■ Forgotten film
Herzog parallels film content,
story creation in 'Fitzcarraldo'
Herzog displays striking
images and creative
plotting in his 1982 film
BY RYAN NYBURG
PULSE EDITOR
The opening scenes of Werner Her
zog’s 1982 film “Fitzcarraldo" tells you
everything you need to know about its
main character and, in a way, about Her
zog himself. We first meet Brian Sweeny
Fitzgerald, known as Fitzcarraldo (played
by the wonderful Klaus Kinski in one of
his best roles) as he rafts madly upriver tc
the docks of a city. He has been on the
water for days, trying to make it to a per
formance by opera great Enrico Caruso.
His hands are bloody and his eyes are
manic, but when he makes it into the
opera house, a look of near transcen
dence overtakes him. This is a man of
great passions.
Fitzcarraldo loves opera as much as
he loves life. That he lives in Peru in the
early years of the twentieth century -
not exactly a hub for the sort of culture *
opera thrives in - hardly dampens his
passion. His biggest dream is to bring
an opera house to the large but isolated
town of Iquitos, a city where colonialists
have made it rich in the rubber trade
while the natives live in rotting squalor.
Fitzcarraldo lives between these two
worlds. He is European, but a failure as
a businessman. He spends his days en
tertaining local children with recordings
of great operas or using a chemical
process to make ice — a novelty many of
the natives have never seen.
Herzog is a smart enough director to
take colonialism as a fact of life rather
than to make some grand statement
about it. He takes the environment that
such exploitation breeds as his setting
for the story of a man who not only fails
at all of his projects, but fails spectacu
larly. His previous project involved build
ing a railroad through the Amazon jun
gle, a project which left only two
hundred yards of track and a locomotive
with nowhere to go.
His latest project is the most ambitious
yet. Borrowing money from his devoted
fianc6 Molly, the owner of the local
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Laura Linney—Best Supporting Actress
■KINSEY is a stupandously moving film Neason nails
Kinsey's rock-hard decency and fragile ego. and Linney
abets him beautifully "-Dinuemiswr sutf
Though it has its share ol carnality.
Bill Condon's wise and witly biography
ol the sex researcher Allred C Kinsey
is. above all, an intellectual turn-on “
-A C Scctl. NEW YORK TIMES
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Director Werner Herzog went to great lengths to create the images in "Fitzcarraldo,"
going so far as to actually haul a steamship up the side of a mountain.
bordello, he buys a tract of rubber trees in
a patch of land none of the local rubber
barons have been able to exploit. The rea
son no one else has touched the land is
that the only means of transporting the
rubber is by the river, which is inaccessi
ble in that region due to an inconveniently
placed waterfall. Fitzcarraldo comes up
with a plan to take a steamboat, take it up
river and then drag it over a mountain to
the isolated area.
What makes the project even more
amazing is that, in order to create the se
quence for the film, the filmmakers actu
ally dragged a steamboat up a mountain
and slid it down the other side. So rarely
does the content of a film and the story
behind its creation connect with such odd
parallel. Herzog is a director of large vi
sions and ambitious projects. That he has
often used his talents to direct opera
should come as no surprise to anyone
who has seen his films.
In “Fitzcarraldo," Herzog has created
some of the most striking images ever
filmed, period, no questions. The foggy
trip upriver is sharpened by the threat of
attack from hostile natives in the area.
In order to win their friendship, Fitzcar
raldo plays records of Caruso on a
gramophone placed on top of the ship.
The unseen natives are silent as the mu
sic plays, but they soon begin drumming
along with the music in an enchanting
piece of cross-cultural synchronization.
When the first lever system used to drag
the ship uphill snaps under the pres
sure, the ship’s cook comes up with the
idea of using the ship’s anchor to pull it
self. We are then treated to the image of
this gigantic machine doing something
no one ever intended it to do as it pulls it
self inch by inch to the top of the hill.
I would not be giving anything away
by saying that the project fails miser
ably, though I will leave out the details.
Nearly all of Herzog's films concern
dreamers whose dreams collapse be
fore their eyes. That this film was made
at all might be considered a refutation of
this, but in the final scenes when Fitz
carraldo finds some form of redemption
it is easy to see that Herzog knows ex
actly what he is trying to do.
ryannyburg@dailyemerald.com
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