This is my film, too. The psychic violence in it is mine. All my films demonstrate that we create violence out of our memories and not out of what is presented to our vision, just the way in childhood we fill the blanks of our understanding with image-stories we manufacture in retrospect.

The subtle power struggle with Jannings has already begun. He’s concerned about playing second fiddle to the technicians. He also wants to make certain of my gratitude. He wants me properly cowed. He dropped by my office after a makeup check to chat. He said he thought the film’s main question to be “What makes a man a man?” He remarked on the humor of a homosexual making a film entitled The Last Man.

Here it’s 1924 and Ufa still has no effects department. The American example remains to be emulated. In the meantime the creation of special-effects or trick photography—all innovation, of any sort, with the camera—is left to on-the-spot resourcefulness and improvisation. The basis of problem-solving is not systematic research but chance and inspiration.

For that, Freund is ideal. He knows more about the technical side of filmmaking than anyone on Earth. He was in the business in 1906 as a fifteen-year-old projectionist. A master of the established procedures, he never hesitates when innovations are proposed, and proposes most of them himself. He has an army of assistants, each filled with fear and devotion.

One he sat on before firing. He’s a fat man, so fat he had to be released from the Army after only three months in 1915. His weight doesn’t hinder his manipulation of the cameras, though the vest buttons under his white work-coat may be straining and popping. He has two all-consuming interests: the science of camerawork and the safety and virtue of his teenaged daughter.

His working habits are as ordered as his equipment. During a break once, I watched him take a delicate shutter apart. This was of special interest to me because, as a young man, I too had taken a shutter apart, and knew what to expect. I had removed the screws from the front and lifted off the top, whereupon the entire internal economy of the shutter exploded in my face and scattered across the floor.

Working with watchmaker’s screwdrivers, he removed the screws one by one, placing each in a row on a sheet of clean paper, the edges of which were folded up. The first screw he placed in the upper left corner, and each subsequent piece followed in a line from left to right in the order of its removal. Then he eased the front of the case loose like someone lifting a foreign object from a lover’s eye. All the springs stayed in place beneath. He removed them with fine-pointed pliers. Then came the blades of the iris diaphragm, one after another. At every moment, he lingered where I would have rushed.