Fitzcarraldo - 1982 film
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Director / Screenwriter: Werner Herzog
By Roderick Heath
Werner Herzog’s career has been one of the strangest of great living filmmakers, fitting for a director always aware of the absurd element of existence and rapt by collisions of life and art. The young talent of the New German Cinema movement emergent in the late 1960s who caught the eye of critics like Pauline Kael even with his short films. The alien auteur on the international film scene in the 1970s and ‘80s. The incessant documentary maker. The internet age ironic pop culture meme, guerrilla film school guru, professional iconoclast, and latter-day character actor, careers sustained while still turning out unique but often ignored movies. All the same man, all displaying different facets of the same great talent and restless creative zest. Herzog, born Werner Stipetić in Munich to a German father and Austro-Croatian mother in 1942, was a child of a bleak age and a country defined by surreal disparities. His mother fled Munich to a remote Bavarian village when Herzog was only two weeks old, after the house next to theirs was hit by an Allied bomb. Even in their new, remote locale Herzog could see the flicker of burning cities lighting the horizon.
Herzog grew up over the next few years in a household without common utilities like running water or a telephone, in the company of other children who ran wild with their fathers off at war. He didn’t see his first film until a travelling projectionist showed on in the local schoolhouse. Although his father eventually abandoned the family, Herzog adopted his father’s surname because it sounded more impressive, returned to Munich with his mother and siblings, and when father and son were reunited many years later they literally didn’t speak the same language. As a teenager Herzog developed passionate interests, but the idea of becoming a filmmaker soon overtook all else. He stole a 35 mm camera from the Munich Film School, which he later characterised not as a theft but an act of necessity. He also developed a reflexive resistance to authority as manifested by bullying schoolteachers, and worked as a steelworker at night to finance his student film projects. Amidst various, sometimes near-fatal travels, he spent stints living in Manchester, where he followed a girlfriend and first started learning English, and in the United States as a student, the latter experience one he would channel into his notoriously caustic portrait of the immigrant experience, Stroszek (1977). He founded his own production company in the early 1960s, around the time he forged his first short film, Herakles (1962).
After several more shorts, Herzog produced his debut feature, Signs of Life (1968). His follow-up, Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), gained attention for its evocation of the physically unusual and grotesque in portraying the disabled denizens of an institution taking it over, whilst Fata Morgana (1971), built around footage he took in the Sahara desert recording mirages, established his habit of casually collapsing the distance between poetic and documentary filmmaking. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) really put Herzog on the map, however, with is unsettling, perverse, inexorable portrait of the ill-fated Spanish Conquistador who vanishes in the Amazon Jungle after succumbing to ever-deeper delusions of grandeur, a process Herzog identified as the logical end of the imperialist project, in the face of a vast, inimical natural landscape. Herzog’s stylistic vigour, with his lunging, wide-angle lensing on hypermobile and often handheld camerawork, and his blending of the immersive and happenstance method of documentary shooting with a defined artistic viewpoint, left a permanent mark on artistically ambitious filmmakers henceforth, particularly on the likes of Peter Weir and Terrence Malick.
Every Man For Himself And God Against All, aka The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Stroszek, and Woyzeck (1979), continued to contemplate oddballs and misfits completely at odds with societies so alien to them they might as well have been parachuted in or otherwise drive them to crazed acts, all approached by the director with a blend of sickly estrangement and woozy compassion. Heart of Glass (1976) offered a bizarre portrait of the rural Germany he had grown up in and its medieval past that ultimately shaded into a fractured parable for the human condition. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) allowed Herzog to work through his obsession with F.W. Murnau’s original film and its oneiric imagery, converting its visual and thematic lexicon into his own as he blended high Expressionist style with his own cool blend of the naturalistic and the hallucinatory. When Herzog unearthed a scrap of historical information about the adventures of a Peruvian-Irish rubber baron named Brian Sweeney Fitzcarrald, a typical figure from the age of the "rubber boom" that gripped the Amazon basin from around 1890 to 1920, Herzog was fascinated enough to make his personal take on that story the subject of a film.
