Fitzcarraldo

Ode to a madman, "the Conquistador of the Useless." Opera is the grand passion, Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt in Manaus, the Irish expatriate (Klaus Kinski) arrives late with his hands bloodied from rowing. Failed railroad and floundering ice business, mocked by rubber barons but supported by the vibrant madam (Claudia Cardinale). To build a theatre in the jungle requires funding, off he goes against the mighty Amazon River, "I shall move a mountain." The creative process is a colossal venture, says Werner Herzog, there are times when it feels like dragging a steamship up a sierra, simple as that. Primordial terrain, "the land where God did not finish creation," it has its own music. Roisterous crew, stout skipper, boozy cook, virtually one of Huston's tall tales. Too delicate a situation for rifles or dynamite, the prized gramophone does the trick. The intransigent artist in white suit and Panama hat, Baudelaire's Icarus with "broken arms from trying to embrace clouds," a bedeviled Kinski tour de force. (A side variation with a stranded locomotive gives a choice glimpse of Grande Otelo.) The cosmic joke is a sight gag, a 320-ton vessel diagonal across the screen, Sisyphus at the end has a cigar and a smile. As in Aguirre: The Wrath of God, a record of a film being made. Natives believe in weeping trees and in rapids like furious spirits, "these bare-asses love flowery language," they also have a different visionary goal for the protagonist's boat. The boy fiddler outside jail (Nosferatu), the fish that swallows money ends up cooked on a fancy plate. Above all for Herzog the belief, blessedly uncured by missionaries, that "our everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams." Blank's Burden of Dreams is a companion piece, and there's Fellini's E la nave va. Cinematography by Thomas Mauch. With José Lewgoy, Paul Hittscher, Miguel Ángel Fuentes, Huerequeque Enrique Bohorquez, and Milton Nascimento.