Word: herzog
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...WHEN YOU SHOOT in elephant, he sometimes stays 10 days on his feet before topping over," a character declures near the begining of Fitzearruldo. With this hit of incident dealogue, the German director Wener Herzog has hit open a sadly apt metaphor forhis new film. Over a 21/2 hour stretch of celluloid, Fitzearruldo lurches and becomes like some Teatonic pachyderm. Drunk on its own significance it dies at our feet collasping under its own weight...
...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...
...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...
Fitzcarraldo is unusual for a Herzog film in providing a gallery of delightful supporting performances. Claudia Cardinale, as Fitz's mistress Molly, radiates sensuality like a healthy year-round suntan. Jose Lewgoy, who plays an unscrupulous rubber baron, takes immense and innocent pleasure in his character's venality. Miguel Angel Fuentes, the boat's mechanic, is a huge ivory totem, twice as large as Arnold Schwarzenegger and with three times the dark charm. Grande Othelo, who starred 40 years ago in Orson Welles' unfinished film It's All True, is the wrinkled old retainer...
...Conquistador of the useless," a rival calls Fitzcarraldo. Fitz says: "I am the spectacle in the forest." This is Herzog talking, of course, not Kinski or Fitzcarraldo. Or rather, Herzog is all his characters, all his actors. He is the dreamer, the savage, the engulfing river. This time, Herzog steered his craft through rapids and longueurs, outside dangers and his own follies. A madman and a survivor: a moviemaking Ahab who lived to tell his fabulous tale. -By Richard Corliss