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I specialize in opera myself
Of all the movies I did not watch at the HFA's all-night marathon, I was sorriest to miss Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982). It is one of my favorite movies I have never seen on film.
It may well be my favorite Herzog. It was certainly my first, a dozen years ago when I went looking for the antecedents of the Frames' "Fitzcarraldo" and got an even more bonkers and beautiful film than I had bargained from the premise of a man who hauls a steamship over a mountain in a jungle for love of opera or the metatext of a director who did the same for love of film. Yes, the production of Fitzcarraldo remains a testament to the power of practical effects and human obsession, the reality of its 320-ton steamship, its rainforest and rivers transforming one man's dream into another's documentary, and it is impossible not to fold its terrifying and delirious logistics into a plot that attains the majestic absurdity of the genre it both ironizes and celebrates, but there's a grounding texture to the film that has nothing to do with the red heat of straining steel cables, the groans of planks and plates winching their own weight up a hillside greased with raw mud and slipped with felled trees; of all things, it's the protagonist. Never mind whether Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski were madmen, doubles, nemeses, sacred monsters. Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald is a shlimazl.
Half Irish and all hapless as a dreamer in the land of parable, Fitzcarraldo (Kinski) splashes onscreen in a boat that has seen better days, hustling his elegantly dressed lover (Claudia Cardinale) ashore as she reproves him, "If we're going to do this, let's do it with some style," and he protests, "Molly, please! We're going to miss Caruso if you don't put some fire under it!" He's rowed them two days and two nights down the Amazon from the boomtown backwater of Iquitos to the nearest opera house in Manaus, twelve hundred miles to see Caruso for once in his life, without a ticket, with streaks of oil on his face and his blistered hands tied up in rags after the motor broke down, and by sheer intensity of desperation bluffs their way in for the last five minutes of the finale, a sunburnt, shock-headed scarecrow in a crumpled white summer suit and an optimistically cocky Panama hat on whom this encrustation of artifice upon artifice—the theatrical misalliance of Caruso in his prime and Sarah Bernhardt long past hers, the soaring score of Ernani anchored to a libretto that even by the standards of grand opera is five pounds of melodrama in a four-act bag—confers the authentic transport of theophany. "Straight at me, you saw it!" he whispers raptly when the great tenor's gesture into the audience seems to light on him, as if acknowledging his greatest fan. "He pointed to me!" No matter the obstacles, he's sworn that one day he'll build an opera house in Iquitos and Caruso will open it. In the meantime, Molly manages a well-respected bordello and Fitzcarraldo himself lives in a ramshackle loft down the river where he paddles home at night with a bunch of bananas and wakes to the squawks of his parrot and the expectant silence of the children of Iquitos, clustered around his bed until he winds up his treasured Victrola and plays for them the shellacky crackle and the divine tragicomedy of Verdi's "Vesti la giubba." A lean dark pig seems to listen just as attentively and he strokes her snout with affection, having promised her a prime seat at his opera. You might call him a luftmentsh, too. He came to Peru to build the Trans-Andean Railway, which went bust even as the first tracks were being laid; now he produces and sells a rather cloudy ice which no one around him is much interested in buying and is derisively toasted as "Fitzcarraldo, the Conquistador of the Useless!" After a particularly humiliating evening of going literally hat in hand around the gaming tables of Iquitos, he drunkenly locks himself in the bell tower and declares with four-alarm fervor that the church will remain closed until he gets his opera house, for which he gets two nights in jail as a public nuisance. "You could take a crack at respectability, you know," Molly reminds him, an old, teasing argument as he leaves her at the airy pastel gates of the bordello he doesn't disapprove of. "It wouldn't kill you." His grin is surprisingly endearing for such a hollow hard-boned face, his spiky yellow hair that makes him look even more of an outsider in this Spanish-brown, Indian-brown town: "Respectability just made me bankrupt."
