Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog, West Germany, 1982, 158 minutes

Opera-obsessed Brian Sweeney FitzGerald (Klaus Kinski - like Rutger Hauer on acid), his name corrupted to Fitzcarraldo by the native Peruvian-Indians, harbours a dream: to build an opera house fit for Caruso in the South American jungle. He aims to finance his dream by manhandling a steamboat across a mountain and thus opening up the jungle to the rubber tycoons. Backed by his dedicated lover (Claudia Cardinale), a local brothel keeper, Fitzcarraldo steams up river, into savage Indian territory, quelling the natives with scratchy recordings of Caruso played on a gramophone.

Herzog makes Fitzcarraldo seem almost normal by surrounding him with similarly loopy characters. The steamboat's captain is virtually blind; the rubber tycoon yearns to know what it's like to go bankrupt, and the railway station official proudly guards a station though there are no plans to build a railway to go with it. Certainly there is no mysticism pervading the characters and compared with Aguirre's conquistatorial vision mountain hopping in a steamboat is small fry.

No doubt any other sane director would have used a table-top and some models mixed in with camera trickery, but Herzog refused all of this and became as obsessed with this project as Fitzcarraldo was obsessed with his. He was not so much a man with a vision as a man with a galloping mental disorder. But as the Indians say real life is the illusion, and reality is in the dreams.

Showing after Fitzcarraldo is Les Blank's film Burden Of Dreams, a humorous and absorbing diary of the making of Fitzcarraldo which reveals some of the conflicts and problems that dogged the project. Jason Robards and Mick Jagger appear in it, though you'll have to come along to see why.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96