This one that would revisit the territory of Aguirre, The Wrath of God, specifically the jungle setting and a new investigation of Herzog’s preoccupation with the impossible effort of being human. He embarked on Fitzcarraldo but found his project metastasising into a test of determination and physical, fiscal, and artistic effort as he shot it on location in the Peruvian Amazon, locked in a hall of mirrors with the very subject of the film, the autobiographical dimensions of which emerged inevitably. Herzog weathered the departure of his first star, Jason Robards, and several supporting players, including Mick Jagger, who was playing a supporting role Herzog decided to excise completely once the singer-turned-actor left to go back on tour with the Rolling Stones. Klaus Kinski, who had worked with Herzog on Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Nosferatu the Vampyre and later became perceived by many as Herzog’s great creative muse, was eventually hired to replace Robards, but his and Herzog’s collaborations, always volatile despite the quality of their work together, became so fractious that Herzog later reported that one local tribal leader proposed killing Kinski for him.
Herzog himself didn’t escape the anger of the locals: one of his film sets was burned down by angry people of the Aguaruna nation, on whose land the movie was being made and who were working on the shoot, after several of their people were injured. Herzog found himself following in the footsteps of filmmakers like Erich von Stroheim, with Greed (1924) and Fritz Lang, with Metropolis (1927), and keeping company with contemporaries like Michael Cimino and Francis Coppola, as a filmmaker walking the tightrope of vision above the chasm of career suicide, as he might has well have been burning money to drive the engine of the steamship that features in the movie. The experience as a whole was recorded by the late Les Blank in his famous documentary Burden of Dreams (1982). Whether all that agony was worth the result is one of those grey zones of artistic effort, but the film itself is its own affirmation: the very crux of Fitzcarraldo as a story is that all human effort is, to some degree or another, a magnificently pointless expression of need, an urge that has no rational explanation, other to tilt against the scale and triviality of the universe. If Aguirre, The Wrath of God was the death dream concomitant to that viewpoint, with its voyage to the conqueror’s oblivion, Fitzacarraldo offers the mythical counterweight, a hymn to raging life and the enigmatic power of human energy.
Central to the film and its hero’s quest is an obsession with Grand Opera as the pure stuff of life, analogue to Herzog’s passion for cinema on the most obvious level but also persisting in weird and fascinating counterpoint to his actual efforts: how much effort humans expend to indulge the habits of the fantasias they weave with their minds in near-obliviousness to the actual world about them, the conviction that life without that extra level of the fantastic, the creative, the dream-enfolding, is without point, without differentiation from the old Hobbesian concept of the life as short, nasty, and brutish. Herzog’s anointed hero is Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Kinski), son of an Irish adventurer, his name transliterated to Fitzcarraldo to suit the local lingua and known to the few people close to him as Fitz. As an ultimate personal ambition, Fitz is preoccupied with reproducing the grand conceit achieved to unique and surreal effect by the Brazilian Amazonian city of Manaus, which built a marvellous classical opera house, in his chosen home of Iquitos, a far cruder city further up the mighty river in Peru. So desperate is Fitz to attend a performance being given by Enrico Caruso in Manaus that he and his lover and partisan, the brothel madam Molly (Claudia Cardinale), travel the 1,000 miles for the performance, and manage to talk a doorman into letting them into the already packed opera house. When Caruso points across the crowd as part of his performance, both Fitz and Molly are certain he pointed at him, as if the very spirit of destiny has chosen Fitz out.
