Ninety percent of my work consists of the secondary chores I perform in order to get to the other ten percent. Something always comes up. Everywhere an argument about who should run out to the café for sweets. The most relentless idiocies filter through. Today I received a bill for a goose that someone ordered in January.

Each night, the same miseries, re-rehearsed in bed. Will the camera problems be worked out? Is it all too slow? Too ponderous? Trivial? Each morning, back in the car, exhausted by having been at odds with myself all night. Insufficient time to consider the best solutions to the problems at hand. Our work is an illustration of Zeno’s paradox: since at each instant an arrow shot from a bow is stationary at some point in space, the succession of instants cannot constitute motion.

The mobility of the camera is even more crucial now that Mayer and I are firm on the revolutionary notion that Der Letzte Mann will have no titles. (!) We want the world of the story to proceed unimpeded, for the action to progress by visual means, the expressivity of the moving camera allowing us to dispense with the explanatory interruption. We want to make the audience a mass of common visionaries, obeying a law they did not know but recited in their dreams. For what we want—the camera swinging great distances through space—some means of stabilizing it is crucial. We need to hang it on a kind of sliding suspension bridge; we need it to follow the doorman through crowds, and up flights of stairs; we need it to drop from one balcony to another. So far, our unchained camera has been liberated only from its ability to provide a comprehensible image. The movements have been too complex and minute to allow the camera operator to adequately correct for stability. Our most recent solution was a metal dish-within-a-dish of ball bearings, which allowed the camera to swing freely. Too freely. The images we got looked like the chronicles of an earthquake.

Each day after principal shooting, we convene at Freund’s makeshift laboratory to watch him wrestle with the problem. We toss out our own ideas, as well. So much metalworking is going on that the place looks like a foundry. Cellini and his assistants must have sweated and cursed before their ovens in the same way. A miserable summer on top of everything else. Freund had great holes torn into the walls for ventilation, to no avail.