"FITZCARRALDO" UPLIFTING

          Current as ever.
          Klaus Kinski stars in Werner Herzog's masterpiece about a man obsessed with building an opera house in the Amazon jungle.
          Fitzcarraldo's dream is to get the greatest tenor in the world, Enrico Caruso himself, to sing at the opera's premiere, and in order to reach his financial goal to make this crazy dream come true, he's perfectly willing to hold a church hostage until he gets his way.
          Seems like a good idea at the time, the place being Iquitos, a frontier town in Peru with rent four times higher than in New York. It's called the richest city in the world, a place where horses drink champagne, and a guy feeds his fish hundred dollar bills. Formerly an ice-maker, Fitz shifts gears and decides to finance his opera house dream with a dangerous scheme to access a wealth of rubber, a scheme which has one crucial hitch: He'll have to drag a steamboat over a mountain.
          And in order to film this, that's exactly what the director did.
          Fitzcarraldo (1982) is a story about sheer determination. That, also ingenuity, teamwork, exploitation, obsession, and in a weird way, the filmmaker Herzog himself, whose vision of cinema encompasses picking up where German film left off prior to the impediment of fascism, and carrying on.
          Sharp chirps and shrill trills of exotic birds in creaking primordial trees accentuate fantastic Amazon photography rife with raging cataracts. Dangers traveling upriver into the ever-deepening jungle echo shades of Apocalypse Now. The jungle, with its deafening insect hum, is full of "lies, demons, and illusions." To the indigenous people, "everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams." To Fitz, opera is the expression of deepest feeling, and this may be sufficient reason to build an opera house anywhere, but he's also driven to do something that no one's ever done for that sake alone, as well.
          White-clad Kinski embodies the figure of colonial exploitation; Herzog's camera catches the towering temper always in his eyes. Off-camera, the indigenous Jivaros, who were deeply unimpressed with the German actor's abusive prima donna behavior, literally offered to kill Klaus Kinski for Werner Herzog. Like a parting gift.
          To learn more about the making of the film, and the stormy working relationship between the great director and his eccentric star, check out the documentaries Burden of Dreams and My Best Fiend.


FITZCARRALDO
Starring Klaus Kinski,
Claudia Cardinale,
Miguel Angel Fuentes,
Paul Hittscher,
Huerequeque Enrique Bohorquez,
Peter Berling
Written and directed by Werner Herzog
Runtime 158 minutes
Rated PG


Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
and
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE