Die letzten Segelschiffe

«“In the past, ships were much bigger”

Viktor Šklovsky, The Voyage of Marco Polo (1938)

“A noble vessel! but, I don't know why, melancholy. Is it not so with all noble things?”

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

One does not know what transports the Pamir, a four-masted longshoreman filmed by the writer Heinrich Hauser in 1926. Without the captions interspersed with the images, one would not even know where it departs from, where it goes to and where it passes through, since the author filmed (or edited) neither the preparations for departure nor the disembarkation, and no coastline interrupts and identifies the marine immensity. The Pamir appears at sea in broad daylight, passes through the ordeal of the storm, and disappears in the twilight. From midday to glorious twilight, from majestic apparition to disappearance with a fade to black, rather than from one continent to another, one has travelled from the total to the detail, from light to dark, from far to near, navigating only in eternity, without abandoning the plane of the monumental.

The Pamir is a world of caring, protecting, repairing. Oiling, lubricating, rubbing, waxing, washing the deck, painting, movement always depends on lubrication. Between the sailor and the ship, the hairdresser and the customer, the doctor and his patient, the same gesture passes each time: that of a prophylactic caress. Right down to the pleasant rubs that unite the nurse bitch and the little pigs so as to make this friendly circulation natural, the set of incessant exchanges that harmonise species and pass between bodies, between kingdoms, between what is alive and the ship. Repair and healing constitute two variants of a common safeguarding enterprise and, on the Pamir, the captain is represented as a doctor. And so the population of busy sailors seems to have been given no other order than the needs of the ship. The sailors prepare, repair, mend, set and take down the sails. They do not eat, they sleep little, they drink only once to celebrate the end of the storm and the passage of Cape Horn. Never treated as a crew, as an ensemble organised according to its own rules, hierarchical or functional, rather than sailors they are officiants, they do not so much work on the ship as for it: no one commands this ship, it is the sailmaker who rules.

The gesture, therefore, not the work, contrary to what is stated in the writing (the motto on board a sailing ship is: work and work again...). Instead of a human concatenation associating order and execution, Heinrich Hauser assembles gestural series that visually agree rather than a system of actions and reactions, it is an interweaving of acts that refer to one another, normal to their space of realisation and not to a human rationality. Brushing with tar, smearing with ointment, greasing one's boots, oiling one's chains... the activity never seems compulsory but determined by an objective necessity, the fatigue never painful and always skilful, the difficulty, the danger and the readiness, a euphoric regime of the gesture whose editing in hiatuses does not respect the real duration but accentuates the points of effectiveness. In the leaning, Hauser films the repetition, in the altar, he shows the pull, in the hoisting, the ascent: of the work, only the grace of efficiency subsists. Thus the Pamir becomes a conservatory of manual techniques; the care everyone lavishes on this sailing ship threatened by futility and doomed to disappearance eventually embalms it and turns it into its own tomb.

The Pamir is therefore treated as a visual space to be travelled and not as a means of transport. Unable to film the interior of the ship due to a lack of light, Hauser devotes himself exclusively to the deck and the sails: the attentive and fascinated description that the “3000 square metres of sails” require inspires the film with its singular form, that of a treatise on composition and whiteness that spontaneously assigns this document to the register of the visual essay, whose only plastic equivalent in the field of fiction cinema would be the sequence of the battle of the ice in Aleksandr Nevsky. [...] The Last Sailers carries out a lyrical investigation into the visual potential and general dynamics of white surfaces, which the film does not claim to exhaust or totalise, but to pour into their otherness. For Ejzenstejn, who analyses the properties of what he calls the “landscape of surfaces” in the frame, the visual peripeteia consists of finding the canvas, tearing it, cleaving it so that the image emerges as a blade that can penetrate the eyes and the heart. On the Pamir, whose deck is regularly transformed into a sewing workshop, the only drama possible is that of a sail being torn and, when it does, Heinrich Hauser films it from all angles, down, up, right, left, as if he wanted to weave a web of shots around the gash in order to finally capture some of that invisible wind that the ship thought it had tamed and was then overcome by. The lint is not a pathetic shred, on the contrary, it manifests better than the taut sail the air currents according to which the ship is profiled, better than the foam and the wave it presents the immediate trace in the form of violence and emptiness. Then, on what had been seen and what is seen, a transparent veil suddenly spreads, the image deepens with a new dimension, is informed of the elusive power that the hieraticity of the vessel, motionless movement on the moving sea, made one forget. The Pamir becomes a phenomenon continually travelling on the frontier separating the visible from the invisible, working to switch its contradictory energies.

