Fitzcarraldo
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.99 You Save: $11.98 (60%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $7.75 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Fitzcarraldo
Movie Review: Herzog scores
Summary: 4 Stars
I first watched Werner Herzog's 1982 film Fitzcarraldo back in the late 1980s, on PBS, and found it to be a great film. All these years later I still find it to be a great film, if not quite in a league with Herzog and Klaus Kinski's other most famed filmic pairing, Aguirre: The Wrath Of God. The earlier film, made a decade before, shares other elements with Fitzcarraldo, which was written and directed by Herzog. The most obvious is that both involve river journeys in the Amazon, and both films have scenes of troublemakers being left in the jungle to fend for themselves. In Aguirre it's a horse, in Fitzcarraldo it's four humans. A less obvious commonality is that both films were shot in English, then dubbed into German. Thus, when one chooses the English language option on the DVD one is watching the film as it was originally made. This is how I watched it, and how all foreign language or foreign made DVDs should be packaged. In a visual medium there is absolutely no excuse for foreign films to not have available English dubbed soundtracks, for the reading of words necessarily diminishes the visual impact of the film on first watching.
However, this film would still be great even were it only available with subtitles. Yet, if a viewer is expecting another vintage over the top performance by Kinski, he will be disappointed, for Kinski's titular character, whose real name is Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Fitzcarraldo is a local nickname based on a mispronunciation), is far more understated a role than in his other collaborations with Herzog. It's a great performance, nonetheless, which proves a) that Kinski was one of the Twentieth Century's greatest actors and b) how felicitous it was for Herzog that his original choice for the role, Jason Robards, dropped out due to illness. While I think Robards was a fine actor, he was not near the pure acting talent that Kinski was. Another fact gleaned from the DVD commentary is that Herzog had a sidekick role for Robards' version of Fitzcarraldo, with rock star Mick Jagger in the lead role. A few scenes of this pairing appear in Herzog's acclaimed documentary on Kinski called My Best Fiend, and they are absolutely terrible. That Jack Nicholson was also considering taking the lead role, but declined it, is another instance of fortuity's role in great art.
There are many little moments in the film, that are the realism in the `eye level realism', which make the film seem less like a film and more as if a camera had been snuck aboard a real life adventure. This is where the film's greatness really comes into focus, for so few other directors ever have such moments in their films. Herzog often calls these moments ecstatic truths, but they are great because they are not really ecstatic, merely ordinary, but displaced in narrative space and time so that they take on a meaning and metaphor that is not immanent. As example, there are the young children who stare at the jail Fitz is held in after an incident at a rubber baron's party. The police chief lets him out because the children will not flee, and one child plays a fiddle for days on end. Why? There is no explanation, but oddities like this occur in life far more often than they ever appear in film. There's the tiny black employee of Fitz's, who has guarded his railroad property from Indians, not knowing it's another project he has returned on. His odd but endearing behavior seems real precisely because only an oddball would defend another man's property without pay for months on end. There is the black umbrella that floats toward the boat as a seeming warning from the local Indians. There is the celebration by the Indians after the boat has made it over the mountain, where native women squirt their breast milk into bowls to be drunk.
Then, at film's end, there is a close moment between Fitz and Captain Paul. Yet, Fitz whispers it into the Captain's ear, so the viewer never knows what is said. Having seen the more recent Lost In Translation, where what was whispered between that film's two lead characters was taken as a `stroke of genius' by tyro director Sofia Coppola, it does not surprise me that she stole that idea from Herzog. In this film, since it is a greater film, and the two characters have gone through far more, the gesture is even more powerful and moving. The very fact that a moment like that goes uncommented upon by all the major critics of the film- then and now, yet when it appears in a film like Coppola's is lauded without surcease, shows how far much more a film like Fitzcarraldo has to offer than a rather light piece of fluff like Lost In Translation. This is because such moments are in surfeit in Fitzcarraldo, whereas they are the centerpieces of Hollywood tripe. But, as Captain Paul mentions to Fitz, there are two kinds of silences- the good and the bad. Oddly, the lack of praise for such a great moment is one of the good silences. Enjoy the gilt.
