A decade after their great mad film “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” Director Werner Herzog and madman/actor Klaus Kinski back in Amazonia to make a film about another crazy project of wresting riches from the interior of South America. Could they top “Aguirre”? No. “Aguirre” is a concise great film made against seemingly impossible odds about a crazy quest for gold in the 16th century. “Fitzcarraldo” is a rambling film with some striking images about an early-20th-century project to get another precious substance, rubber, out of the jungle.
Aguirre begins slightly deranged by greed and ends totally deranged, the only survivor of the expedition, proclaiming himself “the wrath of God” as his raft carries him out to sea from the mouth of the Amazon. Fitzgerald is first seen arriving late to hear Caruso sing in the opera house in Manaus. He wants to make money so that he can build an opera house in Iquitos and hire Caruso to open it. His planned means is not reasonable, but is not entirely delusional. Similarly, if rubber riches could build an opera house in one upper Amazon boom town, why not another even if it’s further upstream? That is, the Kinski character’s goals are less grandiose, almost domestic in “Fitzcarraldo” in contrast to those in “Aguirre.”
Fitz’s scheme for getting rich involves getting a steamship from one river to another across a ridge. None of his crew knows that he has this in mind. Most of them flee before the ship gets to its portage point, fearing the Jivaro Indians. Three key crew members remain, and the head-hunters co-operate, supplying the labor for getting the ship over the mountain.
Fitz does not know why they are helping him, but no one thinks the Jivaro have any mercantile motivations for helping rather than killing him and adding his head to the collection of those they have shrunk. Their plan involves something equal or greater in difficulty to moving a hundred-ton ship over a ridge.
Despite the fulfillment of the Jivaro plans, Fitz and the boat survive, and the last scene has the cast of Bellini’s lyrical opera “I Puritani” in costume, performing that opera as the ship returns to Iquitos. A happy ending, even an equivocal one, is not what one expects in a Herzog movie. Nonetheless, it is quite glorious (especially for someone like me who was recently in Bellini’s birthplace, Catania, Sicily and has a keen admiration for “I Puritani”).
The scenes of the Jivaro boarding the ship and then getting the ship up the hill are especially fascinating. The Jivaro canoe flotilla is, of course, staged, but there is a serious sense in which the scenes of moving the ship comprise a documentary. (For that matter, despite the period costumes, there is a serious sense in which most of “Aguirre” is a documentary of rafting down the Amazon.) There are no special effects. There is work. For the film, the Indians and some German engineers really did lift the ship out of the water.* Doing this to make a movie is probably even crazier than doing it to move rubber on the second river nine decades ago!
This is the only one of the five Herzog films with Kinski in which Kinski’s character does not go crazy. Indeed, there are other characters here who are more delusional than his. Although bordello-madame Claudia Cardinale’s devotion to Fitz is mystifying, there is almost as much sweetness as craziness in Kinski’s Fitzgerald.
Kinski, the man distinct from the character he was playing, went beyond ballistic during the filming. Both Les Blank’s documentary “Burden of Dreams” and Herzog’s recent “My best friend, Klaus Kinski,” show Kinski in towering rages at Herzog and Herzog recalls that he threatened to shoot Kinski when Kinski threatened to abandon ship (as the ships’ crew does in the film). I don’t recall whether it was during the filming of “Aguirre” or “Fitzcarraldo” that the Native People volunteered to kill Kinski whenever Herzog wanted them to. The surprising thing is that Herzog never did give the word.
Herzog has to have been more than a bit crazy himself to make these films and to cast Kinski in the lead five times, knowing even before the first one that Kinski was seriously and dangerously mentally ill. Herzog actually began “Fitzcarraldo” with Jason Robards, Jr. in the title role and with Mick Jagger playing an assistant. “My best friend” includes versions of a scene in a bell tower with Robards and Jagger and the version from the final film with Kinski. (Robards became very ill and could not return.)
As I have suggested, “Aguirre” is an extraordinarily high standard of comparison. “Fitzcarraldo” cannot survive the comparison, especially lasting an hour longer than “Aguirre” does. Still, it is one of the great mad film projects. It is like “Titanic” and “Apocalypse Now” in that it was completed and released in the form the director chose, not mutilated like “Greed,” or “The Wedding March,” or various Orson Welles films.
Compared to other films by leading German directors of the 1970s and 80s (whose work I have been writing about as I watch them again or for the first time in my own private “new German film” festival), the motivation of most of the characters is clear (the exception is not the inscrutable Indians, but the lovely Claudia Cardinale). With such striking images to film, there is none of the odd framing and perverse lighting of films by Aldon and Wenders. “Aguirre” is the great masterpiece of “the new German cinema”; “Fitzcarraldo” is looser in construction and tamer in content than “Aguirre,” but is still an incredible film in several senses of “incredible.” And the documentary about its making (“Burden of dreams”) and the one partly about its making (“My best friend, Klaus Kinski”) are more absorbing, and at least as incredible. “Burden of dreams” is also more tightly constructed. (All three have superb Amazonia images.)
* I am not convinced they moved it from river to river. There is no footage of what I’d find most interesting -- the start of the descent -- in the film or in the documentaries about its making. The alternative involves getting the ship out of the water twice and sliding back into the same river.
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