Walking, Filming, Thinking

Disgusted with himself after thirty years of smoking cigarettes, the Swiss filmmaker Peter Liechti hatched a plan: he would go on an extreme hike lasting several days, during which time his body would cure itself of the craving for nicotine. The rules: he would travel alone, on foot, with his video camera and a notebook to document the trip. He would make no plans or hotel reservations, be on the lookout for chance encounters, and refrain from smoking a single cigarette.

On June 23, 1999 he set off from his apartment in Zurich. After many detours and physical hardships, he reached his destination: the town of St. Gallen in eastern Switzerland, his birthplace and the home of his parents. The journey had taken eight days. No longer an addict, he rode the train back to Zurich. A few months later, he started smoking again. So the following summer he went on another hike. On July 20, 2000 he set off again, toward the same destination but along a different route. This time, he planned his arrival in St. Gallen to coincide with the Swiss national holiday on the first of August. By New Year’s Eve, he had backslid once again. In February 2001 he went on a third and final hike, and has remained—by his own admission—a nonsmoker ever since.

In 2003 he finished the 90-minute essay film Hans im Glück—Drei Versuche, das Rauchen aufzugeben, released in English as Lucky Jack— Three Attempts to Stop Smoking. In two years of editing, he had woven together the images, sounds, and texts of his hiking diaries into a multifaceted meditation on his ambivalent relationship to his own body, the landscape, and his Swiss identity, drawing repeated parallels between the three. By insisting on linking the threefold activity of hiking, filming, and thinking, Liechti draws on the long heritage within Western thought, from Saint Augustine to Guy Debord, of walking as a means of philosophical analysis and a method for solving intellectual or emotional problems. The film’s title refers to the paradoxical Grimm fairy tale about the apprentice Hans, who cheerfully trades seven years’ wages for a series of objects of decreasing value, until he is freed of the burden of ownership altogether.