Movie Review: Ship of State
Summary: 4 Stars
I will never forget seeing "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" some 20 years ago. It is to this day one of the most extraordinary films I have ever seen. Somehow "Fitzcarraldo" got past me, and I have been trying to see it ever since. It did not do for me what "Aguirre" once did, but this may have as much or more to do with my own shrunken state as it does with the film's limitations. If the film is "just" an historical anecdote, a story, then it cannot be faulted. The film is told well. It is filmed beautifully. It is certainly one of the weirdest things ever filmed; only Coppola's mad "Apocalypse Now" can match its audacity. What made "Aguirre" so extraordinary was its metaphorical power; its evocation not only of colonial South America and the lunacy of an adventurer's dream, but its powerfully suggestive imagery which brought to mind the failed ambitions of the Third Reich. It was a kind of mythical tragedy. "Fitzcarraldo" does not have the same power to evoke thoughts of a modern Germany off course, headed for disaster. For one thing, the film ends somewhat happily. The dream is realized if not fully, and there is no suggestion that great dreams have been brought to a lunatic end. Instead, the madness of the adventurer is vindicated. He gets his ship over the mountain; he even gets to hear his opera played in the jungle. What is the message? That one should never give up? Herzog is one of the most provocative and exciting film makers of the post-war era. This film offers a lot. Perhaps I am wrong to want the meaning of the film made clear.Movie Review: Based on the true story of Carlos Fizcarrald...
Summary: 4 Stars
Of all of Werner Herzog's many voyages to the "heart of darkness," Fitzcarraldo stands out as his most, well, lighthearted. Based on the true story of Carlos Fizcarrald, an early 20th-century Peruvian rubber magnate, Fitzcarraldo focuses on the eponymous character's obsession with opera and his desire to bring the opera to the jungle. Starring frequent Herzog player, Klaus Kinski, Fitzcarraldo takes the topic of Western civilization's attempts to dominate the New World and expresses it through the story of one of its eccentric constituents. Unlike Aguirre, The Wrath of God; Cobra Verde; and to an extent, Rescue Dawn, Fitzcarraldo focuses less on the horrors encountered by strangers in a strange land and follows the unshakeable ambition of "the Conqueror of the Useless" (what a fellow rubber baron calls Fizcarraldo in a pivotal scene), as he pursues something no one else wants. And perhaps this is how Herzog can present the story in the manner he does; while other colonists seek nothing more than to strip the land and exploit the natives, Fizcarraldo stands alone in his objectives, which come across as innocuous and potentially altruistic. Featuring one of the most ambitious scenes in film history (the real-life transport, by pulley, of a full-sized steamship over a mountain in the middle of the jungle), Fitzcarraldo is worth watching on the merits of this alone. Four stars for Fitzcarraldo, and its shoe-eating director.Movie Review: Beautiful Obsessions...
Summary: 4 Stars
Full of magnificent and inspiring sequences, the bizarre epic "Fitzcarraldo" won Werner Herzog the best director award at Cannes Festival in 1982. This is the film that keeps reminding us the words of Oscar Wilde, "We are all in the gutter but some of us look at the stars". Even fewer try to reach the stars and Werner Herzog and his longtime collaborator, frequent adversary, and best fiend Klaus Kinski were certainly the men who have reached them. Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (or Fitzcaralado - the local Indians' name for Fitzgerald) was a visionary, a man with a beautiful obsession who dreamed of a building an opera house in the Peruvian rain forests and bringing the great singer Enrico Caruso there. Fitzcaralado's plan involved dragging a huge steamship over a small mountain to avoid traveling upstream through rapids. This plan was duplicated by Herzog during the production and involved the real Indians actually hauling the boat over the mountain. The image of the boat floating in the clouds and the small figure of Fitzcarraldo dressed in the white suit looking with his crazy wild eyes at the boat is one of the most beautiful and breathtaking visions at the screen ever. This film is not as perfect as Herzog's and Kinski's previous project, the stunning "Aguirre, The Wrath of God" but it is a magnificent and fascinating tale that could only be told by its matchless team of creators.
4.5/5
Movie Review: Captivating
Summary: 4 Stars
I caught this on British television about 5 years ago, it also incuded a documentary on German director Werner Hertzog, and this being one of his creations, played Fitzcarraldo after the programme.To be quite honest, having seen how he directs, he would even make James Cameron wince at the demands he makes of his cast and crew. Poor Klaus Kinski nearly lost it during production, and watching the film it's not difficult to see why. The concept, pulling a boat up a hillside and taking it to a river on the other side is frankly bizarre. Bear in mind we're not dealing with a canoe or inflatable boat here either, noooooo that would be TOO easy, try thinking more along the lines of a mississippi style paddle steamer.
The actual film is staggering in it's power to make you ask 'what the hell is going on!' but for some reason is strangely compelling.
Let's face it we've all seen the film about the boat hitting the iceberg (hint..Titanic) but pulling one over a mountaintop (no models or cg helping out here effects fans) is frankly a bit disturbing.
So, is it worth it? well I guess it's definitely maked under the category of 'different' but it shouldn't be classed really...it sort of defies classification! give it a try...you'll probably be just as exhausted after watching it as the 100 odd natives were when they lugged the boat to the top of that hill.