On Screen

...We see the commissioner initially resist and then succumb to the contractor's offerings, without being given the slightest reason for his sudden change of heart...

...several died in the real-life shooting of the film...

...He also throws in pastel-painted interiors, Danish modern furniture and plenty of neon????as if the key to making a film about the '50s were to shoot it in the style of the period...

...In some ways the vainglory of the character's ambitions pales next to the director's: Only one Indian dies on screen...

...The Indians, it turns out, have been obliging Fitzcarraldo only in order to cut the boat loose as a sacrifice to their river god...

...I only wish he wouldn't implicate me, not to mention ignorant Indians, in what he thinks is art...

...Instead of being the story of a man who finds himself in the grips of a heroic vision, Fitzcarraldo thus seems like a case study of a lunatic...

...The acting of the three leads is competent, but somehow cold...

...Fitzcarraldo and his remaining crew celebrate with the Indians and soon fall asleep on the boat, exhausted (never mind that the Indians did all the work...

...His notion is to ferry the rubber back to the portage, where it will be transported overland to the Pachitea and finally to Iquitos by another vessel...

...But before turning it over to the new owner, he uses the proceeds to import a small opera company for one performance, delivered on the deck while steaming past an amazed crowd in the Iquitos harbor...

...The second was his hearing about a rubber baron named Fitzcarrald who had once dismantled a boat, transported it from one river to another, and then reassembled it...

...There is, to be sure, something impressive about the sight of a huge boat inching its way up a hill, or hurtling through white water, as a result of a character's idee fixe...

...With the aid of Caruso's voice on a windup record player, Fitzcarraldo charms the Indians into helping him...

...And toward the audience: Did Fassbinder really believe we would take this kitsch seriously...

...After much agony, the death of one Indian who is crushed when a winch slips, and an unexplained work stoppage, the boat climbs the hill and precariously descends the other side...

...The rebuilding of Germany wasn't Weimar...

...The overall tone of the film is one of ironic condescension????toward the classic it is based on, toward the melodramatic story, toward the characters, toward the Adenauer era (a recurring motif in Fassbinder's films...

...The other rubber barons refuse to cooperate...

...after all, that one was about the Conquistadors...

...If he wants to waste three years of his life in search of new adventures, I don't mind...

...And when he puts ashore, Fitzcarraldo finds that the small space separating the two rivers on the map is actually a steep hill overgrown with trees and jungle flora...

...But what is most striking about the hill sequence is our awareness that the boat is actually being hauled up and down the slope, whether by hand or by machine...

...True, much of what is seemingly done by manpower in the movie was really accomplished with the help of bulldozers...

...That last feat needs some explaining, although the explanation, like the prime mover in the plot whom it involves, is absurd: Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), known as Fitzcarraldo to the Peruvians, is no less obsessed with conquering the jungle on screen than the filmmaker is in reality...

...In fact, the desire to bring music to the jungle seems less an authentic passion of the character than an arbitrary and flamboyant gesture by the director at the beginning and end of the film, a feeble excuse for some admittedly gripping sequences...

...Except this time the story is explicitly based on a movie classic, The Blue Angel (WO), directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Mar-lene Dietrich...

...Whatever Kinski's talents may be, he has unfortunately been typed as a movie madman...

...His effort, however, comes off something like the old white man's burden, which now as in the past always winds up being borne by nonwhite primitives...

...As his boat approaches the bend in the Pachitea near the Ucayali, it is surrounded by headhunting Indians in canoes...

...No doubt any motive would seem an insufficient cause for the loony action that occupies the bulk of the story...

...Similarly, his discovery of Lola's treachery is reversed immediately afterward by his decision to marry her, again with little motive indicated...

...Apparently it was not enough for him to shootLaSoufriere{l976) on the rim of a volcano due to erupt...

...Most of his crew mutinies...

...Herzog claims two sources of inspiration for this improbable story...

...You'd think the Peruvians would have had enough of him after Aguirre...

...Although the story has the shape of a soap opera, genuine emotions are undercut by the self-consciousness of Fassbinder's stylistic devices, the choppiness that results from the lack of transitions and the general narrative incoherence...

...He became intrigued with how the Stone Age men moved them there...

...So right away the content of the film clashes with its form...

...As poor as he is mad, he arranges a loan from Molly (Claudia Cardinale), the local madam, to buy the steamboat he needs to make enough money as a rubber planter to finance his dream...

...In many ways Herzog is the last great German imperialist...

...In Lola he shows us once again (as in The Marriage of Maria Braun) the rise of Germany from the ruins of the War...

...After noticing that the navigable Pachitea River winds within a kilometer of the Ucayali at one point, he is determined to have his boat lugged from one river to the other...

