Island of Demons (20 page)

“It's wonderful, Walter. Is it really for me?” I was entranced. I would hang it across from the bed. It would be the first thing I saw every morning. He barked an expectorant laugh rather like one of the monkeys.

“
For
? Yes, in one sense. Dedicated to, inspired by … ‘for' like that. But it is already sold, I'm afraid. It goes to mend the car. I have to go to the big garage in Denpasar. Nothing works on that car. No steering, no horn. Now, the brokes are break and I am broken.”

I thought about that. “You mean the brakes are broken and you are broke?”

He laughed and slapped me in comradely fashion. “Possibly.”

“How are you getting there?”

He looked at me as if I was mad. “Driving of course. Do you want a lift?”

“Er … no thank you.”

He paused and considered, lip-puckering. “Anyway. If I gave you one of mine, you would give me one of yours and then I would have to say I liked it.” He threw his arms apart and shrugged. “Where would it all end?” Already he was walking away.

7

The filmmakers came with the rains and three grey truckloads of equipment. They even brought their own Javanese cook. Whenever I think of that time, I see splashing mud and money. In overall charge, as the source of the funding, was Baron Viktor von Plessen, adventurer, hunter, painter, cineast – owner of an ancestral estate in Holstein and a pencil moustache. Everything apart from the moustache was big and he stood habitually in the pose of eighteenth-century swagger portraits with one leg thrust out and hands in his pockets. A few years back he had lived in Bali and, curiously, it was an interest in the birds of Nusa Penida that had brought him and Walter together. Once they had billed and cooed over their ornithological collection, argued pigeon classification and fallen out over the calls of the native Balinese duck, they realised that they both knew Murnau, Walter's old friend from the UFA studios in Berlin and, of course, Walter's earlier film,
Goona-Goona
.

By some strange irony, von Plessen, fresh from a European visit, was the only one of us that had actually seen it. Walter had worked with Andre Roosevelt, a vast, shuffling wreck of a man who somehow had, with a camera, the empathy that Walter had with musical instruments. The actual shooting had to be fitted into the ever-shorter periods of lucidity when Roosevelt was not incapacitated either by drunkenness or resultant hangover and it glorified in the standard bare-breasted charms of Balinese womanhood and sexual allure. The story was about the chemically enhanced love between a handsome prince and a servant girl and it had to be stringently re-edited to meet American censorship laws. The resulting version, dehydrated and flavourless, was appropriately dubbed
Love Powder
. Walter had adored the whole process, shamelessly prancing around the set with a megaphone, directing, changing the script, rehearsing the actors until the real director, Armand Denis, threatened to leave in a huff. But ultimately, there was little they could do since Walter was the only one who could communicate with the performers. I would see it in the Italian theatre in Denpasar later that year and it would go on to be a worldwide hit, not least in the Indies pavilion at the Paris World Fair of 1931.
Goona-goona
became, briefly, a term for illicit sex amongst the glitterati of New York and, of the foreigners I subsequently met in Bali, I think at least half had been first attracted to the place by that film. All this may well not have been poor Walter's fault. He certainly made no money out of it. Much of the original footage was lost in a fire (alcohol-fuelled?) during processing in Surabaya and clumsily re-shot in a great rush without him.

Film people are loud, opinionated and eat and drink all the time, a little like armies. The process of the making
of Island of Demons
, barely three months in all, seems now like a protracted barroom brawl. Many of the duties were fluid and discharged by the ubiquitous and darkly sardonic Dr Dahlsheim. Having worked principally in Africa, he was convinced that every river must conceal a hundred forms of sudden death, that the soil must boil with lethal parasites that sought only to bore through the soles of his feet to destroy him and that every form of kindness or beauty was a snare masking savagery and hostility. In theory, there was a director, producer, cameraman, soundman, scriptman; then all the assistants: director, producer, cameraman, etc. doubled up over again. I asked Walter what an assistant producer did. “Usually sleeps with the producer,” he replied cheerily. They were all crammed into the rain-soaked house in Campuhan, sitting endlessly hunched over the forest giant table that swarmed with papers, photographs, bottles and ashtrays, all waving fists and shouting to get their way or sulking because they hadn't. Oddly, Walter told me this insensitivity to noise was a common feature of technicians who had learned their trade in the “silent” movies.

