Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog

Author:Werner Herzog [Herzog, Werner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

20

Dance on the Wire

Many things in my life look to me like a high-wire act, even though most of the time I don’t even notice there are abysses to either side of me. It’s no coincidence that I am friends with Philippe Petit, who became famous when, shortly before the opening of the World Trade Center in New York, he ran a wire between the Twin Towers and danced his way across in giddying height. He had sought me out and found me when Signs of Life was shown at a film festival in New York City. At that point, his walk at the Twin Towers had been in planning for a long time. Just before our meeting, he had pulled off a secret coup at the deepest gorge in Europe in Savoy. One night he spanned a wire across the abyss, and at first light, he set himself to cross it; it was only by chance that he was spotted by a farmer who was driving his herd to pasture over a bridge. The farmer let his cows go, ran back to the village, and woke the policeman. By the time the two of them had reached the scene of the crime, there was nothing left to see. Philippe was gone. His assistants had quickly taken down the wire; only a few iron posts knocked deep into the ground were left to show where it had been. With the Twin Towers, he had with false papers inveigled himself into a team of welders years before and even founded a building firm to get a foothold in one of the unfinished towers. He gradually assembled a storehouse in his office for the steel wire and the various other bits and pieces he needed. From one of the flat roofs, he then shot an arrow with a fishing line attached onto the twin building. Assistants took up the line and attached a thin steel wire to it, to which, with more back-and-forth, a fine cable was attached. Finally, his heavy steel rope weighing several tons was pulled over onto the other building where Philippe had secretly soldered a heavy hook under some molding. At six in the morning, he went out on the rope. He was undisturbed, no one saw him, no one watched him until 410 meters beneath him a taxi driver happened to look up. A traffic jam developed that stretched many blocks northward. Police stormed both roofs, but they couldn’t get Philippe off his rope. Finally, he lay down flat on it to sleep, so to speak, because a police helicopter was whipping up the air dangerously.

Sometime after that in Paris, deep in the night, Philippe levered up a manhole cover and led me into his secret realm of subterranean tunnels and chambers. In one great chamber, there were thousands of skeletons in tidy stacks; in another, skulls from the time of the Black Death. Another night we set off with sixty yards of climbing rope and a hook; Philippe wanted to examine the roof of the Gothic church of St.

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