Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen HERZOG OF THE JUNGLE ANOTHER RAIDER OF THE LOST ART THE OPENING IMAGE of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo is the Cayahuari Yacu in South America, a mist-shrouded jungle to which the Indians...
...Between the regard Herzog has for the Campas one minute and the callousness he shows toward them the next, the only consistency is that of the self, Only in his all-consuming personality are such contraditions of feeling reconciled...
...When a friend became sick in Munich, he walked there from Paris, instead of flying, as a "protest" against the illness...
...If the jungle where the Campas live continues being cleared at the present rate, it will be gone by 2010...
...then, in order to get to the rubber trees, he becomes obsessed with dragging a river-boat over an isthmus...
...Fitzcarraldo is the story of a ne'er-do-well at the turn of the century who wants to build an opera house in a Peruvian backwater...
...All the difficulties he was having at this point only seemed to strengthen his resolve...
...and from his base in Iquito, Peru, he moved his primary locations fifteen hundred miles up-river into the jungle interior...
...For all his physical courage and bravado, Herzog has not yet faced the one truth that requires moral courage from an artist...
...Since Herzog was also having trouble with some Indians whose participation was crucial, he decided to start over again almost from scratch...
...It tries to draw everything within its view, including jungles, into itself...
...As the boat thrashes around in the rapids, its propellers churning though it's supposed to be adrift, it seems only a last, perfect image of Herzog himself, foundering in the chaos of his own plot...
...That plot has been fatally flawed since the beginning...
...Although the cables held, impending disasters like this prompted Herzog to an even greater hubris than before...
...What emerges from Blank's film is the sheer enormity of Herzog's ego, his ability to see everyone and everything as an aspect of himself...
...Aguirre is Herzog's best film...
...He began to talk as if nature had failed rather than his film...
...It's this heady confusion of reality and fantasy that is possible for him only when the former becomes as dangerous as what is being depicted in the latter...
...The example I was discussing last time was Michelangelo Antonioni, whose new film, Identification of a Woman, has been made too much in the shadow of his classic L'Avventura...
...The pulley system attached to the boat was so overtaxed that the engineer in charge resigned, warning there was a seventy-percent chance the cables would snap and kill many of the Indians working them...
...One suspects, however, that the special quality he wants is actually being induced in himself...
...His behavior suggests that making movies has become the same kind of obsession for Herzog...
...His script called for the Indians to help Fitzcarraldo pull a full-fledged riverboat, intact, over a steep isthmus separating two rivers...
...The reason he gives for going fifteen hundred miles to shoot scenes that might have been done near Iquito is that the distance and isolation in the jungle will bring out "special qualities" in his actors...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...That film is the triumph Herzog hoped to repeat with Fitzcarraldo...
...At another point in Burden, Herzog is examining an arrow with which a Campas has been shot by another tribe...
...When he took Kinski up-river again after the initial setbacks on the new movie, Herzog was making a desperate attempt to save himself by re-creating risks that had worked out so well before...
...Notice, also, how easily his mind slides over discrepancies between real life and his fantasy life...
...He's gotten the whole process backwards, with the result that it doesn't work for him any more...
...I live my life, or I end my life, with this project...
...Yet it's hard to imagine how they could despoil the terrain more roughly than Herzog did...
...The trees here are vile and base," he declared...
...That's the best Herzog could hope for as well, having merged too completely with his hero...
...No oil companies will be allowed in...
...The only harmony is overwhelming and collective murder...
...This is a bit of self-admiration, for he once did something similar...
...He is a man obsessed with obsession itself...
...This is the possibility that, having nothing more to say, he should fall silent...
...At the new location, Herzog worked with a more cooperative Indian tribe, the Campas...
...These conditions existed only once before on a Herzog film, when he made Aguirre, the Wrath of God...
...In Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog's career takes a similar turn...
...There comes a point when artists, like oil companies, shouldn't go on uprooting trees in the name of progress...
