Fitzcarraldo

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Summary: Obsession and dreams in the surreal beauty of the Amazon.
Review: A riveting film set in the surreal beauty of the Amazon. Fizcarraldo is about obsession, motivation, will, and the realities that block the realization of our dreams -- or is it the dreams that block the realization of our reality?

Fitzcarraldo (an amazing performance by Klaus Kinski) is obsessed with bringing Grand Opera to the jungle and having Caruso himself open the premiere of a new opera house. The only problem is he hasn't the money to do it. So he schemes up a plot to get rich by mining rubber trees in an untapped and dangerous region of the jungle. His contagious madness and determination are unflappable as he and his crew attempt the impossible.

Anchor Bay has been giving Werner Herzog the deluxe treatment for his DVD releases -- picture quality is excellent and the director's commentaries on this (and "Nosferatu") are manna to Herzog fans like myself.

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Summary: The Burden of dreaming I was Fitzcarraldo
Review: After being a "film fan" or, make that "fanatic" for about 55 years, I cannot resist a chance to say that two of my "top twenty" movies are "Siamese Twins". The films of Werner Herzog have sometimes ("Nosferatu") infuriated me, sometimes ("Lessons of Darkness") enthralled me, and sometimes ("Kaspar Hauser") done both at the same time. But they have never bored me, and "Fitzcarraldo" is, simply, magnificent; I first viewed it in the Auckland (New Zealand) Film Festival around 1983 and was amazed by its depiction of a man so obsessed that he would drag a full-sized ship over a mountain. Equally amazing to me was that the film was made by a director so equally obsessed that he
scorned models and he too dragged a ship over the mountain! Either one or two years later, the Festival showed the documentary "Burden of Dreams", by Les Blank, who was already one of my favourite film-makers.The body of work by these two men is worthy of only the highest praise, allowing for human frailty; therefore to have the pair of films complementing each other has given me constant pleasure in the 15 or so years since I acquired copies of each.
To complete the almost surreal perfection of the situation, imagine the lead role played by Klaus Kinski, the "love/hate" alter-ego of Herzog, and one of cinema's truly "crazy" people == all the better for that!==he brought to the role exactly the
maniacal obsession he used in "Aguirre - Wrath of God", and the bond between Kinski and Herzog is sublimated by Herzog's recent documentary "Kinski - My Best Fiend"
Every Herzog follower is aware that Jason Robards and Mick Jagger were each involved in what came down to a small but pivotal role, and both are shown in the "Burden of Dreams' film; what could have been a bad cliche role was played by Claudia Cardinale in a manner that gave grace and integrity to the film; and to see, in "Burden of Dreams", the sequences where Herzog was hauling a full-sized ship (he made three of them!) over the hill and, in the process, killing several native workers during his exorcising of his fixative search for cinematic reality, is stupendous. Over the past fifteen years, I must have viewed each film twenty of more times and they still astonish me; as another reviewer said, the sequence of the Caruso record playing as the ship careers along is one of the classic scenes of cinema, right up there with both the opening and closing sequences of "Aguirre". Long may Herzog and Blank continue delighting audiences; long may Werner Herzog continue to amaze us as he "eats his shoe"

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Summary: Obscure history, writ large
Review: Among the things that distinguish Werner Herzog as a film-maker are two qualities that he shares with William Shakespeare: he knows the human heart better than most dramatists, and he never lets the facts get in the way of telling a good story.

Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (called "Fitzcarraldo" by the natives) was a real guy, who really loved opera, and really did drag a ship over a piece of land to get it from one part of a South American river to another. He did it to bring opera to middle of the jungle. That's history. What drove this guy to do such a frankly outrageous thing in the name of art? What kind of fever siezes a visionary and brings him to the brink of insanity to attempt such a thing? That's the stuff of drama. Herzog knows the difference, and his choices in bringing the story to the screen were flawless.

Fitzcarraldo, like all of Herzong's films (even Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht), uses the theme of cultural clash as a macrocosm of the conflicted human mind. So what if the real boat was much smaller than the one in the film? Who cares if the real act of dragging it across land - though arduous - was not nearly so grand as the film depicts? The resultant images are what count, and they would not have the stunning effect Herzog pulls off in this film were it more "historically accurate".