On a more immediate and concrete level, Fitz wants to make himself a success in business, not purely for the sake of wealth or social standing, but to achieve his specific obsessions. Having failed to build what he called the Trans-Andean Railway in a bid to open up the Peruvian Amazon, he’s now set up an ice-producing concern utilising a well-known chemical process and which other entrepreneurs, like the immensely rich rubber baron Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy), mock him for, seeing no market in Iquitos for ice. Fitz’s desire for opera is presented not as a bizarre fixation but as a natural urge, as urgent as any need for food or sex, one that fills his thoughts and lends shape to his many, often absurd enterprises, and the dream-world of the opera is the one that stirs him to such follies. Fitz’s frustration climaxes with him regaling the townsfolk of Iquitos as he dangles from the spire of a city church, ringing the bell like a wannabe Quasimodo or some devolved ape of god, screaming, "I want my opera! I want my opera!" People stand far below, gazing up at the priest of art in bewilderment and irritation, whilst some policemen assemble and bash down the locked door of the church to drag him out, a moment Herzog invests with deadpan humour, as if with some participle of his mind is back with the Keystone Kops.
The actual opera performance of Verdi’s Ernani Fitz and Molly behold in rapture is on one level an absurd spectacle, famous names performing in a pasteboard world of delirious romanticism and where the only thing thicker than the artifice is the makeup. The portly Caruso plays the young romantic hero and Sarah Bernhardt, hired because of her fame, must mime her performance to an offstage singer, her wooden leg hidden beneath her costume but already the talk of the town. But it’s also a world that has more reality to Fitz than the one he lives in, in a manner that corresponds to Herzog’s own desire to seek in his cinema a truthfulness beyond mere realism of the kind he found in conventional cinema verite fare, and one dream-world feeds another. In this regard Herzog at once honours and subverts a fairly classical mode of movie based around the gallant visionary who sees far beyond the limits of the immediately practical to envision, well, new limits of the practical, whereas for Fitz, who always dresses in a white suit, the impracticality is the very point. In the course of his scheme he comes close nonetheless to unifying two largely irreconcilable realms, the world-building, world-trampling zeal of the businessman and the soul-nourishing if often just as tunnel-visioned influence of the artist. Fitz’s fixation to a certain extent saves him even from the darker aspects of such compulsion, aspects Herzog would later meditate on with the mountain climber protagonists of Scream of Stone (1991), tormented by their own egos and pain before the gruelling challenge of a great rock spire in Patagonia, and more notoriously the animal lover eventually consumed by his ‘friends’ in Grizzly Man (2006).
Aquilano is the essential contrast to Fitz, a rotund vulgarian nonetheless entirely at his leisure in the palatial rococo interior of the Manaus Opera which he seems to have helped build and run, boasting of how it’s been built on land worth ten times what real estate goes for New York with materials like imported Florentine marble. It’s all an expression of the bristling demand for prestige on the behalf of his rich little town, raised suddenly out of a jungle outpost to become a great global hub of commerce and industry, and all of it flowing out the simplest labour and a natural bounty. Aquilano strikes matches on a bronze figurine decorating the opera house, declares the feeling of losing money when playing cards to be beautiful, and feeds a bundle of thousand dollar notes to a fish being reared in a pool on his estate, noting that his fish only seem to flourish in that taste. The fish, or one of its fellows, is itself later feed in turn to the assembled grandees of Iquitos. This last flourish presents a particularly inspired metaphor for the roundelay of capitalist endeavour, one that cuts out any aspect of adventure or vision of the kind Fitz purveys so relentlessly, the money seemingly wasted cycled back through the literal bellies of the rich. Here Herzog contemplates the relationship of artist and patron with a Dickensian sense of its absurdity, but the dynamic of supporter and supported is laced with contradictions: only the artist and the priest can break money out of the illustrated capitalist cycle of money spent to make more money. But priests failed to bring civilisation to the wild nations of the Pachitea: "Two padres finished up as shrunken heads," Aquilano tells Fitz.
