Original subtitles

(silence)

(music plays)

"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'd fallen into a glacier,

traveled down a mountain in a prison 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.

Chatwin: 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.

Herzog". 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 filmmaker.

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.

(music plays)

Herzog". Since a piece of skin was so important for Chatwin,

we traveled 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.

(crowd speaks indistinctly)

(music plays)

We were lucky to meet Karin Eberhard,

the great granddaughter of Hermann Eberhard,

who had found the remains

of the mysterious prehistoric creature.

As children, this was our playground.

We rode in here on horseback.

At that time, it was still wild country,

no controls, no official park.

We went with our horses behind those piles of rock here,

cantering around, which created a hollow rumble.

And the tourists at the entrance bolted.

They were afraid some of the vault was collapsing,

until we were caught.

And they threatened to take the horses away from us.

That would have been the ultimate punishment for us.

Herzog: And Hermann Eberhard?

And Hermann Eberhard? He came here with his cousin.

According to one story,

the three of them walked through here

and in the sand, something caught his eye.

He bent down and pulled it out.

It was a piece of fur.

And this piece of fur was covered with long bristly hair.

And there were little knots of bone on it.

And they had no idea from which creature it came.

They took it with them,

and thought it could come from an animal already extinct.

And, as this is very dry ground, it was well-preserved.

They took it home to the farm, and hung it on a tree.

And it hung there for quite a while.

And whoever came, carved off a piece of it.

"'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."

Herzog". 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 Milward became British consul in Punta Arenas.

He built this phenomenally ugly house for himself.

(music plays)

Chatwin made a pilgrimage to the museum in La Plate in Argentina,

some 3,000 kilometers further to the north.

Here, the big remaining piece of the mylodon's 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 feces,

the size of footballs,

were preserved almost fresh.

Chatwin himself had found some small pieces of excrement

in the few strands of hair of the creature back in the cave.

This is how the animal looked.

It stood almost 10 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 paleontologists,

Richard Leakey,

who, in Kenya, had excavated the skull of a hominid

dating one and a half 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...

an 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, 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- - Just one second here.

It has an inscription on the bottom.

"L am starting for a long journey."

This slightly pot-bellied Victorian traveler.

And that could be Bruce's motto.

He-- His life, in a sense,

is a search for the...

the countries from which these objects originated.

Including the piece of skin?

(cross talking)

And so in a-- in a parody of Jason and the fleece,

Bruce set off for his first book,

to try and find the origin of this fur,

for the kind of, the Golden Fleece, if you like.

It's a kind of a comic version

on which this would be the clothesline

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-- 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-- in great books.

And it 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 the cave where the Mylodon,

the giant sloth skin he finds.

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-- 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-- he embellished what was there to make it even truer.

(music plays)

(harmonizing)

Herzog". 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 Ave-bury in Wiltshire.

From his nearby boarding school in Marlborough,

a young Bruce would ride his bike here all the time.

(harmonizing continues)

Part of this complex is Silbury Hill,

the largest Neolithic structure in the world.

This is where he was somehow centered.

This was his pivot.

His mythical place of origin.

Everything is an echo of this.

(music plays)

(music plays)

(music plays)

So, it's crossing because,

I think-- I think the force is going that way.

Herzog: Can-- can you show us again here?

Do you feel the force? ls it like electric or--

No, it just-- just crosses.

So, if I went this way now,

in theory it will cross again.

See?

Herzog: Show us again how it crosses.

It just-- (laughs) It's just that easy. It just settles down. It just...

- And you can see 'em wavering - Yeah.

So, there I'm fine.

See, 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 the-- I think the force is going that way.

And what forces are they?

They're just possibly magnetic forces that run round the world.

It's... There's lots of them, and Wiltshire is quite prevalent.

They've got quite a lot of lay lines running through Wiltshire.

Possibly why they settled here.

Perhaps our ancestors could feel it,

and that's why they moved here, who knows?

(harmonizing)

Elizabeth: I can son' of visualize him completely here.

You know, and the way he used to come here.

I can see him walking around.

(cuckoo clock sings)

Oh, cuckoo.

Herzog". 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.

Elizabeth: Bruce was a nomad,

but he was always drawn back to this place,

the Black Hills in Wales.

This is a dreaming place.

I mean, these hills...

Herzog: His inner landscape?

His inner landscape, yeah.

Landscape of his soul?

I think so.

