Hecatomb. While the world is in turmoil the German shoots Hecatomb. A film about the turmoil of the spirit. A saint in prison remembers nights of plenitude and fucking. Connie and Monica do it with four guys who look like shadows. Doris walks along the bank of a weakly flowing river accompanied by Bittrich’s largest goose. The night is unusually starry. At dawn, Doris comes across Pajarito Gómez and they start making love in the back part of Bittrich’s house. There is a great fluttering of geese. Connie and Monica at a window, clapping. The lobster-red cock of the saint shines with semen. The End. The credits appear over the image of a sleeping policeman. Bittrich’s sense of humor. His movies amused drug lords and businessmen. The ordinary guys, the gunmen and the messengers, didn’t understand them; they’d have been quite happy to blow the German away. Another movie: Kundalini. A rancher’s wake. While the mourners weep and drink coffee with aguardiente, Connie enters a dark room full of farming implements. Two guys — one disguised as a bull and one as a condor — jump out of an enormous wardrobe. They proceed to force Connie’s front and rear entries. Connie’s lips curve into the shape of a letter. Monica and Doris touching each other up in the kitchen. Then stables full of cattle and a man approaching with difficulty, pushing his way through the cows. It’s Pajarito Gómez. He never arrives: the following scene shows him stretched out in the mud, among cowpats and hooves. Monica and Doris rimming each other on a big white bed. The dead rancher opens his eyes. He sits up and climbs out of the coffin to the horror and amazement of his family and friends. Covered by the bull and the condor, Connie pronounces the word Kundalini. The cows escape from the stables and the credits appear over the abandoned, gradually darkening body of Pajarito Gómez. Another movie: Impluvium. Two genuine beggars dragging sacks along a dirt road. They reach the backyard of Bittrich’s house. There they find Monica Farr, completely naked and chained in an upright position. The beggars empty the sacks: an abundant collection of sexual instruments made of steel and leather. The beggars put on masks with phallic protuberances, and, kneeling down, one in front of Monica, one behind, they penetrate her, moving their heads in a way that is, to say the least, ambiguous: it’s hard to tell whether they’re excited or the masks are suffocating them. Lying on an army camp bed, Pajarito Gómez smokes a cigarette. On another camp bed the conscript Sansón Fernandez is jerking off. The camera pans slowly over Monica’s face: she is crying. The beggars depart, dragging their sacks down a miserable, unpaved street. Still chained, Monica shuts her eyes and seems to fall asleep. She dreams of the masks, the latex noses, the pair of old carcasses who could barely hold a breath of air and yet were so enthusiastic in the performance of their task. Supernatural carcasses emptied of all the essentials. Then Monica gets dressed, walks through the centre of Medellín, and is invited to an orgy, where she meets Connie and Doris; they kiss and smile at each other, and talk about what they’ve been doing. Pajarito Gómez, half dressed in fatigues, has fallen asleep. When the orgy is over, before it gets dark, the owner of the house wants to show them his most prized possession. The girls follow their host to a garden covered with a metal and glass canopy. The man’s bejeweled finger indicates something at the far end. The girls examine a cement swimming pool in the shape of a coffin. When they lean over the edge, they see their faces reflected in the water. Then dusk falls and the beggars come to an area where big cargo ships are docked. The music, performed by a band of kettledrummers, gets louder, more sinister and ominous, until the storm finally breaks. Bittrich adored sound effects like that. Thunder in the mountains, the sizzle of lightning, splintering trees, rain against window panes. He collected them on high quality tapes. He said it was to make his movies atmospheric, but in fact it was just because he liked the effects. The full range of sounds that rain makes in a forest. The rhythmic or random sibilance of the wind and the sea. Sounds to make you feel alone, sounds to make your hair stand on end. His great treasure was the roar of a hurricane. I heard it as a kid. The actors were drinking coffee under a tree and Bittrich was playing with an enormous German tape player, away from the others, looking pasty, the way he did when he’d been working too hard. Now you’re going to hear the hurricane from inside, he said. At first I couldn’t hear anything. I think I was expecting a god-almighty, ear-splitting racket, so I was disappointed when all I could hear was a kind of intermittent whirling. An intermittent ripping. Like a propeller made of meat. Then I heard voices; it wasn’t the hurricane, of course, but the pilots of the plane flying in its eye. Hard voices talking in Spanish and English. Bittrich was smiling as he listened. Then I heard the hurricane again and this time I really heard it. Emptiness. A vertical bridge and emptiness, emptiness, emptiness. I’ll never forget the smile on Bittrich’s face. It was as if he was weeping. Is that all? I asked, not wanting to admit that I’d already had enough. That’s all, said Bittrich, fascinated by the silently turning reels. Then he stopped the tape player, closed it up very carefully, went inside with the others and got back to work. Another movie: