One of Freund’s cameras on a trial run down the cable smashes itself to bits on the opposite wall below.

Sandri day by day seems more disturbed. I find apple cores arranged to form a triangle under my pillow. Violent scribbles deface whatever’s left lying about. Frau Reger terrified of him. She’s caught him going through my drawers. To avoid him, she’s taken to coming in late at night to clean. This all seems to be taking place in someone else’s house. Usually I come back so late that she’s gone and he’s asleep, in various places.

The house seems uninhabited. My study looks like the last encampment of the nomad. At night I wander the halls, peering into other rooms.

This idiotic compulsion to put up an act in front of the world, pretending everything is fine: that’s what consumes so much of my energy.

In the early morning, my thoughts turn to other failures. Why is it only after people have gone that I’m able to take them into myself, the more deeply the farther away they are?

Filmmaking offers shelter for a failure to live. The essence it transfers to the medium is stolen from life. Without my notebooks I’m ignorant, an absent curator for myself.

I tell myself, Write what comes, catch what you can as best you can. Once the notebook is filled, the spirit has calmed.

The next morning, in the carpenters’ shop, I stand dazed beneath a yellow snowfall of sawdust. Neuralgia, sneezing fits, the beginnings of a bad cold. A fever coming. Röhrig suggests rum. “Röhrig always suggests rum,” says Herlth. “Have you seen his nose?”

The electricians and carpenters are unhappy with their coffee-and-sweets cart. The motto for this production, Jannings says, is “Somebody Should Do Something.” I suggest it should be “We All Whine Together.”

Mayer informs me at lunch that our decision to present the film without titles is considered by the crew to be the ultimate evidence of my haughtiness.

The latest tilting mechanism swung too rapidly in its housing and crushed the fingers of the fourth assistant. In terms of the calendar, we’re rapidly reaching the point at which the film will have to be reconceived. With increasing frequency I find notes from Pommer on my desk about the cost of our experiments. In my one note back, I quoted Goethe: Nothing injures the treasury more than the endeavor to save in essential matters.

We’re satisfied, at least, with the sling/basket arrangement in which Freund will sit. It hangs from its suspension bridge like a reinforced swing for an unbelievably heavy child. Freund sits with both feet splayed in the direction the apparatus will travel.