A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

One of the curiosities about the filmography of Werner Herzog is that it contains his own little two-film micro-genre – “fanatical madman played by Klaus Kinski goes up the Amazon to the music of Popol Vuh.” His first foray is 1972’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, which is quite possibly one of my favourite films of all times. So when I came to Fitzcarraldo, the other of the two films, I was both excited and filled with trepidation. Would it meet the earlier film’s dizzying heights?

For me personally, it didn’t. Not quite. But this does not mean that it is a bad film. Far from it: its another fascinating, engaging oddity from Herzog. Like all his films, they feel uniquely his. Nobody seems inclined to tell the sort of stories he’s drawn to. Right from the beginning you can sense his presence, when the opening text tells the audience:

Cayahuari Yacu, the jungle Indians, call this country “the land where God did not finish Creation
Only after man has disappeared, they believe, will He return to finish His work

That’s how you start a film! That’ll grab ’em, Werns. It’s probably not in the slightest bit true, but presented over striking visuals of the Amazon rain forest, it works.

To reduce the story to its simplest: Fitzcarraldo is the tale of an Irish immigrant to South America who is so obsessed with opera he wants to have it performed in the heart of a jungle. In order to enable this, plot contrivances end up with him insisting that a large boat is hauled across a small area of jungle to connect two different Amazonian rivers. And, inevitably, his insistence veers into the obsessive.

This is where I brought my baggage from Aguirre, Wrath of God into the mix. Of course this obsessional lunatic will be a danger. Of course his mad journey will end in dark disaster. He will be punished for his hubristic dreams, an arrogance that fails to realise his actual place in a vast landscape is clearly doomed.

And this lead is Klaus Kinski – whose very nature on screen in both films seems to be wild and dangerous. He’s a man who is incapable of seeing his own folly, but who also, you sense, will cause much suffering to others to realise the unrealisable. It doesn’t help, I think, to have learnt so much about the actor and his abusive, predatory, violent nature. Not a million miles away from his character in Aguirre, Wrath of God. Whereas a few years back his volatile nature was celebrated as the hallmark of an obsessional actor, the extent to which his behaviour was so harmful and disgusting in real life makes it harder to see that anymore. He’s a viler person playing what I’m seeing as a vile character. And I know this is petty, but it doesn’t help that Kinski speaks his English lines with such a strong German accent while everyone in the film insists he’s clearly “Irish”.

Which is all to say that one of the things I find most jarring about Fitzcarraldo is that having been primed to dislike this lunatic lead character, the film ends up not telling the story I expected it to. Indeed, it almost wants us to see this tale as a triumph of the human obsession with art. The ending feels like a vindication, rather than anything dark and satirical.

I appreciate this is all my own baggage and I can’t help feeling I would have none of these problems if Herzog had been able to complete the film with the original lead – Jason Robards. His version of Brian “Fitzcarraldo” Fitzgerald would have been at least convincing as Irish American. His mad dream more that of an eccentric, avuncular figure. Forty percent of the film was shot with Robards playing the lead (alongside Mick Jagger as his assistant!) before illness meant he had to leave the shoot permanently.

The loss of the leading man so far into production is just indicative of the massive struggles Herzog had to make the film, and the full story can be found in the film Burden of Dreams, which is well worth a watch. It’s hard not to see Herzog’s own desire to finish this hugely ambitious production with Fitzcarraldo’s attempt to have opera performed far into the Amazon. Which does help me see this film as something other than sitting in Aguirre‘s shadow.

That said, I still can’t quite help make the comparison. The importance of opera to the film means that Popol Vuh end up delivering a much more conventional orchestral score to the whole thing. Which just makes me miss their beautiful, unearthly score from a decade earlier, a genuinely groundbreaking piece of work that proved that synthesizers could capture emotion and scale in the cinema, and weren’t just for sci-fi curios. I mean, its not a bad score at all. It’s just not what I hoped it could have been.

High quality restorations also don’t help the film either. It’s genuinely impressive to see the scenes shot in the Amazon with a real large boat being dragged out the water. But this is undermined slightly when an immaculate presentation lets you see some of the later shots as clearly small model work. Why didn’t you chuck a real giant boat down those rapids, Werner, you coward!

This all feels incredible mean, though. A very roundabout way of coming to my conclusion that Fitzcarraldo is really a film worth seeing. It’s visually striking, tells a story nobody else would and its hard not to get caught up in it, especially on the big screen. There is no shame in finishing second to a movie as brilliant as Aguirre, Wrath of God. And if Herzog ever decides to return to the Amazon to shoot another fabulous tale, I’ll still be there on opening night.