Henry Ford, he's not. Nor, thankfully, is he our lone aesthete among the bourgeoisie, since that would be another and a much less interesting film entirely, but he is a terrible misfit in this society of nouveau riche rubber barons intermarried with colonial aristocracy, where a man is supposed to lose money the gentlemanly way, at cards, and might attend the opera of an evening but certainly shouldn't run himself ragged trying to import it. Even a lightly geeky viewer may cringe sympathetically at the scene in which Fitzcarraldo puts on one of his favorite records for an audience of potential donors and then overreacts so spectacularly to the indifference shown Meyerbeer's "O Paradis!" that he ends up storming out of his own intended fundraiser with the famous last words, "As true as I am standing here, one day I shall bring grand opera to Iquitos . . . Sir, the reality of your world is nothing more than a rotten caricature of great opera!" What else should we expect from this man who lives and breathes Bellini and Wagner but a gesture so grand, it starts over the top and only keeps going? If there's no money in ice, he'll get it from rubber, and if there's no rubber to be exploited locally, then he'll find a solution to the quandary of unclaimed territory—a packet of rubber-rich land between two nearly meeting tributaries of the Amazon that has never been harvested because of the impassable rapids on one side and the inhospitable natives on the other—in a plan that's simplicity itself because it's certifiably insane. "It's only the dreamers who move mountains," Molly asserted proudly in Manaus. All Fitzcarraldo has to move is the spruced-up old steamer he's christened the Molly Aïda. Across the steep isthmus between the Pachitea and the Ucayali rivers, with an unreliable map and a mixed blessing of a crew, without dying of any of the countless hazards that white men let themselves in for when they play out their dreams in countries not their own. She chugs out of Iquitos wreathed in flowers and fresh greenery like the jungle afloat, champagne smashed across her bow by one of her namesakes, the other perhaps visible in her brown-skinned figurehead. The crowds cheer along the riverbank, the brass band thumps like a parade, Fitzcarraldo with one of his wonderful, shape-changing smiles waves his hat as the three-decker riverboat turns boldly into the broad, grey-green current. "You saw it right. Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald is moving against the Amazon!" It's a supportive but not necessarily auspicious line. Especially if this film is going to follow its predecessor in green-hell hearts-of-darkness, Herzog and Kinski's first collaboration Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972), we might well expect our most hopeful sight of the Molly Aïda and her dream-compassed entrepreneur to be our most ironic, for all intents and purposes our last.
In this our era of the Anthropocene, in a month of rainforests burning as I type, it is not possible to contemplate Fitzcarraldo's romantic venture into resource exploitation uncritically, nor do I actually think we're meant to. The ironies of his journey accumulate as naturally as the complications and they begin rather pointedly with a protagonist who makes himself over into that which hates for the sake of that which he loves: a rapacious materialist in the service of inestimable art. The powerfully dreamlike, absurdly impressive image of the Molly Aïda steaming with tectonic stateliness up a forty-degree incline to the plangent strains of Puccini's "O Mimì, tu più non torni" cannot be separated from previous scenes of the verdant mountainside clear-cut with machetes and dynamite, brown native bodies toiling at earthworks and blocks and tackle surveyed by white men in white suits. The singlemindedness with which Fitzcarraldo assumes the indigenous Jivaros into his obsession is troubling even before he begins to sleep like a soldier with one hand on his rifle or adopt the insulting colonial designation of "bareasses" for the watchful, hardworking Indians who appeared on the river behind him and climbed aboard his dream with their arrows, their face paint, their masato de yuca, and a dream of their own. Even his imaginative goal of "the great opera in the jungle" is an essentially colonialist project—a transplantation of Europe to the New World—for all that Fitzcarraldo sees opera as a universal language. And yet Herzog