Lawyer: “May I ask you a personal question? Do you really
know what you’re doing?”
Fitzcarraldo: “We’re gonna do what nobody’s ever done.”
Like a lot of films I love, the
bizarre and obsessive lead character of this film reflects the bizarre and
obsessive director who brought his vision to the screen. And like the character
Fitzcarraldo (portrayed with wide-eyed manic intensity by director Werner
Herzog’s “best fiend” Klaus Kinski), Herzog had his sights set on doing with
this film what nobody’s ever done, something that he decided – rightly, I’d say
– was unique enough to call himself "Conquistador of the Useless"
(later the name of a book of his production notes from the making of this
film).
A bit of back story first: in the
late 19th century, Carlos Fitzcarrald, an Irish-American-Peruvian
made a fortune selling rubber he claimed in a remote part of the Amazon jungle,
inaccessible by rapids in both directions on the nearest river. He managed to
access the river by crossing a narrow isthmus where the turbulent river is
separated from a second river by only a short mountain. Fitzcarrald sailed
upriver, dissembled his ship, reassembled it on the other side and voila!
he had access to the rubber tree forest in which he made his fortune.
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But Herzog decided it wouldn’t be
interesting enough to take apart a 32-ton steamer and have it rebuilt. Why
stick to reality when you can have cinema? Instead he floated a 300+ ton
steamer up river, cut a path across the mountain and built a winch and pulley
system with the help of hundreds of native Peruvians and dragged the steamship
over the mountain, without the use of any special effects. The effect of the
actual steamship being propelled up the mountainside is remarkable. You can’t believe
your eyes but there’s the evidence right there in front of you. It's truly
insane. And beautiful. And it's wild optimism of a kind almost never seen in
this world to make such a thing into reality. And it’s justifiably legendary,
so I hope I didn’t need a spoiler alert there.
Back to the film: Herzog, after
several setbacks, drafted Kinski to portray Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald
(pronounced “Fitzcarraldo,” we’re told, because the locals couldn’t say
“Fitzgerald”) and I can’t imagine that he could possibly have made a better
choice, with Kinski’s wild face and intense stare conveying without a single
sound out of his mouth the desire his character has to make his fortune. But he
has no real desire to get rich – his dream is to bring the opera to the town of
Iquitos where he lives and have the finest opera house in the jungle, a place
so grand that he can have Caruso open it and have his pet pig sit in his own
box and a red velvet chair. He’s tried two other moneymaking enterprises before
to make his dream come true – the Trans-Andean railway (“but the project fell
through”) and now an ice factory (“What good is ice here? To cool the rubber?”)
and has now settled on becoming the latest rubber baron by crossing the
mountain with his steamship.
The film itself follows his mad
dream through – he surrounds himself with like minded eccentrics, from his
girlfriend Molly, a madam in a local brothel who can help pull the purse
strings of some potential investors, to his drunken cook Huerequeque, who helps
him communicate with the natives, to the baron Don Aquilino who loves gambling
enough to fund Fitzcarraldo’s dream for his own amusement and also take bets on
the side as to whether he’ll be killed by hostile natives or go broke first.
Herzog slowly puts pieces into place as Fitzcarraldo hatches his idea, puts it
into action, assembles his crew, and then, almost an hour into the film, begins
his journey upstream. Some people call the film ‘slow’ as a result of this type
of pacing, especially when coupled with its many lengthy shots of the boat
drifting around bends in the river while records of Caruso blare from the
ship’s deck. I wouldn’t have it any other way because the payoff of
Fitzcarraldo’s mad journey is that much sweeter. I also find the stunning
photography in the jungle hypnotic in the extreme – cinematographer Thomas
Mauch had worked with Herzog before several times, including his other
Amazonian epic, 1972’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God, in which Kinski played
a mad European conquerer seeking a fortune in gold in the Amazonian jungle.
Familiar? Maybe a bit, but the tone of the two films couldn’t be more
different. Where Aguirre finds the greedy expedition falling apart in
infighting, sickness, and madness, Fitzcarraldo is about a man winning
out against all odds, beating the naysayers and making even the most farfetched
dreams come true. When the shot arrives of the steamship on mountain while
Caruso plays it’s an indelible moment of cinema. It’s inspiring, each and every
time out. After a point in the film when his idea seems achievable, everyone –
viewer included – is simply swept up in his dream.
For more
about the film, I’d also direct you to the superb documentary Burden of
Dreams, in which filmmaker Les Blank recounts the troubled production of
the film that dragged on over four years – a story nearly as legendary as the
film that actually made it to screen. Sick actors, injured crew, months of
footage that needed to be scrapped, on-set fights with cast and crew –
everything is detailed in Blank’s film that acts as a companion piece to Fitzcarraldo
itself and shows Herzog to be as much a mad dreamer as the character he put on
screen. If they’re not the same person at heart, they’re certainly two sides of
the same coin.
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