Fitzcarraldo
Loosely based on a true story, Werner Herzog’s existential epic about an entrepreneurial 1890s hustler (Klaus Kinski) who endeavors to hoist a 300-ton steamboat over a mountain in the remote Amazon to access and extract the territory’s lucrative natural resources (all to fund his fever dream of building an opera house in the jungle) is as delirious as its premise. This being Herzog, no effort was spared to achieve a transcendent realism, with the production re-creating the feat unassisted by technology or shortcuts. A companion piece to AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD that returns Herzog to the primordial cauldron of the Peruvian Amazon and reunites him with his demonically charismatic leading man, the film emphatically reaffirms the futility of man’s attempts at “civilizing” the natural world. (Its besieged production is documented in Les Blank’s BURDEN OF DREAMS, a monumental film in its own right.)
Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale, José Lewgoy
- Notes From Pablo LarraínI talked to Werner Herzog about this in Telluride last year. He was kind enough to come to the lunch we had for my last movie, EL CONDE, and I sat next to him. Because when I first saw this film and other movies from him and other German directors, I decided to become a filmmaker. So it’s a very specific and significant movie for me. Over the years I’ve come to understand why it affects me so much. It’s not only because it’s beautiful, but it’s also crazy—and I’m an opera lover as well. As Herzog says in his book CONQUEST OF THE USELESS: REFLECTIONS FROM THE MAKING OF “FITZCARRALDO,” there’s something useless that the character is trying to achieve. I think it’s a very beautiful metaphor for cinema. Because when you make a movie, you’re pushing a ship over a mountain. There’s an absurdity in it, but you believe in something greater. You think you might be doing something that has substance, that is meaningful, which is also true in the case of the character, who dreams of having an opera house in the jungle with Caruso singing. That exercise of a crazy German dressed in white, trying to convince people of what he’s doing, I think it’s a great cinematic achievement. What is also very funny is that there is a documentary about the making of the film that is really great, too. It’s not just the film but also what happens around the film that became a mythology. For me it’s so similar to the absurdity of trying to convince an investor, trying to seduce the people who could become your cast. It’s a movie that I’ve seen many times, and I had the chance to say that to Herzog, who gave me a smile back. That’s all he did, and it was perfect.