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Werner Herzog: in search of 'ecstatic truth' A feature about the german director --The Sunday Times & Times Online 26th April 2009
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"Fitzcarraldo", written and directed by Werner Herzog, stars Klaus Kinski as the title character - a would-be rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an Irishman called Fitzcarraldo in Peru, who has to pull a steamship over a steep hill in order to access a rich rubber territory. The film is derived from the real-life story of Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald. In his autobiographical film "Portrait Werner Herzog", Herzog has stated that the film's spectacular production was an incredible ordeal. It famously involved moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill without the use of special effects. Herzog believes that no one has ever performed a similar feat in history, and likely never will again, calling himself 'Conquistador of the Useless'. The casting of the film was also quite difficult. Jason Robards was originally cast in the title role, but he became ill and was forced to leave. Herzog then considered casting Jack Nicholson, and even playing Fitzcarraldo himself, before Klaus Kinski accepted the role. By that point, forty percent of shooting was complete and Herzog insisted on a total reshoot with Kinski. Mick Jagger was originally cast as Fitzcarraldo's assistant Wilbur, but his shooting schedule expired and he departed to tour with the Rolling Stones. Though none of the major cast members spoke English natively, the original soundtrack was recorded in English, as it was the only language common to the lead actors. Klaus Kinski himself was a major source of tension, as he fought with Herzog and other members of the crew. In his documentary "My Best Fiend", Herzog says that one of the local Peruvian chiefs who was an extra in the film offered to murder Kinski for him, but Herzog declined because he needed Kinski to complete filming. Les Blank's documentary "Burden of Dreams", about the production of the film, also documents these many hardships. Herzog won the 1982 Best Director at Cannes for the film, which was hailed by critics around the globe.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
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.
5 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
11 reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Burden to create
29 Aug 2009
Format:Hardcover
Herzog is a masterful film director and his films are based on his own, rich, screenplays. This extremely dedicated artist is also a wonderful writer. I could not put this book down. Herzog captures the intensity of the jungle and the personalities of the actors as they fray in the humidity and heat. He captures the raw opportunism of almost all the locals, hoping to cash in on a real "Hollywood film crew", who instead encounter a film maker who is a crazy genius, filled with visions. Intellectual entertainment.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
A beautiful text
3 Oct 2009
Format:Hardcover
I'm not even a huge fan of Herzog but this book is amazing. I have been reading it while in my first semester in grad school, especially when I need to read something beautiful. Herzog's descriptions are so lush and illustrative, both the lovely and terrible. This is a book I will return to again and again. Poetry for those who don't like poetry.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
The Jungle Revels in Debauched Lewdness
30 May 2010
Format:Hardcover
Conquest of the Useless is Werner Herzog's journal while he was in the Amazon, planning and filming Fitzcarraldo. If you are a fan of Fitzcarraldo, this book, along with Les Blank's documentary on the filming (Burden of Dreams), give a real feel for Herzog's experience of the Amazon and the challenges in making the movie. He doesn't dwell very much on the best-known aspect of the story, his determination to haul a steamboat uphill and downhill from one tributary of the Amazon to another. This was very much Herzog's determination -- in the historical events that Fitzcarraldo is based on, the ship was disassembled and moved, not pulled over intact.
What he does dwell on is the Amazon itself. Herzog seems to enjoy love-hate relationships -- his relationship with the Amazon is much like his relationship with Klaus Kinski. At times he is repelled and rants against the jungle:
"The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. The voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid, immobile anger hovers over everything."
"Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air. The jungle revels in debauched lewdness."
Kinski appears, with his own rants, irrational behavior, just plain annoying, irritating behavior. He keeps insisting to Herzog that the jungle is erotic:
". . . Kinski amorously leaned his cheek against a tree trunk and then began to copulate with the tree. He thinks this is immensely erotic: the child of nature and the wild jungle. . . . . To me it was not erotic at all. I spat, only obscene."
Mick Jagger and Jason Robards also appear -- they were cast in Herzog's first attempt to film the movie, cut short by Robards' illness. Jagger comes off pretty well, seeming to enjoy the craziness of the whole thing. There are scenes of Robards and Jagger in Blanks' documentary, with Jagger playing Fitzcarraldo's assistant, Wilber. Claudia Cardinale also comes off very well, a kind of calming, graceful influence on everyone around her, even Kinski. Her character in the movie does the same.
If you aren't a fan of Fitzcarraldo, I don't think the book would really stand by itself. So watch the movie. Then read the book. Then watch Les Blanks' Burden of Dreams.
What he does dwell on is the Amazon itself. Herzog seems to enjoy love-hate relationships -- his relationship with the Amazon is much like his relationship with Klaus Kinski. At times he is repelled and rants against the jungle:
"The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. The voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid, immobile anger hovers over everything."
"Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air. The jungle revels in debauched lewdness."
Kinski appears, with his own rants, irrational behavior, just plain annoying, irritating behavior. He keeps insisting to Herzog that the jungle is erotic:
". . . Kinski amorously leaned his cheek against a tree trunk and then began to copulate with the tree. He thinks this is immensely erotic: the child of nature and the wild jungle. . . . . To me it was not erotic at all. I spat, only obscene."
Mick Jagger and Jason Robards also appear -- they were cast in Herzog's first attempt to film the movie, cut short by Robards' illness. Jagger comes off pretty well, seeming to enjoy the craziness of the whole thing. There are scenes of Robards and Jagger in Blanks' documentary, with Jagger playing Fitzcarraldo's assistant, Wilber. Claudia Cardinale also comes off very well, a kind of calming, graceful influence on everyone around her, even Kinski. Her character in the movie does the same.
If you aren't a fan of Fitzcarraldo, I don't think the book would really stand by itself. So watch the movie. Then read the book. Then watch Les Blanks' Burden of Dreams.
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