Gavin Leech

The world was constantly speaking to Ancient Man

The world was constantly speaking to Ancient Man

You make it sound as if the Statue was somehow inferior to the thing itself. I do not see that that is the case at all. I would argue that the Statue is superior to the thing itself, the Statue being perfect, eternal and not subject to decay

In conclusion, the search for lists was a most exciting experience not so much for what we managed to include in this volume as for all those things that had to be left out. What I mean to say, in other words, is that this is a book that cannot but end with an etcetera.

P1. That A is the case provides evidence E for B’s being the case if and only if the n

P1. That A is the case provides evidence E for B’s being the case if and only if the number of times in which we have observed A, and then have observed B, is greater than the number of times in which we have observed that A was not followed by B.

P2. The strength of E is proportional to the ratio among the number of times in which we have observed A, and then have observed B, and the number of times in which we have observed that A was not followed by B.

P3. The existence of testimony of type K (henceforth K-testimony) to the effect that B was not the case provides evidence ET for the proposition that B was not the case only if the number of times in which we have received K-testimony for a proposition, and then have observed that the proposition was true, is greater than the number of times in which we have received K-testimony for a proposition and then have observed that the proposition was not true (instantiation, P1).

P4. The strength of ET is proportional to the ratio among the number of times in which we have received K-testimony for a proposition and then have observed that the proposition was true and the number of times in which we have received K-testimony for a proposition and then have observed that the proposition was not true (instantiation, P2).

P5. Whenever one’s global evidence is constituted by E1 and E2, and E1 is evidence in favor of a given p, and E2 is evidence for non-p, it is rational to believe that p only if E1 is stronger than E2, it is rational to disbelieve that p only if E2 is stronger than E1, and it is rational to withhold belief as to whether p only if the strength of E1 is the same as the strength of E2.

P6. There is K-testimony to the occurrence of a miracle M.

P7. There is a law of nature L – say that every A is followed by B – and the K-testimony is to the effect that A was not followed by B (DEF–m).

P8. It is rational to accept that M occurred (assumption for reductio).

P9. That A was the case provides evidence E* for the proposition that B was the case, which is weaker than the evidence ET, provided by the K-testimony, for the proposition that B was not the case.

P10. If it is rational to accept that M occurred, then that A was the case provides evidence E* for the proposition that B was the case, which is weaker than the evidence ET, provided by the K-testimony, for the proposition that B was not the case (instantiation, P8, P9).

P11. L has been established by a “firm and unalterable experience” of many instances of A’s that were followed by many instances of B’s without exception (DEF-1).

P12. That A was the case provides the strongest possible evidence E* for the proposition that B was the case (instantiation, P2, P11).

P13. ET is stronger than the strongest possible evidence E* (conjunction P9, P12).

C1. It is not the case that ET is stronger than E*.

C2. It is not rational to accept that M occurred (modus tollens, P10, C1).

people know too much anyway. My publications and film releases render me vulnerable enough: so many breaches in a fortification that stands unprotected anyway.

most of the time I don’t even notice there are abysses to either side of me

To this day, I couldn’t tell you what color my eyes are. Introspection, navel-gazing, is not my thing

it is often assumed that I must be obsessional. No, I’m not. Nor is it true that I had got enough money together to embark on another film. In fact, I risked all the money I had in the world to get the thing off the ground. After a very short time, I was so reduced that I was living in a converted chicken coop with a papier-mâché ceiling just a little higher than the top of my head


All these [media] inventions sound well and good and don't bother me. They don’t bother me because I know who I am. Or, rather, there are areas where memory forms itself, becomes autonomous, acquires new guises, spreads over the sleepwalker like a gentle veil... Ten days after the incident in the vacuum chamber, I received a summons from the immigration authorities. I was to present myself immediately and bring my passport. I knew what that meant. Because I had violated the conditions of my visa, I was about to be deported not just over the nearest border but all the way to Germany. In Pittsburgh, I quickly bought a Spanish dictionary and drove off

