Martje is the mother of my first son, Rudolph Amos Achmed. When we sailed into New York, we passed the Statue of Liberty, neither of us interested in the view we were engrossed in a game of shuffleboard on deck. Martje was on her way to begin a literature degree in Wisconsin. After we had reached the Irish Sea, it stormed for a week, and the dining room, for six hundred passengers, was empty. It was on board this ship that I met my first wife, Martje. I took passage on the Bremen, where, a few years earlier, Siegfried and Roy had worked as stewards, diverting the passengers with magic tricks.
Dr steward duquesne university free#
Pittsburgh was the Steel City, and I had worked in a steel factory myself.Īround the same time, I won ten thousand marks in a competition, for the screenplay for “Signs of Life,” and a free Atlantic crossing. I chose Pittsburgh because I had the sentimental notion that I wouldn’t be tied up with academic nonsense I’d be in a city with real, down-to-earth people. I applied to Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, which had cameras and a film studio. Because I knew it would be hopeless to make a feature right away, I accepted a scholarship to go to the United States. What seemed to me a natural approach became a method. In my paper, I declared, even if it was illogical, that the Privilegium was a true account. Truth, like history and memory, is not a fixed star but a search, an approximation.
Art draws on their power, as they have a normative force, but making purely factual films has never interested me. It was an early instance of fake news, and it inspired in me an obsession with questions of factuality, reality, and truth. Despite being clearly fraudulent, the documents were ultimately accepted by the Holy Roman Emperor, confirming the Habsburgs’ claim to Austria. He produced a set of five clumsy documents, in the guise of royal charters, with a supplement purportedly issued by Julius Caesar.
Dr steward duquesne university install#
This was a flagrant forgery, from 1358 or 1359, conceived by Rudolf IV, a scion of the Habsburgs, who wanted to define his family’s territory and install them as one of the powers of Europe. For a class on medieval history, I wrote a paper on the Privilegium maius. I gave his last name to the main character in my first film, “Signs of Life.” I called another film “Stroszek.”īut some of my studies I found utterly absorbing. In jest, he asked me what I would do for him in return, and I promised that I would make him immortal. I remember asking a fellow-student to write a term paper for me, which he did quite easily. In my case, the bundle seemed to be differently composed. Intelligence is always a bundle of qualities: logical thought, articulacy, originality, memory, musicality, sensitivity, speed of association, and so on. There is such a thing as academic intelligence, and I didn’t have it. I had gone to a distinguished school in Munich, where I had few friends, and which I hated so passionately that I imagined setting it on fire. By the time I was twenty-one, I had made two short films and was dead set on making a feature.
0 kommentar(er)
