As an epilogue to September’s Hollywood Blacklist retrospective, we are showing two extraordinary films by Wolf-Eckart Bühler which draw on the biography of Sterling Hayden as a means of engaging with the Black List and its consequences. Hayden was a seafarer, war hero, Hollywood star, writer, and FBI informer. Impressed by his life, director and editor of “Filmkritik” magazine Wolf-Eckart Bühler set out in search of Hayden to talk to him about making a film of his autobiography “Wanderer”, eventually finding him on a boat in Besançon, France. The direct result of this meeting, LEUCHTTURM DES CHAOS (West Germany 1982, 3.10.), is not, however, an adaptation of the book, but rather a stirring documentary both with and about Sterling Hayden. The film team spend seven days with him, during which there is a lot of talk about the sea, seafaring, and his alcoholism. Yet the central theme of the film is Hayden’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee at the start of the 50s. Hayden joined the Communist Party for a brief period after the Second World War and in the face of the anti-Communist witch hunt saw himself forced to give the names of other Communists to the infamous committee, a decision he was to regret bitterly for the rest of his life.
