• Home
• Reviews A-Z
• The Definitives
• Calendar
• Store
• Contact Us
• Reading
• Archives
• My Account

The Definitives Mission...

The Definitives are an ongoing archive featuring film appreciations posted at an average of one or two a month. More analytical than a simple review, The Definitives focus on the respective film’s production, talent involved, possible “reads,” and its place in film history. With equilibrium between old and new movies, these scholarly articles will attempt to include something for everyone. Most importantly, they will hopefully give you a new outlook on some of your most cherished films, and perhaps introduce you to some new favorites.

Current Deep Focus:

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

 

Few motion pictures have captured the frenzied power of obsession with as much veracity as Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Just as the film portrays a mad enthusiast determined to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle, the making of the film concerns a director bent on telling this story as truthfully as possible, to devastating extremes. Herzog’s four-year production, lasting from 1978 to the film’s release in 1982, was among the most infamous in film history—a neverending series of crises that seemed self-propelled by a director that has been called megalomaniacal. Herzog remains scarred from the production, perhaps because completing this film under such constant duress established his identity as a filmmaker and storyteller. After Fitzcarraldo, his output would dwell almost exclusively on the film’s theme of human conceit in the face of Nature.

Herzog’s story was inspired by Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, a rubber baron who moved a 32-ton boat over a hill between two Amazon tributaries. Herzog’s script grew from this idea and swelled into a tale about a man’s crazed dream of building an opera house in the Amazon jungle to invite his idol, Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, for opening night. Klaus Kinski plays Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, whose name “Fitzcarraldo” was given by locals that could not pronounce “Fitzgerald”. He first appears emerging from the darkness in a boat; Fitzcarraldo has come 1,200 miles, his hands bleeding, having rowed much of the way just to see Caruso perform. But he arrives late, yet is content to stand in the back and listen. Already the character is defined by his irrational passions, and his lot to fall short of them.

Though he has earned money with an ice making machine, the dashed Fitzcarraldo is famous for his failed Trans-Andean Railway. Now he aspires to bring Caruso to Iquitos by building an opera house, a dream no one but him believes in. His mistress, Molly (Claudia Cardinale), a bordello Madame in Iquitos, introduces him to a rubber baron investor who backs Fitzcarraldo’s purchase of a 400 square mile plot of land rich with rubber trees. The land is thought unreachable because of the nearby rapid waters; however, a parallel tributary offers a solution: Bring a boat down the calm tributary, heave the boat over a relatively narrow one mile stretch of land, up a forty degree incline of muddy earth and down the other side, and reach the parallel river to access the rubber.

To complete this undertaking, he purchases a steamer and takes it down river with a crew, and when he arrives at the narrow point of land between rivers, he enlists native Amazonian tribes to complete the manual labor; they believe the white-haired Fitzcarraldo and his bright boat are holy envoys, so they agree to work for him. After months of toiling that leaves workers dead and dozens of others polluted by the presence of civilization in the wild, using a system of pulleys, Fizcarraldo’s boat reaches the top. When it finally touches the water on the other side, the local tribes, believing the boat must continue on to the next world, release it down the rapids, the Pongo das Mortes (the Rapids of Death), with only Fitzcarraldo inside. He survives, and resolves to bring the opera to Iquitos under less ideal circumstances, but no less glory—he drives an orchestra and singers up and down the river on the remains of his ramshackle boat, to play for a shoreside audience.

Had Herzog shot the film as Hollywood wanted, with a plastic boat streaming down a river set piece, the audience would have seen right through the deceit of the moment. For his production, Herzog intended to drag an actual 340-ton boat over an unreasonable slope, which was far greater a task than even Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald attempted. The real life story involved a much lighter boat being disassembled, sent over the mountain in pieces, and reassembled on the other side. Herzog wanted his boat to remain intact throughout its crossing, so the audience never loses touch with that resonant visual of the boat being carried across impossibly steep topography. He did this not for realism, but for truthfulness—the truth the audience feels when they witness the spectacle onscreen. With the finished film, Herzog wanted the audience to feel the struggle and with every frame realize the determination required to assemble the pyramids of Giza, erect Stonehenge, pull this boat over the mountain, or even complete this film.  

 
Read the full article HERE

Coming Soon to
The Definitives

The Thin Red Line (1998)

__________________________

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

__________________________

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

__________________________

City Lights (1931)

__________________________
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

__________________________

Yojimbo (1961)

__________________________

8 1/2 (1963)