Conquest of the Useless [Hardcover]

Because Herzog is Herzog,he dreams dreams, and precious little stops their painful realisation. In the dank, stinking, all consuming jungle, Herzog drags himself and a team of disciples through angry vegetation, to create a movie about a man who brings opera to the savage, entangled, heart of darkness. The pages of this extraordinary book will rot between your fingers, reclaimed to an organic mass, as the all consuming jungle covers, devours, and breaks everything down... equipment, lodgings, creatures, bodies, and finally the minds of the people cast in this astonishing and at times, terrifying tale.
A steamboat is pulled over a mountain, from one river to another. People are injured, people are poisoned, people will die. Throughout, Werner H, slipping and sliding into the quagmire, screaming with despair, writhing with toxic bile, insisting it must go on; and all of it will continue, relentlessly, through total destruction, through barbaric climate, amazingly, miraculously, finding a way, with its cast of hundreds, in the worst environment on god's wicked earth in which to make a motion bloody picture; onto the celluloid that becomes the movie, 'Fitzcarraldo'.
And as if the toxic jungle itself, the raging storms, the civil wars, the lack of money and organisation -as if this is not enough to halt the dreams that plague his mind, he finally realises he will not succeed unless he brings the craziest, most unstable bug-eyed monster he knows in there with him; the only man who could possibly share such weight of mental torment, the only man who could rant and rave in an alien landscape to such degree as to terrify the terrifying natives themselves, and the scattering wildlife that surrounds them - his best 'fiend', Klaus Kinski.
'Conquest of the Useless' is Herzog's journal of these nightmares. It's a vision that he's not really supposed to share. This account of his travails, and of the madness of the late, but incontestably great, Kinski, will form the stuff of your own dreams, keeping you awake and unsettled through a very long night of the soul. And, like the finally finished film, it'll be worth the suffering. Oh blimey, yes. And thank god for the all too rare likes of it.

"...in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal world, in unreal misery -and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core."

Me too dude, me too.

Perhaps it's because I'm a city girl, but Herzog's vision of nature - obscene, cruel, wrathful, chaotic, and filled with a beauty that is terrible - rings far more true to me than any amount of nature-boy ramblings on harmony and being at one with the earth. If you're a fan of Herzog (as I am) then you'll find as much to enjoy here as in any of his films. This is not just a film diary - it's nothing near as banal as that - but a collection of images, feelings, waking dreams and visions (both delirious and otherwise) borne from the chaos of attempting the Herculean feat of hauling a steamboat over a mountain in the rainforest (and simultaneously wrangling the colossal ego of the maniacal Klaus Kinski), while making an astounding film.

Hypnotic, compelling, poetic and hilarious, this is filled with so much material that I could easily re-read it a thousand times without once getting bored, and in fact already look forward to doing so. Whether I was being seduced by passages such as the one at the top of this review, cackling over his responses to the latest outburst from Kinski (I really, really enjoy their relationship, and never more so than when they're really NOT enjoying it) or wondering at the descriptions of his latest vision, I was never anything less than fully engaged and awed.

Wonderful, and highly recommended.

I was hoping that this would be a detailed history of the making of the film "Fitzcarraldo", on location in the jungles of Peru - I've long been an admirer of Herzog's work and looked forward to reading about the nitty-gritty of the making of this particular film. Unfortunately, there is very little nitty and precious little gritty in this book. It is largely a disorganised ramble about what he DIDN'T do for the nearly five years it took to get the film from location to screen.
The word "Reflections" in the title should have alerted me. The book is organised - and I use the term loosely - into passages headed by the date that they are supposed to have been written, or written about. I presume that the intention is, as with Spike Milligan's diaries, to give a feeling of contemporaneity, as if the reflections were jotted down on the same day in the white-heat of the moment. However, I got the strong impression, as with Milligan's "diaries", that they were written long after the event, and with more of an eye for publication than as a real aide-memoire. There is a sense of pretention about much of the work, as if Herzog is saying "Oh look, aren't I charmingly eccentric? Don't you just LOVE me?" - e.g., the following passage, describing his return from a script conference in the US to the primitive jungle setting of the film ("Iquitos-Miami, 26 March 1984")-
"I stepped into a hole...full of putrid water. I felt utterly out of place...because I was still wearing the black pin-striped suit and black oxfords I had put on for meeting with lawyers in New York..." Oh, Bless...
The book is largely compsed of his rambling memories of fever, delirium and drunkenness, both his own and of those surrounding him; of the making of the film there is precious little information, except partial and fragmentary references to things going wrong - usually someone else's fault, though if he had acted as a film producer and not a spaced-out hippy maybe things might have got done with more efficacy.
Having said that, the book is by no means all bad. His descriptions of the wild egomania of Klaus Kinski, of the feebleness of Jason Robards and the (quite unexpected) moral fibre of Mick Jagger and Claudia Cardinale are gratifyingly delightful. And he can certainly turn a phrase; as someone who knows Latin America quite well, I can vouch for the accuracy of his descriptions of life there -"Fish leap out of the water as if they actually belonged to the clouds in the sky... thousands of winged creatures hovering around the lamps, raging in wild swarms like spherical catastrophes around the lightbulbs".
So, if you want a discursive meditation on life in the jungle which reads like the first draft of a Joseph Conrad novel, this is for you. If you want an actual description of the making of the film, go elsewhere.