The film was very much Walter's child and dealt with the primordial battle of good versus evil. Beautiful Balinese farmers dwell beatifically in a sunlit natural paradise of hard work but plenty. But their happiness enrages an embittered old witch who jealously uses her magic to create an epidemic bringing death and misery. Only complex public ceremonies and the ancient wisdom of the priests can cleanse the island and bring an end – possibly, it is intimated, only temporary – to evil and a return to the goodness of the life in harmony with nature that is Man's true goal and right. The actors, of course, were not actors at all but ordinary Balinese who had garnered a little acting experience from their own ritual drama at the village level. The old witch was a widow from just down the road who was not considered immune from such allegations in real life and had what Walter termed a “good” face, i.e. one full of character, framed in wild, grey hair and as scored with ruts and ravines as a relief map of the island. The young lovers, Wayan and Sari, retired dancers, on whose beautiful shoulders all this hung, exuded a breathtaking purity that somehow redeemed the whole of flawed humanity, provoking awe rather than lust. The formal movements of the eyes are an important element of Balinese dance, at least as central as those of the feet, and Walter was able to use their schooled control of them to great effect in the film. All this to the new thing of a soundtrack incorporating not just the incidental music of the gifted Wolfgang Zeller but Balinese
gamelan
and the genuine sounds of redeeming nature in the Indies – the wind in the bamboo, running water, etc. The world was briefly in a period that was language-poor, where barking speech had been displaced by music and gesture. We had no inkling of the deluge of words that was shortly to knock us all off our feet.
Island of Demons
would be marketed in Germany with a poster of a bare-breasted, grinning woman with tropic fruit plonked on her head.

Much of the shooting took place at night, using the new high speed films that had just come on the market and stretching them to their limit. Hans Scheib puffed endlessly on cheroots, despite the lethal inflammability of film in those days, and coaxed magic out his lenses and apertures while swearing relentlessly in Bavarian dialect. Walter organised flickering oil lamps and torches, smoke that lay around the feet of the actors and – of course – elaborate
Nosferatu
shadows to add drama and foreboding. The rain, at this stage, was only intermittent so rarely interrupted the schedule but hauling equipment through the muddy roads was a nightmare. “Like a re-enactment of the Somme offensive,” puffed von Plessen, cinematographically punctuating out heat and palm trees to see only the desired muck and water that he could use in such a scene. “We should have armed guards,” opined Dahlsheim, “like in Africa.” Transport was the responsibility of a big, raw-boned young man with a mop of thick blond hair and endless good-nature. It was at least a week into the shooting before I realised that this was Conrad, Walter's young cousin – come, confusingly, with the crew from Java and found employment out of such almost-nepotism – for I heard them call each other Walja and Kosja and knew that Russian diminutives of affection were obligatory in that family.

The highpoint of the film and the big set piece of the whole shooting schedule was the magnificent
kecak
dance. It came two months in, when everyone was already exhausted and homesick for potatoes and cabbage, when camera shutters had begun to stick, mould to sprout in camera gates and when no word had yet come back from Java confirming the integrity, or even arrival, of shot footage, so that Walter and Viktor were prone to squabble over the enormous unpaid bill at Campuhan that had exhausted Walter's always limited liquidity. The two had much the same lack of respect for the processes of normal accountancy. There was crazy talk of Walter's taking time off from the film to paint another historical picture for Stutterheim just to keep the crew fed and watered. They were all a little mad by now and I really did not know what I was doing struggling off with them, one late afternoon, into the fat, hot rain towards the village of Bedulu where the crucial scene was to be shot. It was probably the romance of the silver screen that had seduced me, though, as it turned out, there were other seductions enough.

