Cinema
Teutonic
Peter Ackroyd
Eitzcarraldo ('A', Camden Plaza)
Disaster has surrounded this film from the start. Its original leading players, Mick Jagger and Jason Robards, packed their bags and left the set. During the film- ing in the South American pampas, several members of the crew were killed. In addi- tion, the director, Werner Herzog, is per- haps not the best person to go into a jungle With. In a recent television documentary he claimed to have seen God in the guise of an engineer. He also confessed to having held his new leading man, Klaus Kinski, at gun- point until he agreed to finish the picture. °Ile might expect, if nothing else, an odd and interesting film to emerge from the Wreckage: disasters off-camera have a way of seeping into the texture of a film and len- ding it a certain perilous glamour: I think of Cleopatra or Heaven's Gate. Unfortunately, in the end, Fitzcarraldo is a disappointment. A vast, mottled egg has been hatched and out has popped a mere chicken.
It opens in a spectacular manner, as such flints are supposed to do. Vast stretches of South America swim in the mist, like mould Upon a giant corpse. We are told that this is the country where God did not finish crea- tion' — the implication being that Herzog will finish it for Him. Certainly the direc- tor's contribution looks good — if you can imagine a cross between Turner and Dali, You will get some idea of the cinematogra- phy here.
And then the scene changes to Manaus, a city on the Amazon where Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt are performing in the local opera-house with the selfconscious- ness of astronauts on the moon. Such is the enthusiasm for grand opera of one man, Fitzcarraldo, that he has paddled 1,200 miles down the Amazon in order to see them. Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer, a roman- tic, who finds in opera some obscure gratification for his own awkward and pas- sionate aspirations. He wishes to build a theatre in the middle of the Peruvian jungle — 'The Great Opera In The Jungle' he calls it. One would have imagined that a man of Fitzcarraldo's sensitivity would have realis- ed that the jungle is magnificent and impos- ing enough, without Wagner disturbing the parrots and a few pot-bellied singers gesticulating to each other through the foliage. His is clearly a ludicrous ambition, as close to blind cultural imperialism as you can get, but unfortunately Werner Herzog does not take this view. He has always been in the business of projecting his own obsessive megalomania, and so here he asserts at face-value the myth of the roman- tic visionary who wishes to impose his dreams upon a recalcitrant reality. It is not an edifying spectacle.
As a result, the tone of Fitzcarraldo is un- balanced from the beginning. The first sec- tions of the film are concerned with the hero's relationships with his white neigh- bours and the Indian natives. But such is the grandiosity of the film's preoccupations that what ought to have been carefully and convincingly drawn is reduced to caricature, infused with a heavy-handed merriment which is neither interesting nor funny. The performance of Klaus Kinski, as Fitzcar- raldo, is no help under the circumstances. Not to put too fine a point on it, he looks utterly deranged, as though he has just step- ped out of The Thing or Horror on Teenage Beach: wild staring eyes, a face like a hat- chet, corn-coloured hair that pirouettes above him. Herzog might have chosen him by default, when both Robards and Jagger left the production, nevertheless this is not the man to play a romantic visionary. Here we have an actor capable of miming paranoia and fear, but not much else.
If all these difficulties are to be resolved, it will have to be on a suitably large scale, where ordinary life and relations cease to be of any importance. And it is inevitable that a film which cannot handle realistic life in a plausible manner should revert at the earliest opportunity to spectacular scenes, which need to be convincing only in terms of size and effort. In order to finance his operatic venture, Fitzcarraldo decides to stake his claim to some inaccessible rubber plantations in the middle of the jungle. In the process, he drags his steamboat across a mountain which divides two rivers. With the help of an apparently incurious Indian tribe, the ship is hauled by ropes and pulleys up one side of the mountain and then down the other. As a feat of engineer- ing it is, even by contemporary cinematic standards, most impressive. But even here
nagging doubts remain: the purpose of do- ing this seems only to prove that it can be done. In a way the film ceases to be about Fitzcarraldo's achievement, and we are im- plicitly asked to admire Herzog's instead. Since the film does ,not carry enough im- aginative weight to sustain the attention of an audience, our notice is directed at the technical and strategic skills which went in- to its making.
In the process the central theme of the film becomes obscured. We can only guess at it since it is, after all, one that Herzog has explored before. In films such as Aguirre, Wrath of God and The Enigma of Kasper Hauser he has concentrated upon the especial destiny of the man who stands against the crowd, the 'outsider' who domi- nates or rejects conventional notions of reality. But these 'outsiders' have in the past been able to provoke respect or ad- miration: Fitzcarraldo, playing Caruso to the natives to pacify them as he floats down the Amazon, is not capable of doing either.
This is in part owing to Kinski's extraor- dinary performance, but it is also an aspect of the film itself. Despite its grandiosity of treatment, it is curiously narrow in its pre- occupations — simplistic in plot and tawdry in theme. The latter, after all, comes down to nothing more than a glossy restatement of that ancient antithesis between the ima- gination and reality — 'the idea', as some- one says here, 'that everyday life is an illu- sion, and that reality lies in dreams'. Her- zog has taken this sentimental and Western vision of the world and grafted upon it the cult of the superman, the man of destiny who dominates the world with his vision albeit, in this case, with the help of cheap native labour. Only a German film-maker could have attempted this, I think, without a trace of irony or selfconsciousness. Her- zog is pursuing, or playing with, his own obsession — which, like all obsessions, is dull and characterless. And so, at a length of two-and-a-half hours, the film begins to drag. The audience, like the steamboat, is hauled up the hill only to go down the other side. And we are left wondering, at the end, if the journey was really worthwhile.
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