Despite the differences between them, Aquilano likes Fitz for his energy and enterprise. Fitz also inspires passionate support from Molly, and a flock of children he’s become a father figure to: they camp outside the jail where he’s kept for two days after the church incident, one sawing away incessantly on a fiddle, presenting a spectacle so pathetic it moves the jailer to release Fitz. Fitz lives in a hovel with a pet pig for a companion, and it’s the pig he promises to set up on a red velvet chair every night in his opera house. Meanwhile Molly’s steadfast faith proves most valuable. Her stable of well-trained, well-dressed courtesanas makes them a social fixture in this crude town despite the pretences of the nobs, giving her leverage to wrangle a chance for Fitz to pitch to those nobs for support for his proposed opera house. When Fitz irritates the party by playing them one of his Caruso records, they try to throw him out, resulting in a display of angry pride from him as he gulps down glasses of champagne, dedicating each one to an opera composer, before offering his personal manifesto of defiance. "I will outgut you," Fitz declares: "I will outnumber you. I will outbillion you. I will outrubber you. I will outperform you. Sir, the reality of your world is nothing more than a rotten caricature of great opera." Molly promptly marches her girls out like a troop commander. "Only a dreamer can move mountains," she tells Aquilano when he interview them together in an office of the opera house, and later Fitz steps up to declare that his very object: "I shall move a mountain."
When Fitz decides on Molly’s advice to follow up on Aquilano’s offer to help him get set up in the rubber trade, seeing it as the only way to make his vision reality, he and Aquilano travel together up the Ucayali, a tributary river branching off the Amazon to the east of Iquitos, where Aquilano shows off both his own, immense holdings and the natural barrier that prevents anyone exploiting the land further on: a violent cataract called the Pongo das Mortes, so rough and fast that no boat can traverse it, let alone one large enough to transport loads of rubber, and no other transport route is feasible. "The Indians call the rapids ‘Chirimagua,’ Aquilano tells Fitz, "The Angry Spirits." Approaching the cataract gorge, they’re urged to be silent by Aquilano’s native guide: "We must be quiet," Aqulinao tells Fitz with sceptical humour, "Whoever talks will be swallowed up by the evil spirits of the whirlpool…the bare-asses also said ‘The water has no hair to hold onto.’" Shown a map of the area by Don Aquilino, Fitz notices how another tributary, the Pachitea, runs parallel to the Ucayali on the western side of Iquitos and bends close to it at a point well above the cataract, with only a slim isthmus separating them. Fitz realises, without entirely explaining to anyone for a long time, that if he can transport a boat across the isthmus, he can then use it to bring rubber from his claim across the Ucayali, to then be shipped down the Pachitea. Despite the many immediate and theoretical obstacles such a plan entails, Fitz sets about chasing the scheme with new passion, taking advantage of government policy that seeks to develop unexploited land, but also warned by the notary (William Rose) who arranges the deal he must establish his control of the region "by deed and by proof" within nine months or lose the rights.
The real Fitzcarrald was not nearly as florid and ambitious as Herzog’s poetically intensified equivalent. The boat he transported across land was only 30 tons, and was moved piece by disassembled piece, and he died at the age of 35 when his ship sank underneath him some years into his successful business operation. Fitzcarrald was no romantic figure either, instead typifying the kind of exploitative spirit more commonly associated with the rubber boom, much as Herzog portrays Aquilano and the other barons, wringing forced labour out of the native peoples whilst treating them with contempt. Herzog avoids rhetorical asides in contending with this aspect of the story, allowing it to take care of itself, whilst noting his Fitzcarraldo’s efforts as an odd mix of tentative connections and mutual use. The symbolic menace invested in the Pongo das Mortes by Aquilano proves not just to be a folkloric aside in a story where the cataract is a plot element and a practical foe, but a motif of genuine consequence both in terms of his great need to take on the universe and come out the victor, and in terms of the alliances and understandings – even if no one actually, entirely understands them – he forges along the way. Molly loans him enough money to buy a ship, purchasing one off Aquilano that sits decaying and mudbound on the Amazon shore, but with a little hard work from cheap local labour the vessel, renamed the Molly Aida after the two special women in Fitz’s life, is quickly spruced up and painted white in mimicry of her owner’s sartorial splendour. Fitz takes on a captain, a Dutchman known as "Orinoco Paul" (Paul Hittscher) for his long experience sailing on that rival great river, and a crew, including the boozy, licentious cook Huerequeque (Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez), and a hulking engineer, Cholo (Miguel Ángel Fuentes).