Landscape of his soul, yes.

Herzog". But apart from the idyllic landscapes

that gave a feeling of home, of belonging,

Bruce Chatwin was searching for a strangeness.

He always liked my first feature film for this.

In it, a protagonist,

a German World War ll 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.

(music plays)

The quest for strangeness was recognized

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."

Herzog: It was you who wrote that to him.

- Yes. - To him, yes.

(music plays)

Herzog". 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 space craft.

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 a passage for him.

"On the surface of the Earth,

the only features were certain hollows

which would, one day, be waterholes.

There were no animals and no plants.

Yet, clustered round the waterholes,

there were pulpy masses of matter.

Lumps of primordial soup,

soundless, sightless, unbreathing,

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 Man Kangaroo,

dormant as seeds in the desert

that must wait for a wandering shower.

(music plays)

In central Australia, I'm concerned

with something which are called "the Songlines,"

or "the Dreaming Tracks."

The Australian aboriginals had 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, a white fella's understanding of songline,

going from literature and conversations with aboriginal people.

Um... yes, I'm a musician,

and, uh, 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 traveling across a very dry landscape

and needed a way from,

to navigate from-- from A to B.

They didn't use GPSes and-- and what have you.

So, they used mnemonics.

So... a poetry...

a storytelling... that got them from "A" to

- Shakespeare: These look like-- - It's coming apart.

Some notebooks of The Songlines.

Shakespeare: This is his attempt to draw a Songline.

Herzog: Yes, can you take the next page next to it?

And here.

Very, very strange sort of--

A system of bringing knowledge he has here.

Yeah.

In 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 this space--

Shakespeare: It's the whole identity the link that they have with the land

Avery 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.

- Herzog: Yes. - They have to hurry through the tracks.

I think Bruce never quite understood,

and didn't pretend to understand, what a Songline was.

And when I asked him to describe it in sound, he tried,

"Oh, it's a low, rather beautiful 'ah'."

And then he-- 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 altira.

And the altira and what was born from those were the song--

Herzog: Mikey Liddle uses here the term in Arrernte language for "Dreamtime."

That carried the existence of the animal

traveling through to create the landscape.

The animals, the trees, growing in the 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...

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.

Then people take it on now.

I'll know that and they know that.

They have to take it on from there.

I know the rest of that song,

but it's then people's responsibility to do that.

(speaks in Arrernte)

You're coming this way,

and you end up here, that's the one,

like another one going,

and he finish up here somewhere.

He's gone...

and another one gone.

He's not going too far, no.

He's going halfway, halfway, halfway.

He's gone.

He's finished.

And another one, another family coming in.

And that's it.

Nothing.

Sometimes you see that plane going.

Plane going like a big swing, going right along.

No.

He should go half, half, half.

Herzog: And does a plane leave a Songline in the sky?

No.

When he flies, he's taken right through overseas somewhere.

Our Songlines are our way

of contributing to the health of the planet...

- Herzog: In which way? - When our old people sing,

they reinvigorate sites,

...and it invigorates them at the same time.

Our old people had a really, really close connection.

We still do, with country.

And...

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 gonna happen,

I don't know what that is, but I think that our Songlines,

I guess, kind of...

hold-- hold the Earth together in a-- in a mysterious way.

Herzog: We are here in the Strehlow Centre,

named after the eminent scholar, Theodore 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,

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 T.G.H. Strehlow had...

had... had some perceptions

that this, the knowledge, would die out.

Now there's no doubt that some elements of aboriginal culture

have-- have... eroded.

But we are still here.

We are still singing many of these songs.

We're still performing ceremonies every year.

We still have a really deep connection to country and--

But they're not-- 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.

This documents 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 burnt?

Look, I don't think so.

Herzog". Theodore Strehlow looks here like an outdoorsman,

but growing up 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, as Chatwin 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, texts.

I have often wondered if he was a kind of precursor of the internet.

He-- 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.

And... and then so it was a real mystery to me or why they--

Was it more powerful than Wagner and--

Yeah! When you--

You know, men would be screaming the songs out.

And, you know, they--

And it would be like a competition between 10 football teams, you know?

And-- 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 and, you know, like...

So, yeah. No, and it would all be done in darkness with stars.

(softly singing)

Herzog". Peter Bartlett introduced us to his Warlpiri mentor,

Robin Granites.

