The Apaches Are Coming!

"We talked to the screen too.  When feather headdresses loomed over a horizon in the Munich cinema, we would warn the settlers in their covered wagons: 'Watch out, the Apaches are coming!'  Then in one of the Dr. Fu Manchu films, I noticed something the others hadn't seen.  In an exchange between goodies and baddies, one egregious villain on Dr. Fu Manchu's side was picked off on a rock.  He tumbled down into the depths, turning over and over.  Twenty minutes later, something peculiar happened: in another fight, we saw all kinds -- good and bad -- meet their ends.  A few had taken refuge in a gulch between rocks, and I saw the same villain plummeting to his doom.  It was maybe done a little quicker and took only a couple of seconds this time, but the man took off into the air in exactly the same way, with one foot out.  No one else saw it, but I was convinced it was the same shot.  For me, that was the moment I understood there were shots and cuts in a film.  From that time on, I watched differently.  How was a story told, how was suspense created, how was a film constructed?  To this day, I can learn only from bad films.  The good ones I watch in the same spirit in which I watched when I was a kid.  The great ones, even when I see them many times, are just an enigma."

--Werner Herzog, Every Man For Himself And God Against All