The fully repaired and manned Molly Aida sets out up the Pachitea, but all aboard soon know that’s when the real trouble will start, as the Pachitea is a wild territory controlled by a nation known as the Jivaros, who killed most of the last expedition of missionaries and mapmakers who ventured up there. On the way to the Pachitea, Fitz stops at the one station he managed to build for his busted railroad because he wants to pull up some of the iron rails for use later. He finds one employee, the Station Master (Grande Othelo), still on duty despite not having been paid or visited for six years, and who’s formed a family whilst remaining on the job. The Master is jubilant to see Fitz, who’s utterly bewildered by the man’s presence, as he thought all the employees had been sent home. This tragicomic vignette this time dovetails the Dickensian with the Kafkaesque, in the image of the tattily officious master, forgotten by the vision that placed him there, lording it over a rusting, rotting outpost of failed industry. The Master becomes panicked when Fitz’s men start ripping up the tracks, worried they’re going to leave the one, rusting, already practically immobile steam engine stranded without even the pretence of its dignity, so Fitz spares him that mortification. Herzog’s camera finds an essential cartouche for his aesthetic in surveying the civilised pretences of the station and its stable of mechanical white elephants, quickly being swallowed up again by the jungle’s relentless and careless encroach.
Once they procure the rails, the Molly Aida and its crew start on for the Mission of Saramariza, where some missionaries are teaching natives, who, they claim, now irritably reject the title of "Indians:" an older missionary tells Fitz, "They said to me, ‘Indians are people who can’t read and who don’t know how to wash their clothes.’ Nonetheless, another, younger priest notes quietly as he recounts their ill-fate encounters with the Jivaros, "We can’t seem to cure them of the idea that our everyday life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams." Fitz immediately states that, with his love of opera, he feels kinship with that viewpoint. This sense of kinship becomes a weapon he wields as he travels up the Pachitea. Fitz hears that the Jivaros have been wandering in the jungle for a couple of centuries, searching for the fulfilment of a prophecy, later clarified as involving a "sacred boat with a white god" who will help them lift a curse blighting the whole land. The Molly Aida’s progress is initially greeted by the din of omnipresent drumming, echoing out of the dense foliage and mists clinging to the surrounding hills, indicating the Jivaros are watching their voyage with a sense of defensive threat. The Molly Aida’s crew present a gallery of vivid grotesques who might as well have stumbled out of a classic Hollywood adventure film as made by John Ford or John Huston, particularly the perma-soused Huerequeque, who brings along his two female assistants/concubines to feel up along the way.
Aquilino obliges Fitz to take Cholo along to act, as the tycoon readily admits, as a spy, to make sure he doesn’t poach on any other planter’s preserve. Cholo is initially hostile and cynical towards Fitz’s efforts, is nonetheless entirely won over to his cause when he realises how inspired Fitz’s idea is. Cholo, a towering incarnation of the physical strength of the native peoples, has nonetheless adopted the hard and expedient attitude of one converted to the methods and philosophies of his colonialist masters, with that degree of extra faith that such converts often wield – Herzog would extend this fascination for such a divided character in Where The Green Ants Dream (1984) – nursing his bundles of dynamite to throw at the hostiles in the jungle and bluntly telling Fitz he wants to take the boat back to his usual employer when the time comes. The rest of the crew snatch up rifles and listen with hair-trigger tension before deserting, leaving only Fitz, the Captain, Huerequeque, and Cholo. Fitz’s answer to the frightening enigma is to start blaring out Verdi from his trusty gramophone, bel canto streaming off into the forest, bewitching the forest peoples with a power that’s neither an offence to their beliefs nor a threat to their lives, but simply a strange and beautiful conjuration of worlds beyond the world. The drumming stops, and the Jivaros begin daring to show themselves on the river in boats. Until, finally, they mass together in canoes and block off retreat down the Pachitea by felling huge trees.