keeps his narrative always bending away from the obvious Conrad, the obvious Kipling, toward something trickier and more elusive, more multivoiced. We learn, for example, that the Jivaros believe in a "white god" who will come with the boat of heaven and take them out of the cursed jungle of their wanderings to the land of their salvation. There's no myth more neatly tailored for an imperialist to take advantage of, especially one with fair hair and an idée fixe. We watch Fitzcarraldo take in this information, gathered for him by the ship's cook and makeshift translator (Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez) from the surrounding debates of the Jivaro chieftain (David Pérez Espinosa) with his people, and then quicker than you can think Viracocha or Daniel Dravot, the cook adds, "They know we are not gods, but the boat has really impressed them." There's no room here for a man who would be king, no matter how exultantly Fitzcarraldo stretches his arms above the treeline of two rivers. If anything, in his ever more dilapidated white suit and his loose black tie, his wild hair and his wilder eyes, he looks less like any kind of god than he does a clown, Pagliaccio of the Commedia, the moony, romantic Pierrot who functions equally as the poet of alienation and the eternal fall guy. Sometimes a holy fool, sometimes just a silly one. In both aspects, he suits a story that is increasingly more of a crossing of dreams than a clash of earthly forces. The black coracle of an umbrella twirls downstream on the silt-brown swell of the Pachitea as if escaped from a painting by Magritte; it is interpreted by the jungle-hardened captain (Paul Hittscher) as a "last warning" from the Jivaros, ominous as the drums beating from the eye-crowding green of the forest. Instead of the expected macho "conversation" of gunfire or dynamite, Fitzcarraldo replies with a surrealism of his own: "Now it's Caruso's turn," he declares, and goes aloft to drop the needle on Massenet's "Il sogno." Whatever the Jivaros make of Italian opera, it must be the right answer. The drums fall silent and the steamer placidly chunks on. Later he will correctly read a row of hands on the railing as a sign of safety, as if the boat rests in trust of the indigenous community—when the hands are withdrawn, deliberately lifted into the dark beyond the bronzing flicker of firelight, Fitzcarraldo understands that gesture, too. Why not? Back at the mission at Saramiriza, when the Jesuits lamented the limits of their success with the native elders, "We can't seem to cure them of the idea that our everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams," the straw-haired émigré nodded soberly: "I specialize in opera myself." He may not know word one of Asháninka, but he's a cradle speaker of the vernacular of dreams.
And so the finale, which at once smashes the pretenses of Fitzcarraldo's dream and fulfills it in its purest form. Too caught up in the phantasmagoria of his opera house to recognize the opera his reality has become, he's nevertheless able to sense something amiss in the seeming compliance of the Jivaros: "Why are they working like dogs for us? Why? Why?" Satisfyingly, the answer is, they're not—they are working for their own dream, which they realize as soon as the Molly Aïda is safely anchored in the clay-flat waters of the Ucayali, on the other side of the scarred, surmounted mountain. As she bangs and crashes through the rending white water of the Pongo das Mortes, her hungover crew flailing awake in horror as the Indians chant softly and the faithful Victrola, scratchily jarred onto its abandoned record, serenades the rapids with the second-act sextet of Lucia di Lammermoor, she is bearing them home. Fitzcarraldo the shlimazl king of the upper Amazon ends up right where he started, minus the projected profit of 14 million rubber trees, plus the debts of a scrap-tattered ship, having experienced something so fantastic that he can approach it only by allegory with another tall true tale:
"I'll tell you something. At a time when America was hardly explored, one of those early French trappers went west from Montreal. He was the first white man to set eyes on Niagara Falls. When he returned, he told of waterfalls more vast and immense than people had ever dreamed of. No one believed him. They thought he was a madman or a liar. They asked him, 'What's your proof?' He answered, 'My proof is . . . I've seen them.'"
Another movie might end there, in ruin and irony, with the only grace its protagonist's recognition of how thoroughly his life outdramatized him. Here, out of the wreck of his colonial ambitions and the compassion of his sometime competitor Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy), Fitzcarraldo brings opera to Iquitos after all, not in exclusive and monumental imitation of the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus but an open-air performance of Bellini's I puritani staged aboard the Molly Aïda where all Iquitos can see. It feels like the natural conclusion of his routine of playing Caruso for the children, only this time the whole mestizo town is listening and it is not the sole voice of European culture that greets them but a mixed company of native and foreign performers. At the stern stands Fitzcarraldo, pleased as Punch and just as motley in his borrowed black tailcoat and his battered straw hat, an impresario's cigar between his teeth and his pig's promised red velvet armchair at his side. Molly waves from the shore, the sun dazzles among the light rain, the music rises like a rainbow and fades away into the last sight of Fitzcarraldo smiling, toasting the singers, the audience, the opera and the world.
I recognize that any description of this film can make it sound like an exposition of spectacle; the cinematography by Thomas Mauch is full of small strange moments of beauty, too, like the river rippling the moon in a sheen of oil or the white constellations of insect life blowing against the void of the night. A hammock sways with the weight of Molly and Fitz's lovemaking while an unceremoniously relocated ocelot blinks water-black eyes at them from the bed. In the lava-gold heat-shimmer of the casting of the ship's propeller, Fitzcarraldo wavers like a mirage, a dream himself. Trees, water, human faces all begin to look as elemental and alien as the mysterious opening shot of the mist-shrouded jungle over which thunder rolls and then, like a gathering static charge, the choral sound of Popol Vuh, the ambient collective who supply the film's non-diegetic music. A fish snaps up money like a fly. If everything is unreal, what can be defined as impossible? Case in point, in this movie Klaus Kinski is adorable. I remain confused that you can get the making-of documentary but not the film itself from Criterion, especially since it is available through the Criterion Channel. Perhaps a dream is always supposed to remain a little out of reach, as evanescent and enduring as a flash of light on water, a phrase of music on the air. This production brought to you by my fleeting backers at Patreon.
It may well be my favorite Herzog. It was certainly my first, a dozen years ago when I went looking for the antecedents of the Frames' "Fitzcarraldo" and got an even more bonkers and beautiful film than I had bargained from the premise of a man who hauls a steamship over a mountain in a jungle for love of opera or the metatext of a director who did the same for love of film. Yes, the production of Fitzcarraldo remains a testament to the power of practical effects and human obsession, the reality of its 320-ton steamship, its rainforest and rivers transforming one man's dream into another's documentary, and it is impossible not to fold its terrifying and delirious logistics into a plot that attains the majestic absurdity of the genre it both ironizes and celebrates, but there's a grounding texture to the film that has nothing to do with the red heat of straining steel cables, the groans of planks and plates winching their own weight up a hillside greased with raw mud and slipped with felled trees; of all things, it's the protagonist. Never mind whether Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski were madmen, doubles, nemeses, sacred monsters. Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald is a shlimazl.
Half Irish and all hapless as a dreamer in the land of parable, Fitzcarraldo (Kinski) splashes onscreen in a boat that has seen better days, hustling his elegantly dressed lover (Claudia Cardinale) ashore as she reproves him, "If we're going to do this, let's do it with some style," and he protests, "Molly, please! We're going to miss Caruso if you don't put some fire under it!" He's rowed them two days and two nights down the Amazon from the boomtown backwater of Iquitos to the nearest opera house in Manaus, twelve hundred miles to see Caruso for once in his life, without a ticket, with streaks of oil on his face and his blistered hands tied up in rags after the motor broke down, and by sheer intensity of desperation bluffs their way in for the last five minutes of the finale, a sunburnt, shock-headed scarecrow in a crumpled white summer suit and an optimistically cocky Panama hat on whom this encrustation of artifice upon artifice—the theatrical misalliance of Caruso in his prime and Sarah Bernhardt long past hers, the soaring score of Ernani anchored to a libretto