017

Drawing (17) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Our green garden gate GG in Achim in the 1950s, thrown at night into the ditch at the bottom of the embankment on which our house stood by yobs. Twice a day, the Flying Roland, a fast train, would race by on its way to and from Munich, triggering a sense of wanderlust in me. We would play I Declare War on the sandy path in front of the house. The countries involved that we children represented were called Germany, the USA, France and Russia. Josef von Sternberg began his daily visits. He was battered by a trip in the South Seas. Rats had crawled all over him - like the insects of the emigrant district in the port of Hamburg that he described in his autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry. He took his revenge on the terrorizing temperament of nature by recreating a jungle in a Kyoto gym for his film Anatahan and painting the green leaves silver so they would come across better on black-and-white film material. This made perfect sense to me." (From: arsenal, september 12).

(1975)

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