...There he sells the boat to a competitor...

...Or to get trapped for five days on a raft in a whirlpool during the filming of Aguirre, the WrathofGod(\912...

...Lola herself is more a creature of the decadent '20s than of the Wirtschafts-wunder...

...They clear both sides of the hill, dig trenches and fill them with logs for the boat to roll over, build 10 wooden winches that will each be turned by several men at once, anchor the contraptions to the hillside, loop giant ropes around the ship????and slowly begin hoisting it out of the water onto the slope...

...Fitzcarraldo is nonetheless undeterred...

...These traits are apparent in many of his films...

...Ever in search of more staggering projects, Herzog traveled 1,600 miles up the Amazon into the Peruvian jungle for Fitzcarraldo, landed in the middle of a border dispute between Peru and Ecuador, and provoked a tribal war that left his camp burned to the ground????forcing him to relocate 1,500 miles away...

...As a climax to his moviemaking and the movie, he paid, persuaded and cajoled 250 Cam-pa Indians to haul a 320-ton steamboat over a 40-degree hill a couple of hundred feet high...

...When the would-be rubber planters awaken, they find themselves plunging uncontrollably down the Ucayali toward the Rapids of Death...

...Once again the central character is a woman of dubious (conventional) morality, a prostitute/nightclub singer (Barbara Sukowa...

...Fassbinder's story of how she seduces a heretofore incorruptible building commissioner (Armin Muel-ler-Stahl) at the behest of a dishonest contractor (Mario Adorf) thus seems a little incongruous set in the context of postwar Germany and filmed in the manner of Sirk...

...Just as Herzog represents one aspect of the German Geist, the 19th-century visionary imperialist, his countryman Rainer Werner Fassbinder embodies another, the mid-20th-century Kitschmeister...

...To top everything off, Fassbinder, like his compatriots in the new German cinema, typically shows little patience for narrative...

...It will hardly come as a surprise that he is unpersuasive as an Irishman...

...An Irish expatriate in Iquitos at the turn of the century, Fitzcarraldo dreams of bringing his idol, Enrico Caruso, to the jungle for a performance of Verdi...

...A mere 36 years old when he died earlier this year, Fassbinder was very much a child of the '50s, weighted down with the collective guilt of postwar Germany and overwhelmed by American popular culture His reaction to both was to cultivate a morbid sentimentality edged with an irony that (one suspects) had its roots in his homosexuality...

...The only rubber trees left unclaimed in the Peruvian jungle are far up the Ucayali River, beyond the impassable Rapids of Death...

...In Lola, Fassbinder relies on garish and often inappropriate red and blue lighting, stagey big moments designed to jerk tears, faces in shadows with the eyes alone illuminated by spotlights (making them look as though they were covered by those plastic beach visors...

...Herzog isn't calling our imagination into play, he's trying to overwhelm our sense of reality, of what's possible...

...Throughout his career, Fassbinder aped the style of Douglas Sirk, the Danish-born director whose work included classical theater in Germany and, as a refugee in the United States during the '40s and '50s, such weepy epics as Imitation of Life...

...With his wild eyes and a hairdo that appears to have been styled by whoever did the Bride of Fran-kenstein's, he looks ignobly insane from the very start...

...Yet the spectacle is in the service of a vaulting romantic preoccupation, the engineer controlled by the idea...

...You have to wonder, though, whether Herzog had to manufacture such an unlikely tale, and stretch it out to nearly three hours, simply to give us those two sequences...

...In the latest film he has written, produced and directed, Fitzcarraldo, scheduled to be the finale of the 20th annual New York Film Festival (which began September 24 and concludes October 10), he seems determined to prove that the important thing about what you see on screen is the effort required to get it there...

...How a love of grand opera fits into all this is a bit unclear...

...Badly battered, Fitzcarraldo's craft manages to survive the rapids, and he returns to Iquitos...

...The first was his encountering????during the production of Every Man for Himself and God Against All (1975)????the gigantic prehistoric stone blocks set in the ground near the coast of Brittany...

...The real lunatic, of course, is Her-zog, who is a curious combination of technocrat and seer, in Fitzcarraldo, he sees his enterprise in spectacular proportions: the large-scale manipulation of men and objects (a la D. W. Griffith, or, to take a lesser example, Cecil B. DeMille...

...The arbitrariness is underscored by Kinski's acting...

...Difficulties plague Fitzcarraldo at each step of his grand scheme...

...He spent three years in preproduction and nine months in production, losing three leading men (Jack Nicholson, Warren Oates and Jason Robards) plus one supporting actor (Mick Jagger...