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Fitzcarraldo
As played by Klaus Kinski, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald—called “Fitzcarraldo” by the Peruvian locals—is a man who wholeheartedly believes in the popular saying, “With the faith of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain.” What he doesn’t know, or what he chooses to ignore, is that this old saying is a figure of speech. By the time the film comes to a close, he has darn near moved a mountain. His obsession to get it done is the central thesis of this film, which is written and directed by Werner Herzog. The images that everyone remembers in Fitzcarraldo, justifiably, are those of Kinski watching obsessively as a group of local natives pull a 320-ton steam boat up a mountain, using only a block and pulley system. The reason they are doing so is to simply appease Fitzcarraldo’s obsessions, which are so utterly preposterous that the indigenous tribe believes that his vessel is some sort of heavenly object, and he is its divine captain. We know otherwise: Fitztcarraldo is a mere businessman who has failed at every commerce he has attempted in Peru, and now makes barely enough money to survive by supplying ice to local villagers. But he has much higher aspirations than this—he is a “man of the opera,” who dreams of opening an opera house in the jungle. To do so, he must first make his fortune, which he intends to collect by exploiting untapped rubber trees up the Pongo River. To do that, he must get his steamship from the Amazon to the Pongo, which is separated by a mountain. Which brings us back to Doe. Even if the rest of the film was a dud (and it isn’t), the scenes concerning the steam ship and the mountain would alone ascend Fitzcarraldo to greatness. Herzog’s meticulous camera work of the labor that the chatty, dumbfounded natives do for Fitzcarraldo produces images of such power that we are left awestruck at their bizarre beauty. The natives’ sweat falls as they chop down the trees on the mountain and build a ramp. Their muscles rip as they use the pulley system to literally inch the steam ship up the mountain. Fitzcarraldo hisses in delight, and our jaws drop as the steamship, against all seemingly undefeatable odds, moves. The film’s power rests on these scenes; everything else is either buildup or descending action that pale in comparison to these powerful examples of raw human obsession and strength. All the while, we know that Fitzcarraldo is mad, as anyone who could concoct such a scheme must be. Yet the film is then given a rich layer of irony when we realize that these cinematic moments are not created with models or miniatures, but are the real thing. The truth is even stranger than the fiction: Werner Herzog literally hired real Peruvian locals to haul that ship up a real mountain with a real block and pulley system. The natives agree to participate because they hoped that the film would stir sympathy for them in the eyes of the Europeans who hoped to cultivate their land. Understanding this, we are forced to ask: If Fitzcarraldo is mad for envisioning such a dream, can Werzog’s madness be any less? This film, then, is not an essay about obsession and human struggle; it is a demonstration: When the ropes strain, they are really straining, and when the film gives us a long shot in which the ship literally slides into a forty-five degree angle on the screen, there are no special effects. We learn in Burden of Dreams, the documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, that Herzog’s safety engineer quit when he heard the director’s plans, citing that he would not be responsible for the many lives that he was certain would be lost. In the end, the plan worked and the steam ship moved, but we are still forced to wonder what type of person would ever possibly dream that such an endeavor could or needed to be accomplished. Herzog seems to make films the same reason other men climb mountains: He wants to conquer the stubborn, unmovable forces of nature, or die trying as they conquer him. Here is a film about madness, ambition, obsession, and about the brilliance found in them all, made by a director who possessed these very qualities. Ergo, Fiztcarraldo’s mad passions blend with Herzog’s. In fact, they are interchangeable. For the film’s shortcomings—its flimsy plotline and rather unlikely ending—the parallels between Fitzcarraldo and Hergoz, and the two men’s obsessed madness to pull that steam ship over the mountain, make this one of the greatest cinematic triumphs of all time. This might very well be the first film made in which reality and fiction are inseparable, linked together by one man’s ambition. Some reviews have tried to separate fact from fiction in Fiztcarraldo, urging viewers to judge the film on its own merits, not on the basis of Herzog’s demented dream. My question to those critics is, why would they want to separate the fantasy from the fiction? When blended together, the complement each other—Fitzcarraldo is Herzog, and vice versa. To embrace one is to embrace the other, and to consider one without considering the other is to leave out an essential part of the picture. Klaus Kinski’s own madness must also be considered; he is an actor whose passions and anger were so furious and short-wicked that somehow, they were appeased only when he worked with Herzog, whose madness equaled his own. He was a man of many delusions—among them that he was a reincarnation of Christ and Paganini—playing a man perhaps only slightly less mad than he. Together with the director and the character of Fitzcarraldo, Kinski makes up a sort of triumvirate of obsessed persons, working together to create a film that is essentially about themselves. Kinski plays Fitzcarraldo as a man so driven that he never even stops to consider that his plan might be impossible, and when his strategy is questioned, he can only blink, stutter, and grow angry and the incompetence of everyone around him. As Fitzcarraldo, Kinksi is essentially representing both himself and Herzog. Consider the scene in which Kinski lugs his record player into a banquet hall, and tries to force the aristocrats to listen to his music. Servants attempt to take it away, and he explodes in rage—not because they dislike his music, but because they question the appropriateness in him playing it. He sees all questioning of his motives as a direct attack on his character, and if he is not always in charge of his environment, or if he isn’t at least manipulating those around him to aid him in his obsessions, he is a loose cannon of anger and depression. Kinski combines the director’s obsession with his own rage—if the character and director are interchangeable, they are both the essence of Kinski’s brilliant performance. The final image that Herzog leaves us with is an unforgettable shot of Fitzcarraldo, a grin on his face and a cigar in his mouth. He is a man lost in his own delusions, and yet, despite it all, he has won, and in his madness, he has proven himself to be brilliant. The revelation, of course, that this image is a mirror for Herzog himself makes Fitzcarraldo an unforgettable experience. Herzog remains one of cinema’s greatest artists, if for no other reason than his ability to see his dreams through, no matter how uncanny they might be. He projects those dreams on the screen for us to look at in amazement, our eyes wide, our mouths opened, and our imagination stirred at his extraordinary tests of his own endurance and sanity. Cast: A Werner Herzog production. Written and directed by Herzog.
Rated PG, for innuendo and brief violence. Running time: 158
minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: October
10, 1982. German, with English subtitles. |
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