I will always be grateful to America for [Marshall Plan aid]. The packages contained, among other things, corn flour, which we were unfamiliar with and which was therefore suspicious to us. My mother got us to try it by telling us the reason the flour was so yellow was that it contained egg yolks, so it was especially nutritious. From then on, we ate it enthusiastically...
stripped the wallpaper off the ruined walls. Then his mother would boil the paper because there were nutrients in the glue... in all my childhood I never once slept on a flat surface... mother was unable to produce enough food for us. We ate salad from dandelion leaves; my mother made syrups from ribwort and fresh pine shoots; the former was more a house remedy for coughs and colds, and the latter stood in for sugar. Once a week, there was a longish loaf of bread from the village baker purchased with our ration coupons. With the point of a knife, our mother scratched a mark in it for each day, Monday to Sunday, allowing about a slice of bread for each of us... in one violent quarrel—the subject, as I recall, was the care of our pet hamster—I was so beside myself with fury, I laid into my brother with a knife. I struck him once in the wrist as he tried to fend me off and once in the upper thigh. In no time, the room was awash with blood. I was deeply shaken at my own behavior.

...a magnificent time, especially as there were hardly any fathers anywhere in the village, so everything was in the best sense anarchic. I was certainly delighted that we didn’t have a drill-sergeant type in the house telling us what to do. We found out for ourselves without being told...
All my friends who grew up in Munich remember those early postwar years with enchantment. They had the best settings to play in. Bands of kids ruled the roost, lording it over the bombed-out streets and blocks. They collected bits of metal and sold it to scrap dealers. They turned up weapons, pistols, and hand grenades. Once they found a corpse dangling from the beams of a ruin. They grew up early and fast, and they loved... the local priest screamed at us for being godless and slapped my older brother in the face. We might have been six or seven at the time

...we would rig up a trip wire for Krampus

We bought the cheapest plonk we could find, a red wine fortified with vermouth. Reeling, I barely made it back to my father’s apartment, who put me to bed and brought me a bucket to be sick in. I puked all night, and my father was incredibly proud that he had a son who behaved like a proper frat boy. The fact that I wasn’t yet twelve put the icing on it for him

[Working on a fishing boat aged 16]: Above me was the orb of the cosmos, stars that I felt I could reach up and grab; everything was rocking me in an infinite cradle. And below me, lit up brightly by the carbide lamp, was the depth of the ocean, as though the dome of the firmament formed a sphere with it. Instead of stars, there were lots of flashing silvery fish. Bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around, a speechless silence, I found myself in a stunned surprise. I was certain that there and then I knew all there was to know. My fate had been revealed to me. And I knew that after one such night, it would be impossible for me to ever get any older

I was seventeen. I had followed my then girlfriend to England, where I acquired a part share in a brick terraced house in a working-class area near Elizabeth Street in Manchester with four Nigerians, three grown-ups and a small child

I made my first telephone call when I was seventeen... I, though, got to witness and experience, even though I was no part of an agricultural civilization, how fields were mown by hand with scythes, how the grass was turned, how hay wains drawn by horses were loaded up with great two-tined hay forks, and the hay brought into the barns. There were lads who worked like serfs in medieval times. Then, for the first time, I saw a machine—still drawn by a horse—that turned and tossed the hay up in the air with two horizontal forks... there has never been such a cluster of radical changes in human history, and I can hardly imagine that future generations will experience such density of change in a single human lifespan.

My greatest good fortune, though, wasn’t that as an eighteen-year-old I had survived such an illness but that I hadn’t managed to make it across the Congolese frontier

I didn’t love pain; it was just something that was there in my frame of reference—the way I expected the world to be.

Dietrich, my father, lived with the fantasy of composing a vast work encompassing many intellectual disciplines. Of this, he never wrote a line. This work was his pretext for never working and earning money. In a way, he was principled

fleas, thousands of them, which I bore uncomplainingly so as not to embarrass my hosts

In cases where the drivers were so drunk that every yard they travelled could be fatal to themselves and others, I would demand the keys, but that didn’t often get results. So I reached in through the open window and snatched them. Some of the drivers would try to sock me as I reached in. One man bit me in the arm. Another tore out a hank of my hair

[Going to college at] Pittsburgh turned out to have been a bad idea... after a week, I knew that I couldn’t stay... Later, for other reasons, I came to love and respect the city.

I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

I dream maybe once a year, then always banally, that I had a sandwich for lunch, for instance... I feel bad that I didn’t dream, and maybe that’s why I compensate by making films.