that even by the standards of grand opera is five pounds of melodrama in a four-act bag—confers the authentic transport of theophany. "Straight at me, you saw it!" he whispers raptly when the great tenor's gesture into the audience seems to light on him, as if acknowledging his greatest fan. "He pointed to me!" No matter the obstacles, he's sworn that one day he'll build an opera house in Iquitos and Caruso will open it. In the meantime, Molly manages a well-respected bordello and Fitzcarraldo himself lives in a ramshackle loft down the river where he paddles home at night with a bunch of bananas and wakes to the squawks of his parrot and the expectant silence of the children of Iquitos, clustered around his bed until he winds up his treasured Victrola and plays for them the shellacky crackle and the divine tragicomedy of Verdi's "Vesti la giubba." A lean dark pig seems to listen just as attentively and he strokes her snout with affection, having promised her a prime seat at his opera. You might call him a luftmentsh, too. He came to Peru to build the Trans-Andean Railway, which went bust even as the first tracks were being laid; now he produces and sells a rather cloudy ice which no one around him is much interested in buying and is derisively toasted as "Fitzcarraldo, the Conquistador of the Useless!" After a particularly humiliating evening of going literally hat in hand around the gaming tables of Iquitos, he drunkenly locks himself in the bell tower and declares with four-alarm fervor that the church will remain closed until he gets his opera house, for which he gets two nights in jail as a public nuisance. "You could take a crack at respectability, you know," Molly reminds him, an old, teasing argument as he leaves her at the airy pastel gates of the bordello he doesn't disapprove of. "It wouldn't kill you." His grin is surprisingly endearing for such a hollow hard-boned face, his spiky yellow hair that makes him look even more of an outsider in this Spanish-brown, Indian-brown town: "Respectability just made me bankrupt."
Henry Ford, he's not. Nor, thankfully, is he our lone aesthete among the bourgeoisie, since that would be another and a much less interesting film entirely, but he is a terrible misfit in this society of nouveau riche rubber barons intermarried with colonial aristocracy, where a man is supposed to lose money the gentlemanly way, at cards, and might attend the opera of an evening but certainly shouldn't run himself ragged trying to import it. Even a lightly geeky viewer may cringe sympathetically at the scene in which Fitzcarraldo puts on one of his favorite records for an audience of potential donors and then overreacts so spectacularly to the indifference shown Meyerbeer's "O Paradis!" that he ends up storming out of his own intended fundraiser with the famous last words, "As true as I am standing here, one day I shall bring grand opera to Iquitos . . . Sir, the reality of your world is nothing more than a rotten caricature of great opera!" What else should we expect from this man who lives and breathes Bellini and Wagner but a gesture so grand, it starts over the top and only keeps going? If there's no money in ice, he'll get it from rubber, and if there's no rubber to be exploited locally, then he'll find a solution to the quandary of unclaimed territory—a packet of rubber-rich land between two nearly meeting tributaries of the Amazon that has never been harvested because of the impassable rapids on one side and the inhospitable natives on the other—in a plan that's simplicity itself because it's certifiably insane. "It's only the dreamers who move mountains," Molly asserted proudly in Manaus. All Fitzcarraldo has to move is the spruced-up old steamer he's christened the Molly Aïda. Across the steep isthmus between the Pachitea and the Ucayali rivers, with an unreliable map and a mixed blessing of a crew, without dying of any of the countless hazards that white men let themselves in for when they play out their dreams in countries not their own. She chugs out of Iquitos wreathed in flowers and fresh greenery like the jungle afloat, champagne smashed across her bow by one of her namesakes, the other perhaps visible in her brown-skinned figurehead. The crowds cheer along the riverbank, the brass band thumps like a parade, Fitzcarraldo with one of his wonderful, shape-changing smiles waves his hat as the three-decker riverboat turns boldly into the broad, grey-green current. "You saw it right. Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald is moving against the Amazon!" It's a supportive but not necessarily auspicious line. Especially if this film is going to follow its predecessor in green-hell hearts-of-darkness, Herzog and Kinski's first collaboration Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972), we might well expect our most hopeful sight of the Molly Aïda and her dream-compassed entrepreneur to be our most ironic, for all intents and purposes our last.
