Another interesting project I filmed was an attempt to rid the whole island of Sardinia of mosquitoes. So every inch of water was sprayed with DDT, every hoof print, if it contained water, every dwelling was sprayed inside and out, every cave even wherever people lived. Malaria was a great problem for Sardinia, and it was an experiment to teach other regions afterwards how to get rid of mosquitoes. Now, they drained swamps, they fished for mosquito larvae in ever river and canal, they sprayed swamps from the air, and as I said, every dwelling, every hut, every flat, every house. And I was under the spray, I swallowed a lot of DDT, but I am still here to tell the story. The malaria subsided very quickly. The mosquitoes also disappeared fairly quickly. The poor man I remember who had to disinfect, as it were, the wells and... on each farm, they embedded DDT in concrete and threw a DDT bomb into the well, but the poor man had to drink the water afterwards to show the farmer that it’s drinkable, and he went about all day doing this job and drank and drank DDT. Well, I didn’t come to any harm. It may have prolonged my life, I don’t know. The organisation was vast they had umpteen lawyers and cars and big centres for their equipment all over the island, and mosquitoes did disappear, but in a few months time afterwards they came back on the wind, I think, from North Africa.
DDT is supposed to be really bad for you, isn’t it?
Well, I don’t think anybody came to much harm. It affected birds. It affected their capacity to lay eggs which had enough shell on them to survive. I don’t... I haven’t heard of anybody really poisoned by DDT. But that was a very interesting project. It was... I went there twice, once on a sort of technical film, and once a film for the theatres — for the cinemas — a short version using some of the material we had shot before and getting some... getting some additional material for a popular film, 20 minute film for the theatres. My photographs I took during that work were discovered by an ethnographical museum in Sardinia, and I gave them all the negatives even of that period, and they want to make an exhibition of my work which I took 50 years ago, in June of this year, in Nuoro, a largish town in Sardinia where this... this lovely museum which has local costumes and handicrafts and, things like that, on view for the public. And they have a large photographic library, and also film library, and they showed me some of the films I had taken in Sardinia.
