Werner Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO

FITZCARRALDO (Directed by Werner Herzog, Starring Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale, José Lewgoy In German, Spanish and Asháninka with English subtitles, 157 min.) 

A famously audacious Herzog project that depicts the story of Fitzcarraldo fictionalizes the mad, true-life mission of South American rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald to establish an opera house in the Peruvian jungle—which can only be accomplished by hauling a gigantic riverboat over a mountain. No special effects here—this is the real deal, with the impossible results executed before your eyes. Fitzcarraldo is an astonishing and totally consuming meta-vision of man’s ambition. 

The romantic flipside to Aguirre, the Wrath of God—a backbreaking epic that ecstatically treads the line between a portrait of madness and a genuine expression of obsession filmed a decade before, Werner Herzog returned with Klaus Kinski to the Peruvian jungle for another tale of mad, monumental obsession—and indulged in some loony, now-legendary obsessiveness of his own! Kinski plays 19th-century Irish rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an eccentric dreamer determined to build an opera house in the Amazon. His wild scheme involves dragging a massive steamship over a mountain, utilizing the labour of the area’s often-hostile Indigenous people, the Jivaro. In depicting his hero’s folly, Herzog chose to live it: to drag an actual steamship over an actual mountain, with the help of not-always-cooperative locals. Herzog received the Best Director prize at Cannes, but also drew flak for endangering his cast and crew, including the many Indigenous workers and extras employed on the film. The whole perilous production was stunningly captured by Les Blank in Burden of Dreams, screening at Epsilon Spires on Saturday, September 21st (free admission to Fitzcarraldo for attendees of Burden of Dreams- which reflects the extended, troubled circumstances of its own making, the film – critique, celebration, self-portrait? – with a bravura unto itself.) 

CRITICAL ACCLAIM:

"Though there was a distinct possibility that the much-publicised and characteristically fraught production saga of Herzog's movie would overshadow the completed film itself, it turned out to be some kind of appropriately eccentric and monumental marvel. Operatic excess is both the subject and the keynote, as Kinski's visionary Irish adventurer obsessively hatches grandiose schemes to finance a dream of bringing Caruso and the strains of Verdi to an Amazon trading-post. Staked by loving Molly, a madam (Cardinale), he pilots the resurrected tub 'Molly-Aida' down an uncharted tributary in search of untapped rubber, wooing the fierce natives with gramophone arias before securing their inexplicable collaboration in the ludicrous task of hauling the ship manually over a hill towards a parallel waterway. Overcoming his own disparaged image as an inspired madman, Herzog charts an ironically circular course around an indulged, benevolent Aguirre; perversely illuminates colonialism with surrealism; and demonstrates once again in his always suspect yet somehow irresistible way that 'only dreamers move mountains’." – Time Out

“There has never been another movie like it … A film in the great tradition of grandiose cinematic visions, like Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.” -Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“Some kind of appropriately eccentric and monumental marvel … Herzog demonstrates once again in his always suspect yet somehow irresistible way that ​‘only dreamers move mountains.’”  Paul Taylor, Time Out

“Fitzcarraldo may well be a madman’s dream, but it’s also a fine, quirky, fascinating movie. It’s a stunning spectacle, an adventure-comedy not quite like any other.” -Vincent Canby, New York Times