All film directors do things for effect. What separates the good ones from the great is their reason. The once-great Frances Ford Coppola seems to be aiming for empty aesthetics with his last few films; Herzog wants nothing less than to illuminate the soul. It's a grand, quixotic goal; prone to failure - much like dragging a boat through the jungle. But he seems to pull it off time and time again. You remember the images, yes - they're hard to forget. But you also remember the passion of the characters - their desparate dreams, wild fantasies, great achievements, and devastating failures.

Klaus Kinski perfectly embodies the obsessive madness of the title character - albeit in a far less sinister way than in Aguirre: The Wrath of God. His performance is no less brilliant. Claudia Cardinale plays his love interest, the kind of woman whose heart every visionary dreams of winning.

In most treatments of this kind of story, one would expect things to end badly. They do for Fitz, but somehow it does not matter. He finds grace and dignity in the struggle, rather than the outcome. He is a brighter vision of Don Quixote, and the feeling of surviving his ordeal is, miraculously, more like that of triumph than defeat. Fitzcarraldo ends in exuberance rather than despair. How can a man lose everything and still raise his head so high, as Kinski does in the last scene?

Without a hint of sappy, artificial feel-good-ism, Herzog has pulled off one of the most authentically moving surprise happy endings in recent cinema.

Failure never looked so good!

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Summary: Big-Time Boat Trip
Review: Another big-time boat trip with my favorite existential trapped rat, Klaus Kinski as Herr Kapitan with a crew of fellow odd-balls and dreamers going upstream against the grain on the Amazon, then higher up a tributary and finally, going overland in his boat, dragging the thing up a steep jungle incline via a system of pulleys powered by cannibals-needing-help and the apparently uncooled engine of the huge vessel. Then down the other side into some other water and back home in triumph after drifting and smashing, mostly unpowered, through a previously-thought-to-be-impassable rapid, thus opening for future exploitation some inaccessible rubber trees growing in the wilds above the rapid.

The reason behind the boat trip? The protagonist, Herr Kapitan Kinski, has an obsession with Grand Opera that could vie for prominence with the greatest obsession any man ever had for any woman, anytime, anyplace. If he can get this land with these rubber trees and make enough dough to pay back his constantly amazed and amused girlfriend for footing the bill for his boat,
he can build an opera house and bring Grand Opera to this riverbank jungle town (which he does, finally, along with the longest cigar I've ever seen, at the conclusion of this epic of film-making madness at its finest).

In a "Hey, this guy's all right!" scene early on displaying Kinski at the height of his infantile-ego-driven craziness, he's shown up in the town's church belfry in the middle of the day, hammering the clapper violently against the bell, roaring through clenched teeth, "I WANT MY OPERA HOUSE!!"

Unless the cannibals got him later on, I'd say he's got his opera house by now.

But what next?

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Summary: " Life without music would be a mistake"---Nietsche.
Review: Documentaries have been made about the love/hate relationship between the greatest German director and the greatest German actor of the twentieth century. Kinski claimed that he kicked Herzog during the making of this film and that "Herzog groveled." For his part Herzog claimed that when Kinski threatened to walk off the set, Herzog took a high powered rifle and swore to Kinski that he would shoot him as his motorboat passed around the bend.( They were filming in the The Amazon ) Kinski stayed.

Only these two superbly talented megalomaniacs could have pulled off this tour de force of directing and acting.

Fitzcarraldo is, quite simply , one of the greatest films of all time. No other actor could have played the lead as well as Klaus Kinski, and no other director could have conceived eschewing props and actually hauling a 300 ton steamship over a mountain, or, for that matter, hiring warring tribes of headhunters as extras.

It works.

The story is set in the late 19th century when rubber (and robber!) barons created great wealth in the remote jungles of South America, built on the monopoly of the rubber plant. We moderns know that this artificially created civilisation will soon collapse, when the plant is smuggled out; so what better setting than these ephemeral cities of gold and palaces of opulence to tell this tale of man's capacity to dream?

Here is a world where elegance mingles with crudity. In one scene, a millionare, proud of his collection of rare carps, tosses them them large bills, while he jokes in front of an impoverished Fitzcarraldo about how fond the fish are of the taste of money.