...It crashes down the rapids there, miraculously staying afloat, but in the end landing back at Iquito with nothing to show for the effort...
...in order to finance his dream, he becomes equally obsessed with starting a rubber plantation in the jungle...
...In my previous column I was talking about the misfortune of great filmmakers who are doomed by their own originality...
...They lack even in excitement...
...In the jungle, everything went wrong, worse than in Iquito...
...When a Campas war party leaves to revenge the incident, thus halting production, Herzog remarks dejectedly, "I'm running out of fantasy...
...The birds are in misery...
...They just screech in pain...
...So few people in any walk of life have the character to do that...
...He prevailed upon Klaus Kinski, star of three of his earlier films, to take over the lead...
...Near the end of the shooting schedule, when the boat went over the rapids, Herzog again risked other people's life and limb to get what he wanted...
...First Fitzcarraldo is obsessed with building an opera house in Iquito...
...Although Herzog clearly wants us to see him as a sympathetic and romantic character, he is someone in whom obsession becomes detached, abstract, the way it is in Macbeth and Richard HI...
...When he made Aguirre, Herzog went off into the jungle because he was inspired, and for the same reason, he overcame the difficulties that he faced there...
...When an Indian is attacked in reality, he reacts as a character might in his films...
...Their initial success with the medium makes their subsequent work look self-derivative...
...At one point, for instance, he talks admiringly of those Campas who reached his location on foot rather man by the air service he provided...
...He calmly told Blank, "If I abandoned this project, I would be a man without dreams...
...Between Blank's film and Herzog's own, we realize that Her-zog's imagination is becoming a kind of human maelstrom...
...It's the other film for which he went off into the jungle with Kinski...
...The original stars were Jason Robards and Mick Jagger...
...Herzog muses that he might give the bloody arrow to his son, who would be "excited" to know it actually hit someone...
...Herzog reflects that Fitzcarraldo is able "to turn it into some kind of victory, a very painful one...
...Herzog therefore arranged that title to the land he had acquired as a location would revert to the Indians upon his film's completion...
...Yet these scenes are anti-climactic and unaffecting...
...To finance his scheme, he tries to establish a rubber plantation in inaccessible jungle...
...As I said at the beginning of my previous column, out of the whole history of modern art lean think of only one example, Marcel Duchamp...
...Its title character is the ultimate Herzog hero, a complete megalomanaic for whom Fitzcarraldo is the closest counterpart...
...Just as the conflicting attitudes expressed in Blank's documentary finally come together only in Herzog himself, all the eclectic allusions Burden makes to Herzog's earlier work meet in Aguirre...
...A theme running through Blank's movie is that truly primitive tribes like this will soon vanish...
...Now he goes into the jungle and purposely creates difficulties in order to become inspired...
...To accomplish this, Herzog had a huge tract of jungle cut right down to mud...
...But when the shooting schedule was already half finished, both of them had to quit the film...
...Part of the reason the film is even worth talking about is that the debacle of its making was recorded in a documentary entitled Burden of Dreams by Les Blank...
...They don't sing...
...Nature is in misery...
...Screen HERZOG OF THE JUNGLE ANOTHER RAIDER OF THE LOST ART THE OPENING IMAGE of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo is the Cayahuari Yacu in South America, a mist-shrouded jungle to which the Indians refer as "the land where God didn't finish Creation.'' Despite the strangeness of the place, the image has deja vu quality, for it's very like the opening of an earlier Herzog movie, Hearts of Glass, where the mists are those of high, icy mountains...
...In Burden, Herzog summarizes the plot of Fitzcarraldo, explaining how the boat is dragged over the isthmus only to be cut loose by the Indians on the other side...
...This is the kind of ghoulishness on which the humor in Herzog's Nosferatu is based...
...We see that he is capable of turning both the arrow and the Indian whom it struck into mere figments of his imagination...
...Thousands of trees were absorbed into his "dreams," and disappeared there...
Vol. 109 • December 1982 • No. 21