“There, tossed about by the sea, the cabin boy feels as comfortable as if he were standing on a pair of bull's horns. Of course, in winter, you can take your home aloft with you in the form of a pilot's jacket, but in truth the more substantial pilot's jacket is no more the home of the naked body, just as the soul is enmeshed within its tabernacle of flesh and cannot move freely or leave without running the great risk of perishing, so the pilot's jacket is not so much a home as it is merely an additional wrapping or skin around you. You can no more make your pilot's jacket a proper hut than you can fit a shelf or a chest into your body” (H. Melville, Moby Dick). How to film this visual monument so inhospitable to man that is the Pamir? Heinrich Hauser's film thus documents the apprenticeship of a filmmaker who is absolutely aware of his subject and who invents, according to need, the filmic solutions necessary for his figurative project, filming the beauties of the last time, accompanying the Pamir into eternity, treating the journey as a ritual, so that crossing the storm, crossing Cape Horn, will be tantamount to accomplishing and consummating the dark test of disappearance.

First of all, how to present the Pamir? From far out at sea, from very high up on the great cage, Heinrich Hauser finds the locations and angles to cancel out the human point of view and place the film at the level not of an observer but of the ship itself. In the opposite camp to the Pamir, one could have found the captain, the crew, the sea or the land: but no, as the alternating montage that governs the cap-hornier's portrait at the beginning of the film attests, the counter-field is a shot of seagulls in flight; a shot of sky, wind and speed that ends up illuminating the space while at the same time the bird gliding motionless in the frame sums up the visual paradoxes that, throughout the film, make the swift sailing ship the ever-fixed reference point of the image. This non-human point of view affirms the Pamir as the sole subject of the film and justifies the treatment of the sailors as silhouettes, small creatures who populate with difficulty a space that is not made for them, as it subjects them to too much imponderability or too much gravity: in the aerial regime, bodies in suspension, subject to the rig, hanging in clusters on the spars, implicitly protected by a network of reefs and halyards but threatened on all sides by the vacuum; in the terrestrial regime, they parade in procession, one, two, three, six men, to carry the interminable burden of a spare sail, compared to the monstrous mass of torn fabric that must be thrown into the hold in a sort of act against nature. The effects of anonymity and torment that preside over the treatment of the crew as a collective can be seen legitimately in advance: the human body does not constitute the measure of this space, the sailors are figurines embarked on a metaphysical adventure that goes completely beyond them, their acrobatic manoeuvres only trace discreet signs.

Against the backdrop of this essential initiative, Hauser discovers ways to account for the height of the stormy waves (by taking reference points in the rigging), their violence (with scissor flash panoramas, like Godard filming torture in Le petit soldat), he invents ways to pay homage to the gymnastic skills of the sailors (he climbs along with them, imagining the trolley carried in a mirror), to further accentuate the inhuman character of the ship (with flat 180° angles, like Rodčenko and later Vigo and Kaufman filming factory chimneys)... Above all, he learns to cut out his plastic entities in the visual mass presented to him by the veil. If the initial shots described the equipment mast by mast, sail by sail, according to a montage that allowed the identification of the units and the functional logic of their ensemble, Hauser later abandoned the plane of the recognisable and constructed his images according to the relationships of black and white, fullness and emptiness, tension and formlessness, line and surface: not by way of a formal mastery that mocks his motif, but because then the ship finds its full autonomy, an inexhaustible reservoir of visual events whose majesty the cinema will release down to the smallest grey quiver. Hauser thus invents the documentary techniques involved in making an inhuman, impersonal film, which makes The Last Sailers a song with Rilkean resonances, in which the modest and fragile human creature takes on the task of saving that which will outlast itself. In this sense, The Last Sailers manifests an act of documentary faith in its purest state.

If South made by Frank Hurley (in 1917 and 1922) has remained famous, it is undoubtedly because of the human tragedy the film recounts; but also undoubtedly because Frank Hurley, while photographing the Endurance stuck in the ice, was able to record this image that was impossible in principle: the ship in full expedition, very close to the Pole, right on the edge of a world centre, and yet in the reverse field. At the same time the adventure itself and its objectification. Embarking on the Pamir, Hauser evidently cannot catch the sailing ship in the reverse field, at the crucial moment of the passage of Cape Horn, he can only describe the sensitive effects of the ordeal, not its actual realisation. But the film refrained: Hauser invented the backlight as a counter-field. After all that white, after the storm, after the overcoming, Hauser dares to film the black, and the backlight, a twilight triumph, assures us that the Pamir has passed to the other side of the mirror, that it has passed the test of disappearance forever.

