When I was just a sprocket-crazed sprat, this was my secret idea of heaven…

I slowly discovered that the Australian documentary world certainly attracted girls like that, and many men did their best to be like that, but the girls turned into women and the men became peculiar.

Most of us just bumbled along, and gradually worked out that documentary can have integrity, but rarely any glamour.

The image comes from a poster for a film called “Vorstoß nach Paititi (Hans Ertl’s Anden-Amazonas-Expedition)”, found on a good collection of German film ads, via Rashomon.

Once I started to fiddle around with Google and the weird patois of Babelfish, I discovered the image is not what I thought, and both those posed documentary makers are heroically interesting.

He is Hans Ertl, and the girl is actually Monika Ertl, his daughter, born in 1937, and around seventeen at the time of the photograph. Her father was a mountaineer from childhood, and seems to have joined the German film industry by working on the curious genre of mountain films, which first brought Leni Riefenstahl to prominence as an actress.

Ertl shot important parts of Riefenstahl’s film of the Berlin Olympics and developed the camera systems which created the subjective aerial shots of the ski jump, and the underwater swimming sequences. He shot Robinson in 1940 in South America for the ubiquitous Arnold Fanck, which was his last credit on features.

He became Rommel’s favourite war cameraman, serving in North Africa and transferred to the Caucasus as punishment for supporting him. Indeed, he helped to create the myth. Tainted by his Nazi affiliations, he was kept away from film, so became a stills photographer for the Quicken agency, and emigrated to Bolivia in 1948, attracted by the climbing. Eventually, Reinhold Meissner would call him one of the best climbers of his generation.

Nordgipfel des Illimani, Bolivien, shot by Hans Ertl

Part of a growing colony of supremely shady expats, he helped Klaus Altmann to settle in and gave him his first job – something he probably came to regret from the depths of his soul. Altmann was Klaus Barbie; whether Hans knew at the time or just accepted another refugee torturer on face value is not revealed in the internet sources.

His wife and three daughters followed Ertl in 1953. By then, Hans was working for a West German film company. He made Nanga Parbat, a relatively early colour feature about the famed but doomed Austrian climber Hermann Buhl in Pakistan. Adventurous for the time, it contained dramatisations of Buhl’s dreams, which helped to rob Ertl of later acclaim. In 1955, he shot the Vorstoß nach Paititi, a similar adventure film about an expedition to find a fabled Inca city, when Monika joined him on location as we see in that defining poster.

In 1958, Monika was a cinematographer and star for the ethnographic(ish) Hito Hito, and was pictured again on the poster -

I think we can just about claim her as a pioneering woman documentary filmmaker.

She married a German-Bolivian engineer, and was photographed looking carefree and euro-glamorous.. On the mule, she seems to be wearing her father’s Afrika Corps cap, or something closely modelled on the design.

After her marriage failed, she became politically active. She lived in an extreme world, surrounded by ageing Nazi torturers and ghastly social inequality. She became a revolutionary, a key operative for the ELN, the violent underground guerilla movement which was then reforming after the death of Che Guevera. After her car was recognised in an attack on a bank, she went on the run and took to the hills.

A year later, in 1971, she somehow appeared in Germany. She is believed to have killed Roberto Quintanilla Pereira, the man who cut the hands off Che Guevera. He was the Bolivian consul in Hamburg, and she posed as a representative for a group of Australian folklorists.

In ‘72, she teamed up with Regis Debray for an astonishingly daring plan straight out of bad fiction. Using the fact that she had known Klaus Barbie for a long time, they would kidnap him and drag him back to France, where he was wanted for appalling crimes. The revolutionaries would replicate the capture of Adolf Eichmann. Unfortunately, the ELN was not Mossad, and the plan failed.

In May 1973, she was killed by Barbie’s private army, after falling into a trap that Regis Debray claims was set by Barbie himself. She was buried somewhere in the jungle and her grave has never been found. There is a documentary by Christian Baudissin; Costa-Gavras wanted to make a film of her life.

Hans lived on until 2000, dying in a remote Bolivian farm at the age of 92. A journalist who tracked him down and took the photo below wrote of a man full of life and energy, who cried when he spoke of Monika.

————–

Mostly from Babelfish translations of Hans Ertl and Monika Ertl on Wikipedia, with various other fragments. Don’t take the details as reliable, but I am sure the shape of the thing is true.

(Ertl is wearing the cap on the cover of the book on the table, one of three he wrote… He certainly resisted his slide into obscurity, and claimed for all his career that he was unjustly neglected. These days, he would probably get away with those pioneering dream sequences)

I wish I knew what happened to his family. A very bad article from Reuters in 1999 adds these tantalising suggestions:

“The old photographer’s second wife returned to Germany six years ago suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He maintains contact with his children, who forward money from various points around the globe.

Without a telephone or radio, Ertl is shut off from the outside world save an occasional unexpected visitor. He has three workers on his property, which echoes with the sounds of cattle, ducks, turkeys and horses.

A son who lives in Germany has sent him a sack of earth from Bavaria to cover his coffin when the time comes.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under domestic, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.