I write my screenplays once I can see the entire film in front of me, and I’ve rarely taken more than a week to complete one

there was one soldier standing guard. I shouted that he was to fire a shot in the air, but he was frozen with panic. I had to tear his rifle from him and fire it myself. Frightened, those pushing into the tunnel withdrew, and only then did four or five unconscious women slip to the ground.


At the dress rehearsal of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Palermo, there was a bomb threat, and the theater had to be vacated. (This time, it wasn’t my doing.)

To this day, I couldn’t tell you what color my eyes are. Introspection, navel-gazing, is not my thing

I’m a slow reader because I often depart from the text in front of me to picture scenes and situations and only then return to the words

I live in Los Angeles. Lena and I had to decide where we would live in the United States, and the answer was clear right away—in the city with the most substance. LA is associated with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but it’s in LA that the internet was born, and all the big painters are no longer in New York but here, same with the writers, the musicians, the mathematicians. The number of Mexicans has greatly enlivened writing and music. Electric cars are being designed here; reusable rockets are built on the southern outskirts of the city. The mission control center for a number of space enterprises is just north of Los Angeles in Pasadena. A lot of banal phenomena are from here as well: aerobic studios, inline skating, weird sects. I could go on.

My voice has found a great community of fans, which combined with my view of life asks to be imitated. I am a grateful victim of such satirists.


I want to make a film with Mike Tyson about the early Frankish kings... I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under fourteen minutes... had an unfinanceable project on the conquest of Mexico seen from the point of view of the Aztecs, and for that, I had studied the basics of classical Nahuatl



[Before directing his first opera] I went to see a production at La Scala in Milan, the first I had ever been to; I had no idea what operas were supposed to look like... while I may be an opera director, I can’t read music


Cinema verité was an idea from the 1960s; its representatives nowadays I call the “bookkeepers of the truth.” That got me furious attacks. My answer was “Happy New Year, losers!"

the Rogue Film School, a countermethod, a guerrilla school or hedge school where the only two things I actually teach are the forging of documents and the cracking of Yale locks


the Whitney museum in New York. This was a spatial installation with several projections of prints by Hercules Seghers with music by Ernst Reijseger, who has collaborated with me on many recent films. One of the Museum’s curators called me to ask about possibly contributing to the upcoming Biennal, but I refused right away, because I have problems with contemporary art. “Why?” the curator asked me. I referred broadly to the art market and its manipulations and its preference for conceptual art over actual exhibits, but the curator refused to be shaken off so easily. Would I not be interested as an artist? I said that I didn’t think of myself as an artist and that this term was better applied to pop singers and circus performers. If I wasn’t an artist, then what was I? I said I was a soldier and hung up

One day when I was going up the stairs on my way home from school, I heard a commotion from inside. I unlocked the door of the apartment, and the first thing that met my eyes was Hermine, eighteen, a stout country girl from Lower Bavaria. She was chasing after a young man I’d never seen before, smacking him with a wooden tray. The man was yelling shrilly. He had reached under her skirt. It was Klaus Kinski... Good-hearted as she was, Clara Rieth had taken Kinski in off the street, where he was pleased to style himself as a starving artist. Already at that time, Kinski had acquired a reputation as an unusual performer of various small roles in different theaters. He didn’t make much money, but it must be said that he also loved the part of the misunderstood starving genius. Not far from us, he had squatted in an empty attic in an old apartment house and frightened away the legitimate owner, who wanted to throw him out. Instead of furniture, he had scattered dry leaves throughout this apartment until eventually they were knee-deep. He slept in them. Like my father, he never wore clothes... As an opponent of all forms of civilization, he also disdained silverware

Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, who for a long time was my editor... Beate thought all my films were so bad that she refused to go to any of the premieres, including Aguirre’s.

would have far preferred a religion like Islam, where the priestly caste plays a lesser role, because it leaves the human being alone with God with no mediation... What I wanted was a more radical form of Christianity, so I joined a group my age that my family called the association of saints... Had I lived in the fourth century, I’m sure I would have favored the Arian heresy... I would see the church father Augustine as the heretic sooner than Pelagius... there was something in me that the Catholics call certainty of salvation