(softly speaking in Warlpiri)

(in English) The tunes-- the tunes are right,

but the wording that--

- They have a lot of songs, right? - Yeah.

Right? But they don't have decent words.

Herzog: Are the lyrics of the Songlines eroding?

Or should we rather suspect

that he does not want to reveal everything to our camera?

Bartlett: Well, what about that one I used to sing?

Maybe it's the wrong one for you?

That... (speaks Warlpiri) one?

(singing in Warlpiri)

(both speak Warlpiri)

(singing in Warlpiri)

(singing continues)

Herzog". This here is a mission station in Hermannsburg.

Bruce was searching here for something profound,

a whole world embedded in ancient aboriginal songs.

(people singing in foreign language)

It does not feel right to me

how the missionaries transformed the culture of song

into Lutheran piety.

(singing in foreign language)

The furnishings date back to Theodore's father,

Carl Strehlow, the Lutheran pastor.

Everything here seems to be frozen in time.

(singing continues)

(music plays)

I was always in search of this elusive manuscript,

which he had said he'd written.

He'd spent, himself, seven years writing, The Nomadic Alternative.

Which was the key of his theory about nomadism, about walking about.

How walking cures you, which you must've talked with him about.

And the library allowed us to touch it,

to read from it, look into it.

...l can show it.

It's for real.

It is...

- This is called-- - You had searched for it.

I had 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 world view,

that with nomadic existence,

with the demise of nomadic life...

city life, sedentary life would come in, in place.

Meaning, huge amount of human beings,

technology,

all of which is now probably working

at the distraction of the human race.

And he was quite sure that...

humanity was fragile,

that we had... maybe 100,000,

or 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 I-- 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,

traveled 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.

Ten thousand 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?

(harmonizing music)

The 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.

(harmonizing continues)

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 favorites.

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 maybe 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.

(harmonizing)

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 Wodaabe 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 civilization.

I'm reading now an excerpt of Chatwin's In Patagonia

that he did not read in his recording.

"Bernal Dias relates how,

on seeing the jeweled cities of Mexico,

the Conquistadores 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.

ls the ship not tossed by raging waves?

Does a storm whip it along?

Do the ropes and the rigging sing a siren's song in the wind?

Are these ice flows 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?

(music plays)

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.

(speaking indistinctly)

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, this distinct strata.

(marching 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 honor."

(wood creeks)

Scores of Yagans, Selk'nams, Kawéscar,

and other indigenous groups, were buried in this tribal cemetery.

(music plays)

This end of a civilization 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,

so, to the top of the table.

And everybody laughed a lot.

And that was-- It was nice.

It was just so sad that he didn't live.

You know, because he-- 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.

Herzog: Do you hear his voice still?

Oh, I can, yes. I can if you say that, I can hear it.

Mmm, in my head.

- Yeah, I can. - His laughter?

- Hmm? - His laughter?

Oh, yeah. Laughter, yeah.

- His shrieks. - Shrieks, yeah.

I was gonna say shrieks. Exactly, yeah.

He... he loved-- he loved telling jokes.

And he loved telling adventures and so on.

- His storytelling-- - I mean, 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.

He was a talker.

I mean, he was interested in characters

and in stories and in...

and in mimicry and in-- in...

As you say, these shrieks were...

One wanted to bottle them in a way,

because they were both painful and exciting and-- and encouraging.

They were...

They were... the essence of something.

Yes I remember his voice and everything when-- 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-- we met at breakfast,

he would continue, I would continue.

Of course, it was hard to squeeze in a story

because he was non-stop and his way to imitate voices

was-- is still in my ear.

I remember one story he told about

the interior of Australia, 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 apologies and asks,

"Can we-- 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,

"Four Toyota pickup 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 eyes

glowing out of his 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,

"Do you mean I am going to bash in your head

with a baseball bat or do I shoot you?"

And he said, "Maybe some-- some sort of... medicine or so."

And I said, "Why don't you talk to Elizabeth?"

"No, I cannot talk about this. She's so Catholic."

And...

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 10 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 gotta be on the road again. I've gotta be on the road again."

And he looked at his legs, they were only spindles,

and he says, "But my rucksack is too heavy."

And I said, "Bruce, I can carry a 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?

(clears throat)

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 steam boat 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 free climber of his time,

uses no safety devices at all.

He refused everything.

No rope, no carabines, nothing.

(birds chirp)

It's cloudy as always, you know that there for me.

But you know it's...

