Each movie consists of exactly one hundred shots, each shot lasting exactly one hundred seconds. That’s ten thousand seconds in total, which, since the movies have neither opening nor closing credits, results in works that are precisely 166 minutes and 6 seconds long.
In the pre-digital age, when the drive bands of projectors were likely to run slightly slow or fast, timing was inevitably a rather more hit-and-miss business. Technological advances have enabled Zander to become more thoroughly formalist.
And in truth Zander began making movies when digital media were unheard of, when videotape was still a novelty. He exposed his first footage in the early 1970s, when he was a very young man, using a Super 8 amateur movie camera.
The story goes that he acquired this camera immediately after he’d acquired his first car, a Volkswagen Beetle. Taking a few shots of a new car is a common enough thing, but whereas most amateurs would be inclined to do endless pans and zooms, close-ups and action shots, Zander simply set his camera on a tripod and filmed his parked Beetle for exactly one minute and forty seconds, a little less than half the length of a roll of Super 8 film. Eager to finish the roll, he found a neighbour who also owned a Beetle and filmed that for a hundred seconds too. The rest of the film he ‘wasted’.
There is no shortage of Volkswagen Beetles in mainstream movies, the most conspicuous and irksome example being the Walt Disney Herbie series. Elsewhere Beetles can be found playing significant roles in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil and Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, to pick three more or less at random. Among makers of art films, Zander has claimed kinship with Francis Alys, whose Rehearsal 1 shows a red Volkswagen Beetle repeatedly attempting and failing to drive up a steep hill in Tijuana, while on the soundtrack musicians rehearse some Mexican ‘danzon’ music.
Having filmed ‘still lives’, as it were, of those first two Volkswagen Beetles, Matt Zander had found his subject, and he has never found another. His entire oeuvre consists of accumulations of hundred-second shots of Beetles at rest, never in motion.
This may sound perverse and restricting, but even the most casual viewing of Zander’s works shows a rigour and a scope that is anything but limited. Over the decades he has been to every continent, to hundreds of cities, to thousands of locations; suburbs and ghettos, parking lots and private garages, rain forests and deserts, scrapyards and war zones, and in each location he has selected a Volkswagen Beetle, set up his tripod, and using ever more sophisticated cameras, filmed it for exactly one hundred seconds.
The reach, the variety, the obsessive quality of his work is extraordinary. In each shot the Beetle remains unmoved, a given, a constant in a chaotic world, a world of untold stories, while around it landscapes change, people and animals wander in and out of frame, smoke or debris drift around the car, gunfire or screams are heard on the soundtrack. Zander’s films become melancholy, spiritual meditations on technology, diversity and decay.
He has said he will only make two more films, Kafer 99 and Kafer 100, but nobody believes him. At that point he will have filmed ten thousand Beetles, a good number to be sure, but even allowing for natural wastage, destruction and recycling, that still leaves him with many millions of subjects, many millions of Beetles still to be filmed. Some would say his career might be just beginning.
Twenty
So began a short but stable and really surprisingly enjoyable phase of my quasi-American life. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I spent the days in my trailer writing. That was good. I liked that. Writing was what I did best. Arguably it was the only thing I did well at all. I was set up with a laptop and a printer, and Cadence became my dedicated, over-eager and really not much needed assistant.
Every day I turned out a few new pages that bore some passing resemblance to the novel I’d written, a lifetime ago, as it now seemed. These pages were rather more closely related to the existing but discredited script which I was now finally allowed to read (it was OK, in its way), and more crucially I wrote scenes that explored the dramatic possibilities presented by a group of Volkswagen survivalists holed up in a trailer park in southern California. It wasn’t the worst assignment anybody had ever been given. It wasn’t exactly easy but it was work I thought I could do, and I tried hard to accomplish what was required of me.
And now, of course, I had to address the question that had caused me so much trouble: “What about the velociraptors?” There was still no sign of them anywhere. Well, I was told, first by a chastened Josh Martin, then by a more upbeat Angelo, then by the production designer, that like all the best movie monsters, our velociraptors should exist in the minds of the audience as much as they did on film. Later there would be top-of-the-line special-effects wizardry, and then some computer-generated velociraptors would be digitally inserted into the movie, the exact number of them and the complexity of the scenes being determined by Josh Martin’s ability to raise further finance. My job, therefore, I was informed, was to concentrate on the human story, the conflicts between people, the changing alliances, the inevitable sorrows, the unexpected joys, the parallels with Nazi Germany, while still leaving scope for an unspecified number of monsters who might or might not ultimately appear.
My script became increasingly littered with characters saying things like, “Look over there!” and then peering into the off-screen distance, while other characters reacted with terror or pity or shock or ambiguity, or whatever, to things unseen. The absurdity of the situation didn’t escape me, but I’ve always been able to live with a certain background level of absurdity. That was a big help.
As far as I could tell, things were now going much better on the shoot. The risk of disaster had concentrated a few minds. There was a new energy around the set, and the air of lethargy had lifted. Josh Martin still got angry sometimes, but he no longer got angry with me, and that was a great step forward as far as I was concerned.
My own status on the movie was only vaguely defined, and I thought it best if it stayed that way. Of course, in some ways, I was Josh Martin’s boy. He was the one who’d chosen to make a movie from my book. He’d written the original script. He was the ultimate authority. If he hadn’t agreed that I should do some rewrites then I certainly wouldn’t have been doing them. But equally the very fact that rewrites needed doing only emphasised that his skills weren’t all they might have been. I was propping him up. And I wasn’t the only one doing that. Everybody was, one way or another. But maybe that’s the way it always is on a movie. I told myself I was on nobody’s side. If anybody had asked, I’d have said I was on the side of the movie.
I busied myself solving matters of motivation, charting character arcs, wrestling with pressing artistic conundrums such as whether Natasha and Troy should have an explicit sex scene. Everyone thought this was a great if not exactly original idea, but I thought it would be much more entertaining if Natasha had an explicit sex scene with Ronnie the dwarf. This was less well received by everyone, except the actor playing Ronnie.
Otherwise I had to determine whether, as Troy became more Hitleresque, he should grow a moustache (I was against this), whether he should make Nuremberg-style speeches (I was basically in favour, though daunted at the prospect of having to write them, and afraid that long speeches would gum up the movie), and also whether I needed to introduce some new characters. It crossed my mind that the movie could make use of, say, a strong man who could throw Volkswagen engines around, or a woman who could make stunt leaps in a Beetle, but I knew I still had to tread carefully in that area.