.
Not all, because he stayed for only two, three weeks or so.
Erm, I think he was in awe.
He was awestruck.
A raw power of emotion and vileness.
And...
A character that only exists in novels.
And, of course, he was absolutely delighted that I engaged
a real king,
the king of Ndzain, with his entire 450 people entourage,
his sedan bearers and his shadow bearers, and they would drum
and shake in with him and it's wonderful and Bruce said,
"That's what I had hoped to see, once in my life."
"You made it, and it's going to be in the film.
"This is going to be in the film."
DRUMMING AND CHANTING
There was another king, a minor king of Elmina.
And he was curious about reading Bruce's book,
The Viceroy of Ouidah, so Bruce gave it to him,
and after three days, the king, the other king,
came back to him and...
GUNSHOTS
..he was...
..somehow moving his head left, right and sort of looked
at him, and...
..Bruce said, "Well, then?"
And the king looked at him, and he said, "Mr Chatwin,
"you wrote a roundabout book."
That was all he said.
And Bruce was completely and utterly delighted.
Bruce was very ill when he was in Ghana,
but walking and enjoying himself.
And only later, he really lapsed into the final stage of his illness.
And he was already, I think when I did Lohengrin,
he was still in very good shape.
With his wife, he arrived in Bayreuth,
where I had staged Lohengrin.
He was very good looking.
There's no doubt.
And some women in New York,
who describe him as "alarmingly handsome".
"Alarmingly handsome."
And, of course, for both sexes.
Men and women fell for him.
I, personally, and he says it, I was close and remote.
I always kept a certain distance.
We were very comfortable with that.
I remember one woman, who he had brief liaison with,
she said, "He was out to seduce everything.
"It didn't matter whether you were a man,
"a woman, an ocelot or a tea cosy.
"He wanted to seduce."
I do not care whether somebody is bisexual,
or homosexual or whatever.
It is completely of no consequence for me. Bruce is Bruce.
How complicated was it for you to know that he had
relationship with men?
Not complicated. It wasn't a problem.
I mean, you know, because it didn't actually impinge
on our relationship.
I mean, I really didn't care.
And sometimes he brought them to, for the weekend or something
like that, and they were charming and...
So what?
I wouldn't dream of divorcing him.
I mean, there was no question about that.
It was still in the early days of Aids when Bruce Chatwin
contracted the virus.
At that time, wider awareness of the dangers
had just started to spread.
He made a pilgrimage to the monks of Mount Athos,
and converted to the Greek Orthodox faith.
His ashes are buried next to an Orthodox chapel,
on a promontory overlooking the Aegean Sea.
I remember this place.
We used to sit here
and look out at the garden.
So this was, you know, a very happy place
to come to.
It's very sad that Bruce isn't here.
This is, apparently, the very last lines he ever wrote.
"Christ wore a seamless robe."
End of story.
Never anything ever written again.
I mean, he dictated, to Elizabeth, but that's the last,
last, last piece of handwriting we have.
OK.
The book is closed.
While researching the Songlines in Australia, Bruce already knew
he was terminally ill.
The final pages of his book carry the mood of a journey coming
to an end.
He talks about the idea that, when close to death,
some Aboriginal people take a long journey back to the place
of their conception.
And that this...
This, for me, was the central message from the Songlines.
And I think it was a message that held a lot of value for Bruce
at that point. I think he was looking for a way to die.
Which is what I argue in the book, I guess,
is that, like Sartre was looking for a right way to live,
Chatwin was looking for a right way to die.
And I think something about this scene spoke to him
in that way. Otherwise he wouldn't have ended the book like that.
It looks a little bit as if Bruce was describing the death,
the right death, that he himself would like to die.
Can you read the last passage of the book for us, please?
Yes, and I agree with you, I think this is about Bruce
and his death. Yeah.
"As I wrote in my notebooks, the mystics believe the ideal man
"shall walk himself to a right death.
"He who has arrived goes back.
"In Aboriginal Australia, there are specific rules
"for going back, or rather, for singing your way
"to where you belong.
"To your conception site.
"Only then can you become, or re-become, the ancestor.
"The concept is quite similar to Heraclitus' mysterious dictum.
"Mortals and immortals alive in their death, dead
"in each other's life.
"Limpy hobbled ahead.
"We followed on tiptoe.
"The sky was incandescent and sharp shadows fell across the path.
"A trickle of water dribbled down the cliff.
"In a clearing, there were three hospital bedsteads
"with mesh springs and no mattresses.
"And on them lay the three dying men.
"They were almost skeletons.
"Their beards and hair had gone.
"One was strong enough to lift an arm,
"another to say something.
"When they heard who Limpy was, all three smiled, spontaneously.
"The same grin.
"Arkady folded his arms, and watched.
"'Aren't they wonderful?'" Marion whispered,
"putting her hand in mine and giving it a squeeze.
"'Yes, they were all right.'"
"They knew where they were going, smiling at death in the shade
"of a ghost gum."