In the sixth shot, Hauser had caught the shadow of the sailing ship on the sea: to record the traces of a reflection in the elusive water, to deliver this black aura, to justify its protection, for those who truly trust in it, cinema has no other vocation». (Nicole Brenez, Accès au fantôme, "1895", numéro hors série: “Exotica, l'attraction des lointaines”, 1996, in Le avventure della non fiction, ed. by Adriano Aprà, Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema, Pesaro 1997, pp. 164-168)

Travel Notes [Cinemambiente 1998]

Gute Reisende sind herzlos

Good travelers are heartless

Elias Canetti

From the travelogues of Hale's Tours to reportages on great exploits and exotic lands, from the road movie to the thousands of invented and untold stories of conquered spaces and lost or rediscovered identities, the theme of travel has accompanied the entire history of cinema, in all its genres and areas of production, the very metaphor of the new medium capable of restoring the movement of the world.

The brief itinerary proposed here allows us to observe some areas of the prolific relationship between the camera and the environment constituted by the travel film. These are works and materials that concern different dimensions of travel – some probably permanently disappeared – in which constant, however, is the exercise of looking at a reality, a place, a culture, an “elsewhere” reached through physical movement. Colonial conquest, exploration, scientific discovery, family vacation, as well as ritual and soul-searching, are the main passages of this reconnaissance, which reveals first and foremost the importance of the possibility of creating images, which document but also represent a determining factor shaping travel itself.

The components of violence and cultural imposition of Western voyages of conquest in the first decades of the century are, for example, shown in the work of recovery and reworking of original materials carried out by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, who with the power of images alone manage to construct a lucid discourse on the role of the camera as an expression of a will to appropriation and domination. It is the same colonialist gaze analyzed by Peter Kubelka in his African journey in the 1960s, following a group of whites engaged in a safari.

The reliance on cinema as a possibility to record the real, to bear witness to natural events and human endeavors appears evident in the works of volcanologist Haroun Tazieff, who filmed apocalyptic scenarios and spectacular eruptions, or in the conspicuous documentation left by Alberto Maria De Agostini during his wanderings in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, or again in the images of early mountaineering expeditions to the great peaks, not without political implications in some cases, such as the document on the ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1938, which becomes an example of Nazi propaganda. The exploration of the environment as a human challenge, a ground for confrontation with the force and sometimes the hostility of nature, is still visible in the first filmed documentations of Antarctic expeditions, in which the narrative and spectacular vocation of cinema peeps out even where one would presume total adherence to realistic subject matter.

What becomes immediately clear in this chapter of the history of travel is that there is no truly achieved goal and conquered space, if not properly documented, no expedition and enterprise that can renounce being filmed and thus make its own contribution to the construction of an imaginary made of heroes and great adventures, of immense spaces real and unknown. Immersed in the silence of their innocence, and in the seduction of their genesis – possible in many cases despite difficult environmental conditions and thanks to daring actions – such images enchant today as they did then. The crossing of a last sailing ship filmed by Henrich Hauser, in which neither places of departure nor points of arrival are shown, becomes the emblem of the experience in itself of movement, a hymn to the deepest sense of travel. Of which the deviations from the desired outcomes, the failures, renunciations, tragedies or simply the impossibility of creating the longed-for image (the summit as well as the return) must also be collected. But the fascination with travel to distant and extreme lands can also become an explicit advertising tool, as happened with the African and Asian cruises organized by Citroën between the 1920s and 1930s, in which human enterprise and produced image turn out to be totally inseparable.

Another type of relationship with the environment is that traceable in home movies shot during family vacations: Gustav Deutsch rereads anonymous materials from the 1950s and 1960s, offering an interesting catalog on the amateur gaze in its attempt to capture places – in this case those deputed to tourism – and preserve memories.

Travel as an encounter with “other” worlds and cultures, rapprochement and self-discovery, is the theme finally of some works in which the dialogue with the environment is constructed on the basis of the awareness that movement is not the prerogative of the person holding the camera. Ulrike Koch's documentation of the migration of nomadic Tibetan herders to the great salt lakes of the Himalayan plateau, a tribute to a sacred dimension of travel; Bill Viola's contemplation of natural landscapes and animal presences, Chris Marker's reflections from the “two extreme poles of survival” – Japan and Africa – or even the crossed gaze proposed in another work by Deutsch (who juxtaposes his images of an Austrian in Morocco with those of a Moroccan in Austria), suggest modes of travel based on dialogue, confrontation, meditation: observing the movement of nature and its inhabitants, with respect and hesitation, leads to a movement of consciousness, a production of thought, an activation of memories. The relationship with a place is no longer established through topographical and cultural appropriation, but through an appreciation of differences, the maintenance of a subjectivity and a historical understanding. Travel as discovery and adventure belongs perhaps only more to mythology and nostalgia, just as the very conditions of image production and consumption turn out to be profoundly transformed with respect to the eras evoked here. The cognitive potentialities of travel, and therefore of the images borrowed from it, are then entrusted, rather than to a movement in space guided by a ravenous gaze in search of the pure and the uncontaminated, to an ability to stand in any different place, to let this otherness speak and be absorbed, also tracing its historical motivations and welcoming the dimension of memory that that place can give off in those who try to approach it.