Fitzcarraldo can be described in its way as a companion piece and riposte to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a film owed more than a little to Aguirre, The Wrath of God in the first place. Both films depict a journey upriver and a messianic foreign overlord manipulating local peoples into fulfilling his mission. But where Colonel Kurtz embodied a similar quality to Aguirre, the maniacal will to power wielded in the name of some nominal cause that finally becomes its own, self-consuming logic, embodying a dream of death, Fitz brings music, laced with overtones of connection and invocation for life-bringing that’s all the more powerful for having no actual substance, even if Fitz himself doesn’t entirely comprehend the resonances of his actions until the end. Fitz, learning about the Jivaros’ myths through the translations of Huerequeque, realises how he can place the Jivaros in service of his own ambition, without quite considering that they might do the same thing to him. The apparent leader of the Jivaros agrees to help Fitz in his scheme, which he finally unveils in the most thrilling way possible by having a platform built high in a tree, so he and the remnants of his crew can behold the small corner of the Earth they need to make subject to a manmade miracle.
Herzog’s early films had made a deep impact on the world film scene with his often beautiful yet unease-provoking imagery, his fascination and bewilderment before extreme natural landscapes, and sense of ironic contrast between the efforts of the human and the scale and impudence of the world. Aguirre, The Wrath of God famously opens with shots of the conquistadors and their native servants slogging through the teeming jungle like streams of soldier ants, making their inroads only with extraordinary effort. The blaring heroism of older films portraying social, political, and industrial conquest of the New World like, say, How The West Was Won (1962), was swapped out by Herzog’s acerbic conviction that such subjugation was both horrible and largely illusory, and if not illusory, then distinctly Faustian. At the same time, this was balanced by a conviction, half-appalled, half-admiring, that this was still the human mission, a mission communicated with the parable-like coda of Heart of Glass that reduced the human species to a race clinging to a rocky island, challenging the ocean in a boat. The boat motif, returned to here in the evident form of the Molly Aida, becomes the transfixing central metaphor and visual conceit of the film as Fitz and his helmates begin the arduous ritual of dragging up and over the isthmus between the rivers. Herzog’s viewpoint wielded a sense of the intransigence of modernity and western civilisation as crashing into other peoples as well as the natural, whilst harbouring its own neurotic and insidious forces within, like the accursed strain of vampirism that finally escapes into the world in Nosferatu the Vampyre.
Fitzcarraldo, with its portrait of the Amazon being disrupted by industry and portrait of the antipathetic attitudes of modern capitalism and ancient social and religious concepts, was fit for a time in the early 1980s when environmentalist concerns were becoming mainstream and worries over the Amazon in particular were heightened, and sparked a small clutch of films with similar concerns, including John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest (1984), Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986), and John McTiernan’s Medicine Man (1991). Herzog’s woozily mesmerised fascination for the dark mark humanity leaves often on the Earth would climax in the documentary Lessons of Darkness (1992), with its awesome contemplations of the environmental havoc wreaks during the Gulf War with burning oil wells dotting the desert landscape. The side of Herzog’s art rooted in the approach of a documentary filmmaker is vital throughout Fitzcarraldo but also infused to the very root with its symbolic and aesthetic dimensions: Herzog’s capacity to film the real as, well, real – palpably, even pungently immediate, from its famous core image of the ship working its way with agonising effort up a slope on down to the backdrop of Iquitos with its plethora of rusting corrugated iron rooftops and the stains of authentic sweat and grime on Fitz’s white suit. Herzog pushed his immersive method of filming he espoused to its absolute limit, virtually forcing himself to live out the mania of his main character. Thomas Mauch’s cinematography, utilising the clear, lush, if slightly inexpressive palette of early 1980s film stock which aids the feeling of immediacy, particularly in the pivotal sequences of the ship-dragging, which collapses the boundary between record of an event and the conjuration of it for a fictional narrative.