The Overland Whippet had previously belonged to von Plessen, made over to Walter in exchange for two of his paintings, and he now resumed unspoken ownership, uncontested by Walter since he also paid for all very necessary repairs and a new set of tyres. Von Plessen and Conrad, at the wheel, sat at the front in steaming raincoats, Walter and I behind, the light car skittering across the slick surface as the trucks grumbled up behind. All went well till we were about three miles from our goal. At the base of a steep incline, torrential rain had washed the light surface dressing off the rock base of the road and coagulated into a thick paste in which the tyres would not grip. Planks, vegetation torn from the roadside and flung under the spinning wheels, brute manpower, all to no avail, they all – naturally – opted to stand in the rain and squabble. Von Plessen raged and stamped, made as if to lay about him with his directorial megaphone, was offered defiance by the rest and caved in.

“Walter, this is crazy. We can't work in this.” He was shouting to be heard above the drumming of water on the canvas of the trucks.

“Viktor. I assure you. The rain will stop soon. We must go on. This is the only night we can do this for the next two weeks.”

“How do you know? You can't tell the weather. No one can.”

Walter smiled. “It's not just a matter of weather. There are good days and bad days, the phases of the moon, the intermeshing of the different Balinese calendars. I consulted a priest.”

Von Plessen stepped back, genuinely astonished. “Our filming schedule is being decided by a fucking priest?”

“We must keep moving at all costs,” opined Dahlsheim, nervously. “To stay here longer is to invite attack from the natives. I am sure I saw movement in those bushes.”

Walter turned and shouted to Conrad in Russian and precluded further argument by seizing a camera tripod and splashing off on foot. Conrad, grinned and reached back to grab the main camera body from the floor of a truck and raced after. A cameraman will sooner let you lay hands on his wife than his equipment so Scheib was soon off in hot pursuit with the reserve film stock in his arms, uttering
Scheissing-great
Bavarian
Arschloching-oaths
, certain words coming through loud and clear like the taste of venison in curry. To a film crew, the main camera is as the battle standard to a Roman legion, so they followed too. An exhausting hour later, we were setting up with hands trembling from fatigue as the rain died off into ethereal and photogenic steam. Bamboo platforms had been set up to allow more dramatic angles. With only two cameras, they would have to be rushed from location to location during the performance and edited into coherence later.

The dance was to be performed and filmed in the space before the old temple and was very much Walter's big scene. For weeks he had been coming here alone or in the company of Katharane Mershon, a big-boned modernist dancer from Sanur. There were two versions of the full-lipped life she led with her sparrowlike husband Jack and their reasons for living there. The first had it that they were good, simple folk, moved by the plight of the inhabitants of heat-soaked Sanur into establishing a free clinic where locals might be treated for the many minor ailments to which the climate there disposed them. The other had it that they had there adopted a beautiful and pliant Balinese youth whom they serially and jointly debauched with almost forensic deliberation, paying his mother a dollar a month for the privilege. Probably both were true.

Walter was crouching down with his arm around a spectacularly muscled, loinclothed man in his early thirties who was leaning affectionately against him. My jaw dropped. Behind crowded a whole army of pared athletes all naked but for a little strip of the Javanese
batik
cloth. Walter turned to me. “My friend Limbak,” he introduced loudly in Malay and glowed with paternal pride. Balinese theatre uses the technique of a narrator addressing low characters who are there just to provide someone to be talked to. This, I foresaw, was to be my part. “The greatest
baris
dancer on the island.” Limbak blushed. I knew the
baris
, a demanding military dance that came in a hundred different variants. In Sanur, it was said, they had a form where the men dressed up with glasses, stuck their teeth out and imitated Chinese; elsewhere women imitated men. “But we've moved him on a notch or two. Wait till you see.”

Von Plessen was hovering, rudely overshadowing, nervously puffing. “Christ, Walter. All these people. At the rehearsal we had a dozen. I thought you hated Wagner. Next thing you'll be using fucking dwarves with tuned anvils. Wait, of course.” He clapped his hand nastily to his forehead. “That's the iron
gamelan
of the Bali Aga you were telling us all about at such length the other day.” Even more nastily. “How much is this costing us? Can't we cut it down?” Walter ignored him.