Werner Herzog's FITZCARRALDO is a Mesmerizing Metaphor For Filmmaking
Everyone has holes in his or her film education. No one has time to see everything, so there are always movies, filmographies, or sometimes entire genres that fall through the cracks. For me, one of those big holes in my film knowledge is missing out on the films of Werner Herzog. So this week I set out to change that by finally carving out time to watch one of his most famous movies, 1982's Fitzcarraldo, for the first time.
If you haven't seen it, I'll give a very brief rundown of the plot. Set in the early 1900s, the movie follows a man named known as Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) who is driven by a single-minded obsession: to bring the opera to the jungles of Peru. He acquires a parcel of land from the government with the intention of obtaining enough rubber from its trees to fund his dream. The rubber business is booming, so the only available tract of land is located in a section of the jungle that's extremely difficult to get to. Fitzcarraldo realizes that he could conceivably head down one river until he reaches a point where it nearly touches a separate river with only about a mile of mountain in between the two bodies of water, and concocts a plan to pull the ship up and over the mountain into the other river to reach his parcel.
Warning: spoilers for the film ahead.
If you've seen the movie, you know that he miraculously accomplishes that goal, but immediately afterwards, his plan is foiled by the very natives who helped him; they untie the ship on the first night its in the new river as a sacrifice to the gods, and it floats through intense rapids and is very nearly destroyed. Heartbroken, Fitzcarraldo returns to his home with nothing to show for his months of work and sells the boat back to the man he bought it from originally. His dream has been crushed. But in a small triumph, he uses the money from the boat sale to rent a group of traveling singers to come to his city and perform an opera. The film ends with him smoking a cigar with a look of satisfaction on his face, having achieved some small portion of his grand original plan.
A few quick thoughts. First, the movie takes a good while to get to its central Sisyphean metaphor of pulling the ship up the mountain, but once it does, it becomes completely mesmerizing to watch because you can see that there are real stakes involved and real people are involved with actually pulling this behemoth through the jungle. It's a wonderful confluence of dreams between Herzog and his lead character, and the result is astounding to behold.
But mostly, the movie struck me as one of the best metaphors for filmmaking I've ever seen. Talk to any director about making movies, and one of the first things they'll tell you is that the job is all about compromise. Someone (or a group of people) has a shared vision about what a film is going to be, and production is all about overcoming as many obstacles as possible in order to achieve that vision to the best of everyone's abilities. It's extremely rare a film turns out exactly as the director originally intended. Fitzcarraldo centers on one man's big dream, and even though at one point it appears that he achieves it, unexpected circumstances pop up to foil his plans. Left with no other options, the main character (the director in this metaphor) does what he can with what he has left to capture any sense of that original dream and share it with the world.
If you haven't seen the movie and read this far anyway, I'd recommend checking it out and then immediately watching Burden of Dreams, a documentary about the making of the film that features tons of behind the scenes footage and interviews with Herzog and the cast. It gives a bunch of insight into their mindset while making this movie, and some of the footage and stories in that doc are absolutely crazy. I'd put it up there with films like Heart of Darkness (about Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now), Lost in La Mancha (about Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote), and Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's The Island of Dr. Moreau as one of the greatest documentaries about filmmaking ever made.
In the comments, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, and any Herzog recommendations you have for which of his films I should watch next.