For me, it's incredible to stay here with you. You know, it's a real pleasure.

And I living here since when you make the movie in the 90's--

Yes, but-- but I'm not the protagonist.

- You're not? Okay. - No, no, no.

Protagonist is Bruce Chatwin, this rucksack.

- Okay, yeah. No, but, yeah. - That's his rucksack.

(wind howls)

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 the--

our reserve rescue team did not fly first.

The helicopter dropped us and then disappeared.

And then an incredible hit, a storm hit us.

In-- in a minute my--

We got in and my mustache was ice,

and it was 20 degrees below zero.

It may be a 200 kilometer storm.

- Well, we dug a hole into the ice. - Mm-hmm.

Just like a barrel of wine,

and crawled in and sat there.

And we were 55 hours,

two days, two nights and a half a day,

something like that.

And it was storm, storm and white out.

I could not see you at this distance anymore.

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-- it's not that I-- I'm not the protagonist--

- No, I know, but-- - Bruce Chatwin--

You told me something about your rucksack in that moment. What happened?

I sat on the rucksack for-- for all this time,

-and it-- it sheltered me from-- - Yeah, yes.

Because you lose a lot of temperature when you sit...

- On ice. -...on ice, yeah.

But people say, "It saved your life."

No, that's nonsense because the two others were just sitting on the ice as well,

-and they-- they did not die. - Yeah.

And then they tried to come towards us,

-and they-- - 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 traveled on foot from Munich to Paris

as a pilgrimage to save my mentor,

Lotte Eisner, from dying.

My dairies 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."

(water falls)

(speaking indistinctly)

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, no, no, no! Not David Bowie.

I have to do it," And I immediately went into it.

And you actually discovered,

I see it for the first time here,

you discovered this, my screenplay, here.

Shakespeare: This is your screenplay with Bruce's annotations all over it.

Which he never sent to me.

Never did. They've never sent it to me.

Here, you can see there's--

Even the names have annotations.

Then, for example, here.

It's full of annotations.

Shakespeare: Do you think they-- Would they have helped?

I do not know.

I have not read it. I--

It's the first time I'm holding this in my life.

First time I have his annotations to my screenplay.

[Shakespeare] I'm gonna 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'm 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 hammockers

and one shadow bearer."

I mean, they had these huge umbrellas.

The kings had them carry it,

and they would wobble it 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 stunt man.

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!

Herzog: 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! Stay back!

His wife will strangle him now. Stay back.

Herzog". 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.

I think he was in awe.

He was awestruck

of raw power of emotion

and vileness

and... a character

that... only exists in-- in novels.

And, of course, he was absolutely delighted

that I engaged a real king.

The King of Nsein,

with his entire 450 people entourage,

his sedan bearers and his shadow bearers,

and they would drum and shake in with him

in this wonderful--

And Bruce said, "I-- That's what I had hoped to see once in my life."

I said, "You made it, and it's gonna be in the film.

This is gonna be in the film."

(tribal music plays)

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...

(gun shots)

(tribal music plays)

He was somehow moving his head left, right and so,

and looked at him and,

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-- 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 a 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 cozy.

He wanted to seduce."

I do not care whether somebody

is bisexual or homosexual or whatever.

It's completely of no consequence for me.

Bruce is Bruce.

Herzog: 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 didn't-- I really didn't care.

Then he sometimes, he brought them to-- for the weekend

or something like that, and they were charming.

So, uh...

I wouldn't dream of divorcing him.

I mean, there was no question about that.

(music plays)

Herzog". 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.

(music plays)

I remember this place.

We used to sit here, and look out at the garden.

So this was a, you know,

a very happy place to come to.

It's very sad that Bruce isn't here.

Herzog: This is, apparently, the very last lines he ever wrote.

"Christ wore a seamless robe."

-"Christ wore a seamless robe." -"A seamless robe."

- End of story. - End of the story.

Never anything ever written again.

I mean, he dictated to Elizabeth,

but that's the last, last, last piece of handwriting we have.

O Kay-

The book is closed.

(music plays)

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... 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-- 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 looked-- was looking for a right way to live,

Chatwin was looking for a right way to die.

And-- and I think something about this scene,

spoke to him in that-- in that way.

Otherwise he wouldn't have ended the book like that.

Herzog: 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 first, 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?' Marian 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...

(birds chirp)

(music plays)

(harmonizing)

(music continues)

(music fades)