In this our era of the Anthropocene, in a month of rainforests burning as I type, it is not possible to contemplate Fitzcarraldo's romantic venture into resource exploitation uncritically, nor do I actually think we're meant to. The ironies of his journey accumulate as naturally as the complications and they begin rather pointedly with a protagonist who makes himself over into that which hates for the sake of that which he loves: a rapacious materialist in the service of inestimable art. The powerfully dreamlike, absurdly impressive image of the Molly Aïda steaming with tectonic stateliness up a forty-degree incline to the plangent strains of Puccini's "O Mimì, tu più non torni" cannot be separated from previous scenes of the verdant mountainside clear-cut with machetes and dynamite, brown native bodies toiling at earthworks and blocks and tackle surveyed by white men in white suits. The singlemindedness with which Fitzcarraldo assumes the indigenous Jivaros into his obsession is troubling even before he begins to sleep like a soldier with one hand on his rifle or adopt the insulting colonial designation of "bareasses" for the watchful, hardworking Indians who appeared on the river behind him and climbed aboard his dream with their arrows, their face paint, their masato de yuca, and a dream of their own. Even his imaginative goal of "the great opera in the jungle" is an essentially colonialist project—a transplantation of Europe to the New World—for all that Fitzcarraldo sees opera as a universal language. And yet Herzog keeps his narrative always bending away from the obvious Conrad, the obvious Kipling, toward something trickier and more elusive, more multivoiced. We learn, for example, that the Jivaros believe in a "white god" who will come with the boat of heaven and take them out of the cursed jungle of their wanderings to the land of their salvation. There's no myth more neatly tailored for an imperialist to take advantage of, especially one with fair hair and an idée fixe. We watch Fitzcarraldo take in this information, gathered for him by the ship's cook and makeshift translator (Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez) from the surrounding debates of the Jivaro chieftain (David Pérez Espinosa) with his people, and then quicker than you can think Viracocha or Daniel Dravot, the cook adds, "They know we are not gods, but the boat has really impressed them." There's no room here for a man who would be king, no matter how exultantly Fitzcarraldo stretches his arms above the treeline of two rivers. If anything, in his ever more dilapidated white suit and his loose black tie, his wild hair and his wilder eyes, he looks less like any kind of god than he does a clown, Pagliaccio of the Commedia, the moony, romantic Pierrot who functions equally as the poet of alienation and the eternal fall guy. Sometimes a holy fool, sometimes just a silly one. In both aspects, he suits a story that is increasingly more of a crossing of dreams than a clash of earthly forces. The black coracle of an umbrella twirls downstream on the silt-brown swell of the Pachitea as if escaped from a painting by Magritte; it is interpreted by the jungle-hardened captain (Paul Hittscher) as a "last warning" from the Jivaros, ominous as the drums beating from the eye-crowding green of the forest. Instead of the expected macho "conversation" of gunfire or dynamite, Fitzcarraldo replies with a surrealism of his own: "Now it's Caruso's turn," he declares, and goes aloft to drop the needle on Massenet's "Il sogno." Whatever the Jivaros make of Italian opera, it must be the right answer. The drums fall silent and the steamer placidly chunks on. Later he will correctly read a row of hands on the railing as a sign of safety, as if the boat rests in trust of the indigenous community—when the hands are withdrawn, deliberately lifted into the dark beyond the bronzing flicker of firelight, Fitzcarraldo understands that gesture, too. Why not? Back at the mission at Saramiriza, when the Jesuits lamented the limits of their success with the native elders, "We can't seem to cure them of the idea that our everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams," the straw-haired émigré nodded soberly: "I specialize in opera myself." He may not know word one of Asháninka, but he's a cradle speaker of the vernacular of dreams.