Fizcarraldo can in its way be described as a particularly eccentric variation of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, which Albert Camus had also taken as the essential symbol of the existentialist concept of human endeavour, although it can also be argued that Herzog partly dismantles the metaphor in the unseen levels of drama he engages with, the world that his protagonists live in being one where effort isn’t necessarily commensurate with desired result. The film also, despite its setting and contemporary concerns, belongs to a very German artistic tradition. The figuration of the pristine, primal river and its guardians facing disruption by an intruding figure looking to steal the horde of gods reiterates and revises Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold – Herzog had already used that opera’s famous opening strains in Nosferatu the Vampyre so here makes do with Verdi whilst contrasting the grandiosity of the vocals with the alternations of momentous strenuousness and rudderless pathos Fitz’s story involves – whilst the early scenes of Aquilano explaining his empire to Fitz and presenting his own temptation whilst looking down on a ripe world from a high vantage evokes Goethe’s Mephistopheles seducing his version of Faust. Herzog would go on in Where The Green Ants Dream to pit the atavistic, as embodied by his take on Australian Indigenous people with a similarly boding and taciturn self-sufficiency to the Jivaros, against the technological and the apocalyptic, ending with a similar act of appropriation of a vehicle – in the latter film’s case a warplane – to achieve an act of spiritual rebirth. Scream of Stone portrayed the rock climbers’ efforts as at once a profane, media-age act riven with elements of ego and glory-chasing, and a sublime, almost ritual challenge to primal forces.
Fitz’s labours similarly persist on the two levels of cynical get-rich-quick scheme and expression of overriding need of the soul, and his and the Jivaros’ aims, which seem to be fatefully and tragicomically out of alignment, finally prove to be two different versions of the same thing. Herzog’s inspiration for the image of the ship being pulled over the isthmus was the works of ancient builders of Neolithic monuments, ziggurats and pyramids, who often dragged colossal stones great distances for their seemingly irrational projects, most often inspired by a form of mystic and religious zeal that converted into a permanent physical expression to posterity. This makes Fitz Herzog’s ironic priest-king, and the director as enraptured by the act of human forging colossal, nature-defying works with muscle and a bizarre blend abstract faith and practical commitment as Cecil B. DeMille was on The Ten Commandments (1956) and Andréi Tarkovsky in the bell-making chapter of Andréi Rublev (1969). In spite of the great stylistic and philosophical gap between the two filmmakers, Herzog and DeMille both behold the splendour of human ingenuity and will whilst also suggesting it’s all for nought in the face of immutable forces; like Tarkovsky, Herzog finds the meaning nonetheless in the act of creation itself.
But Fitz’s efforts are also destructive, requiring not just that he suborn the Jivaros to his project, but for a great path to be gouged through the heart of the jungle and the crown of the isthmus’ heights with relentless labour of axe and explosive, even before the real test of the possible can occur. When the Molly Aida starts its ponderous journey up the slope, Fitz tries using some hewn logs as a slipway, after the Captain dismisses the idea of using the rails, but veers about and crushes some of the Jivaros. The locals promptly walk off the job and begin their own act of mourning and reckoning with the forces they feel they’re challenging in this bizarre labour, standing and gazing for days on the flowing river, before briefly vanishing and then returning – all of it entirely enigmatic to Fitz and his fellows, although Fitz understands a gesture from the Jivaros, hovering at the edge of the field of light from the crew’s dinner table lanterns with their hands reaching into the brightness, as one of mysterious but intuitive assurance, even blessing. Fitz exploits the resources of the world he bashes through, utilising trees he knows to be as hard as steel to create a windlass to aid the ship’s progress, but it’s Huerequeque who comes up with the ingeniously simple plan of using the steam winch for the anchor, as powered by the main engine, to simply haul the ship up the slow under its own power.