Fitzcarraldo has a passion for opera. If the viewer does not share this, the film can still makes sense, provided the viewer has a passion for SOMETHING. If not, forget it. It'll be incomprehensible to anyone without blood in his veins. Just the story of a nut.

Not that Fitzcarraldo is not er . . .speculative in his business schemes. When he announces to his lover, a successful brothel keeper, (Claudia Cardinale) " I have an idea! " She responds with: " Oh, no! Not another one! "

But she bankrolls him, nevertheless. Now all he has to do is--well, as Einstein once eloquently said, to achieve the impossible, we must attempt the absurd.

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Summary: Adventure Directed
Review: Dream-like and appearently burdened by technical troubles, Herzog's film slogs its way upstream as more of a testimonial to realism than as a contrived formula for entertainment. As hostile locations and dangerous cinematic sequences are dealt more and more by pamperhanded mouse fidgeters painting on digital editors, it is inspiring to see Herzog approach the task of shooting larger than life sequences using a real ship, a real jungle, a real South American river, on real film reels. This film was a must for me--an adventure filmaker in the making. No star wars for me. I like my calluses and scars; and any likeminded viewers will like Fitzcarraldo. (Set on the shelf beside "Lawence of Arabia", "The Man Who Would Be King", and "Lord Jim".

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Summary: Herzog and Kinski both at their finest.
Review: Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)

Fitzcarraldo is the fourth, chronologically, of the five celebrated films upon which Werner Herzog collaborated with Klaus Kinski, and it is certainly the best of the lot. Herzog and Kinski both bring their A game to the table in the creation of the title character, a man obsessed with building an opera house in the Amazon rainforest. In order to raise enough capital for the project, he and his financial backers attempt to crack an untapped rubber market on a tributary of the Amazon by creating a land-bridge between two tributaries over which a large steamship can be hauled.

The bulk of the almost-three-hour film concerns the building of the land-bridge, with framing pieces on either side. The whole presents an excellent character analysis of Fitz (Kinski) himself, a happy-go-lucky entrepreneur who also happens to be obsessed. Fitz comes off as the ultimate film character, a man as fully realized and as fully explored as any constructed for the cinema before or since. And therein lies the film's strength.

The film's weaknesses aren't enough to balance, but they are certainly in evidence. The pace of the film is slow, to say the least, almost glacial in places. Herzog is a little too good at taking half an hour to make a minor point that could have been carried off in five minutes, and he does it once or twice too often here. There's also something to be said for the inconsistency of the natives; they rush off, as if they are never to return, and then the next morning are back to work as if nothing had happened. It's a great trick when used once, but it gets old fast. It also seems as if Herzog may have tacked the ending on after some unfavorable test-marketing, but it's impossible to say how without spoiling the last half-hour of the film. It'll be obvious once you've watched it.

As I said before, the bad points aren't nearly enough to drag the film down. Kinski gives the performance of his career, and it alone is enough to warrant watching the film. ****

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Summary: A Beautiful Obsession
Review: Fitzcarraldo, a movie about an obsessed man made by an obsessed man, Werner Herzog.This creative process is observed in Les Blanks documentary "Burden of Dreams" a wonderful and vivid study
which, in my opinion, must be viewed to fully appreciate "Fitzcarraldo" The main character in "Fitzcarraldo" is played by the eccentric german acting legend Klaus Kinski
With mouth-dropping imagery and tone This is a truly satisfying film "A film which only Werner Herzog could make"

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Summary: not a review
Review: For those that don't know, Fitzcarraldo was a real-life person, and he was actually Peruvian--not a foreigner. Just so you know.

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Summary: Visual madness
Review: Herzog, recalling the shooting of the movie said that the Indians were so scared of Kinski's hysterical bouts of anger they offered to kill him... They were dead serious about it. Nothing in this movie is fake, it 's over two hours of unnerving madness spiralling into cathartic self-destruction. Kinski wasn't supposed to hold the role, in fact the shooting started with another actor (and Mick Jagger!) who got sick and had to renounce. But of course the movie would not have been the same without him, maybe it wouldn't have been at all, for Herzog's madness had to be matched by the cast. This movie is not meant as light entertainment but its superhuman quality makes for a fascinating viewing. A super-production, if this word means anything.