FITZCARRALDO Directed and Written by Werner Herzog BURDEN OF DREAMS Directed by Les Blank
Werner Herzog is in love with the impossible. It seduces, challenges, obsesses him. It lures him to forbidden kingdoms, from the Sahara to the Amazon, where holy misfits are given the chance to realize or cheat their destinies. The risks this German film maker takes — with his subject matter, with his and his company's safety, with an audience's willingness to accede to his demons — make a reckless ad venturer like Francis Coppola seem stodgy by comparison. For Heart of Glass Herzog hypnotized his actors, and on the receptive viewer his films have a similar effect: their spectral landscapes, brain-fevered protagonists and eruptions of lyricism can weave a mesmerizing spell. In achievement and originality his movies stand above and apart from most contemporary cin ema. They have the remote beauty of fairy tales decoded from a lost civilization.
Herzog's compatriots, gimlet-eyed burghers such as Volker Schlondorff, Wim Wenders and the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, made their mark by refracting the cynical spirit of postwar Germany through a lens as hip as the new Hollywood's. Herzog renounces the rubble and babble of his homeland; none of his nine fiction features is wholly set there. Instead, he is drawn to legends and nightmares. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1973), a Spanish officer of the 16th century dreams of conquering South America and ends up alone on a raft, blithe and demented, lording it over some monkeys. In The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1975), a young man appears in a Nuremberg square in the 1820s, with no recollection of his past; the townspeople attempt to "civilize" Kaspar, treating him as their pet, their lab rat, their ignorant savior. In Heart of Glass (1976), a mountaintop savant predicts the fall of a small village's glass industry; panic and madness ensue. Herzog paints his pictures in colors as vivid as dream life and instructs his actors to proceed with the elegant gravity of silent-film stars. Aguirre, Kaspar and Heart of Glass are three solitary landmark films of the past decade.
In contrast with these soul struggles, Fitzcarraldo must have seemed like a shaman's summer vacation when Herzog conceived of it five years ago. He would return to the Peruvian Amazon, not too far from where he had filmed Aguirre, to shoot a sunnier version of that pathetic tale. At the end of the last century, an entrepreneur named Fitzcarrald dreamed of bringing his passion, grand opera, to the savage Indians upriver; to fulfill his dream, and with the Indians' help, he lugged a small riverboat across a narrow strip of land that separated two tributaries of the Amazon. It was a feat of autocracy and artistry, of engineering and enlightened madness—a readymade metaphor for Herzog's kind of film making. The movie would also be his first "big" production, with financial help from Coppola and with Jack Nicholson as the star.