The entire film winnows down to the singular, awesome, hilarious shot of the Molly Aida moving at a virtual forty-five degree angle up the mountainside, diagonally bisecting the cinema frame, a sight all the more compelling with the knowledge that Herzog took no shortcuts in achieving it, the ultimate expression of his desire to find a point where the authentic and the poetic collide. The task of bringing the ship down on the far side of the Isthmus is comparatively easy, the craft slithering down to the riverbank mud and, after a sick lurch close to capsizing settling into the water, sparks rejoicing. Fitz and crew get blotto as they celebrate with the Jivaros with their woozily rhythmic music, dancing upon the mud. That the native peoples have a deeply ingrained poetic sensibility is noted with sarcasm by Aquilano early in the film when he comments, "They call the rubber tree caoutchou, ‘tree that weeps.’ These bare-asses love flowery language. Gold, they call ‘sweat of the sun.’ Bees, ‘fathers of honey.’" This sensibility again coincides with Fitz’s obsessions, the sense of the physical world and its ethereal counterpoints, whether one conceives of them as purely products of the human mind’s subtleties or incarnate on a spiritual plain, are always in flowing dialogue.
The chief, ironic consequence of this is to bring about the ruination of Fitz’s efforts. During the night, with Fitz, Pete, Cholo, and Huerequeque all asleep on board, the Jivaro leaders cut the Molly Aida’s hawser, allowing the ship to float downstream. This deed, far from being malicious, fulfils their particular object in all this, the part they’ve felt anointed to play in a cosmic drama. This is their gesture to the furious spirits of the Pongo das Morte, a rite they hope will lift the curse on a benighted land, white god and sacred ship riding the waters of chaos. The men aboard the ship only awaken when the Molly Aida starts bashing against the stone walls of the canyon around the Pongo das Morte, too late to get the engine going in time to make headway, and they’re forced to ride out the churning, surging waters and hope the craft hangs together. Whether by miraculous grace or merely good engineering, the ship does survive the ride with a few cracked and stove-in timbers. The few inserts of model work interpolated in this scene do violate the carefully wrought veneer of the undeniably actual, although these are cut in amidst the genuine footage Herzog and a small crew dared to film on the freely drifting ship, Herzog’s gaze applied with a sort of punch-drunk wonder to footage of the ship thumping listlessly against rocky shores with operatic arias surging in disconsolate fashion on the soundtrack.
The quieter irony here is that whilst the Jivaros wreck Fitz’s worldly scheme, they help him fulfil his aims on other levels. They set the seal on a legend that binds them together in a manner Wagner would have delighted in, proving the primacy of the dream-world over the actual. The voyage over land and the pacification of the troubled waters two entwined deeds that perform literal acts of beneficence, exhausting the obsession on Fitz and rendering, or at least proving, the Pongo das Mortes just another run of rapids, and providing an absurd contrast to the reign of greed over the land. Fitz, abashed and tired, nonetheless finds his own way of setting the seal on the story and fulfilling his ambiton at the same time, accepting Aquilano’s offer to buy back the Molly Aida and using the funds to hire a visiting opera troupe to enact their rendition of Verdi’s The Puritans atop the steamer, with Fitz himself playing the proud impresario, cigar in mouth, a red velvet chair for his pig on hand, and Molly awaiting him with a large crowd at the Iquitos dock. Mere success is the purview of business, but where incredibly laborious acts are undone with incredibly simple deeds and total failures are alchemised into grand victories, there lies the continent of the artist.