And so the finale, which at once smashes the pretenses of Fitzcarraldo's dream and fulfills it in its purest form. Too caught up in the phantasmagoria of his opera house to recognize the opera his reality has become, he's nevertheless able to sense something amiss in the seeming compliance of the Jivaros: "Why are they working like dogs for us? Why? Why?" Satisfyingly, the answer is, they're not—they are working for their own dream, which they realize as soon as the Molly Aïda is safely anchored in the clay-flat waters of the Ucayali, on the other side of the scarred, surmounted mountain. As she bangs and crashes through the rending white water of the Pongo das Mortes, her hungover crew flailing awake in horror as the Indians chant softly and the faithful Victrola, scratchily jarred onto its abandoned record, serenades the rapids with the second-act sextet of Lucia di Lammermoor, she is bearing them home. Fitzcarraldo the shlimazl king of the upper Amazon ends up right where he started, minus the projected profit of 14 million rubber trees, plus the debts of a scrap-tattered ship, having experienced something so fantastic that he can approach it only by allegory with another tall true tale:
"I'll tell you something. At a time when America was hardly explored, one of those early French trappers went west from Montreal. He was the first white man to set eyes on Niagara Falls. When he returned, he told of waterfalls more vast and immense than people had ever dreamed of. No one believed him. They thought he was a madman or a liar. They asked him, 'What's your proof?' He answered, 'My proof is . . . I've seen them.'"
Another movie might end there, in ruin and irony, with the only grace its protagonist's recognition of how thoroughly his life outdramatized him. Here, out of the wreck of his colonial ambitions and the compassion of his sometime competitor Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy), Fitzcarraldo brings opera to Iquitos after all, not in exclusive and monumental imitation of the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus but an open-air performance of Bellini's I puritani staged aboard the Molly Aïda where all Iquitos can see. It feels like the natural conclusion of his routine of playing Caruso for the children, only this time the whole mestizo town is listening and it is not the sole voice of European culture that greets them but a mixed company of native and foreign performers. At the stern stands Fitzcarraldo, pleased as Punch and just as motley in his borrowed black tailcoat and his battered straw hat, an impresario's cigar between his teeth and his pig's promised red velvet armchair at his side. Molly waves from the shore, the sun dazzles among the light rain, the music rises like a rainbow and fades away into the last sight of Fitzcarraldo smiling, toasting the singers, the audience, the opera and the world.
I recognize that any description of this film can make it sound like an exposition of spectacle; the cinematography by Thomas Mauch is full of small strange moments of beauty, too, like the river rippling the moon in a sheen of oil or the white constellations of insect life blowing against the void of the night. A hammock sways with the weight of Molly and Fitz's lovemaking while an unceremoniously relocated ocelot blinks water-black eyes at them from the bed. In the lava-gold heat-shimmer of the casting of the ship's propeller, Fitzcarraldo wavers like a mirage, a dream himself. Trees, water, human faces all begin to look as elemental and alien as the mysterious opening shot of the mist-shrouded jungle over which thunder rolls and then, like a gathering static charge, the choral sound of Popol Vuh, the ambient collective who supply the film's non-diegetic music. A fish snaps up money like a fly. If everything is unreal, what can be defined as impossible? Case in point, in this movie Klaus Kinski is adorable. I remain confused that you can get the making-of documentary but not the film itself from Criterion, especially since it is available through the Criterion Channel. Perhaps a dream is always supposed to remain a little out of reach, as evanescent and enduring as a flash of light on water, a phrase of music on the air. This production brought to you by my fleeting backers at Patreon.
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Thank you! I do think it would be worth your time.
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I laughed out loud.
This sounds like a fascinating (and elusive!) film.
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I mean, that's kind of just how Hernani is...
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I'm not saying we can't also blame Victor Hugo.
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I'm really fond of it! I think it was even a good introduction to Herzog, if somewhat misleading about Kinski. I watched Aguirre, the Wrath of God next and that seemed to be more his usual thing.
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That sounds wonderful. I'm still hoping to see it on a big screen someday, as it deserves.
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Thank you, mow. Some other three o'clock in some other theater, someday.
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I can see that. A Herzog-a-week festival sounds amazing.
I'm not sure if Fitzcarraldo was/is my favourite, but I sure remember that steamship!
It's very memorable!