with the voice of caruso
by Douglas Messerli
By comparison, the film’s events,
beautifully filled by cinematographer Thomas Mauch, look more like a picnic.
But, obviously, the real turmoil of the shooting is what helps to make the film
so monumental. When the film’s dangerous Amazonia natives threaten the ship and
its denizens, we realize that the actor-natives were, in fact, playing out some
of their hate of Kinski.
Fitzcarraldo, quite simply, represents
the acts of a madman, the character simply standing in for the mad machinations
of the director. A failure in his last business venture, the creation of
Trans-Andrean railways, the dreamer hero finds himself in the backwater town of
Iqauitos, in love with the local beauty, Molly (Claudia Cardinale), the owner
of the town’s successful brothel. His only other cohorts are the several
village
children, who
love his offers of free ice, and a pig. But Fitzcarraldo has a love even
greater than that his love of the pig, children, and Molly: he is enthralled
with opera, particularly with the singing of Enrico Caruso, and he is determined
to bring Caruso to Iquitos to in sing a newly constructed opera house. The film
begins with a hurried journey to another Peruvian city via a small rowboat,
with Molly in hand, to see Caruso—a trip that has taken him several days and
has resulted in lacerations of his hand. The couple does not even have a ticket
to the gala event, which is nearly over by the time they reach the opera house,
but they find a way to wheedle themselves in for the final moments of the opera
and tell the opera house manager of their plans to build such a grand palace in
Iqauitos.
The opera house manager and the citizens
of Iquitos perceive Fitzcarraldo for what he is, a kind of lunatic. But, we
realize along with Molly, that it is often the unconquerable spirits of such
truly crazed individuals who accomplish what might never otherwise be. And
Molly, clearly in love with her crazy suitor is willing to bankroll is rubber
land venture and helps him to buy the huge boat. Fitzcarraldo, along with an
experienced, if slightly near-sighted Captain (Paul Hittscher) even manages to
gather a crew, including the wily but traitorous Cholo (Migues Ángel Fuentes)
and a perpetually drunken cook, Huerequeque (Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez),
who insists on two women assistant chefs. The other men he finds for the trip
are tough sailors, all fairly handy with guns and aware of the dangers of the
trip.
None of them, however, know of
Fitzcarraldo’s mad schemes, and become disoriented the minute he begins their
voyage moving off in the wrong direction on the wrong river. Dissention
immediately arises but is eventually quelled with the firing of some men and
the two women cooks, that is until they reach the region of the unfriendly native tribes who inhabit the
jungle, and have previously killed and beheaded missionaries and other would-be
travelers. The eerie voyage through the native territory, where they are met by
a strange babble of noises, is so unnerving to the sailors that they mutiny,
leaving the boat with only Fitzcarraldo, the Captain, Cholo, and the cook to
continue.
The unstoppable Fitzcarraldo, however,
offers his increasingly hostile enemies the only thing he has to give: his
operatic love, playing out Caruso’s voice on his wind-up gramophone, which so awes
the pipe-playing natives that, as they close in, they not only allow the men to
live but feed them and sign themselves on to the trip.
They continue upstream with good cheer
until they discover Fitzcarraldo’s insane plan to move the ship over the
mountain. But even here, the audacity of the event elicits their help, until
the ship falls backwards down the slippery hill, killing one of their own. The
natives disappear, but eventually return, clearly with some reservations. When
Huerequeque suggests they use the boat’s engine along with the pulleys,
however, the trip up the mountains resumes, miraculously ending with the boat
slipping down, like a thirsty elephant, into the Pachitea. A drunken
celebration follows, at which the boat’s original crew members pass out. Late
in the night the head of the natives cuts the boat’s securing rope to appease
the river gods, sending it downstream in a mad fall into the rapids.
After several crashes into the rock-laden
shores of the river, the boat surprisingly survives, but the down-hearted
Fitzcarraldo arrives back in Iquitos without any rubber. He is able, however,
to sell the refurbished steamboat back to the rubber baron, and, before giving
over the vessel, sends the captain off to the distant opera house to bring back
Caruso and the entire cast to perform on its deck, finally bringing opera to
the backlands.
While this truly “operatic” story may seem
slow-moving at times and highly unbelievable, we recognize that it really
happened—not in the past, but in Herzog’s cinematic present. And that very fact
turns this film from a cinematic fiction into a kind of daring cinematic act, a
spectacle of insistence that movies really matter, that they can create
realities vastly larger than life. Few directors—I am reminded of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Tarkovsky’s films—have dared to put so much on the line
in filmmaking. And if, in all these works there is something, at times, “over
the top,” we also know that we are seeing something we will never encounter
again, and could never exist otherwise in “real” life.
Los Angeles,
August 26, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment