Screening ‘Fitzcarraldo’ (1982)

Fitzcarraldo 
Duration: 158 min

Introduced by Kari Driscoll

Synopsis:

The movie is the story of a dreamer named Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, whose name has been simplified to “Fitzcarraldo” by the Indians and Spanish who inhabit his godforsaken corner of South America. He loves opera. He spends his days making a little money from an ice factory and his nights dreaming up new schemes. One of them, a plan to build a railroad across the continent, has already failed. Now he is ready with another: He seriously intends to build an opera house in the rain jungle, twelve hundred miles upstream from the civilized coast, and to bring Enrico Caruso there to sing an opera.

If his plan is mad, his method for carrying it out is madness of another dimension. Looking at the map, he becomes obsessed with the fact that a nearby river system offers access to hundreds of thousands of square miles of potential trading customers — if only a modern steamship could be introduced into that system. There is a point, he notices, where the other river is separated only by a thin finger of land from a river that already is navigated by boats. His inspiration: Drag a steamship across land to the other river, float it, set up a thriving trade, and use the profits to build the opera house — and then bring in Caruso! This scheme is so unlikely that perhaps we should not be surprised that Herzog’s story is based on the case of a real Irish entrepreneur who tried to do exactly that.

But “Fitzcarraldo” is not all sweat and madness. It contains great poetic images of the sort Herzog is famous for: An old phonograph playing a Caruso record on the deck of a boat spinning out of control into a rapids; Fitzcarraldo frantically oaring a little rowboat down a jungle river to be in time to hear an opera; and of course the immensely impressive sight of that actual steamship, resting halfway up a hillside.

“Fitzcarraldo” is not a perfect movie, and it never comes together into a unified statement. It is meandering, and it is slow and formless at times. Perhaps the conception was just too large for Herzog to shape. The movie does not approach perfection as “Aguirre” did. But as a document of a quest and a dream, and as the record of man’s audacity and foolish, visionary heroism, there has never been another movie like it. (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fitzcarraldo-1982)

See here the trailer.