Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/05/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)

Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo

Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald: Klaus Kinski
Molly: Claudia Cardinale
Don Aqulino: José Lewgoy
Cholo: Miguel Ángel Fuentes
Captain: Paul Hittscher
Huerequeque: Huerequeque Enrique Bohorquez
Station Master: Grande Otelo
Opera Manager: Peter Berling
Chief of Campa Indians: David Pérez Espinosa
Man at Opera House: Milton Nascimento
Enrico Caruso: Costante Moret
Sarah Bernhardt: Jean-Claude Dreyfus

Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Production design: Ulrich Bergfelder, Henning von Gierke
Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus

Why does Werner Herzog's infamously extravagant Fitzcarraldo begin with Fitzgerald/Fitzcarraldo and his brothel-owner mistress Molly attending a performance of Verdi's Ernani that stars not only Enrico Caruso but also, in the role of Elvira, Sarah Bernhardt (played by a man in drag), who mimes while a soprano sings from the pit? Probably to add several more layers of myth to the story, since there is some doubt that Caruso ever sang at the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus and he almost certainly never appeared in a production of Ernani with a lip-synching Bernhardt. If Fitzcarraldo is about anything, it's about obsessions, the more extravagant and, yes, operatic the better. Which is why Herzog's own obsession with actually hauling a steamship over a hill through the jungle, instead of using special effects, models, and montage, is so ironic. If we can believe that Klaus Kinski is an Irishman, we can believe almost anything. Why resort to reality? Fitzcarraldo is also about the power of illusions, of misguided and conflicting belief systems. Fitzgerald believes, against all evidence to the contrary, in himself. The Indians who labor for him do so because they believe he is some kind of god. So it's entirely appropriate that the central metaphor for a film about extravagantly obsessive belief in illusions should be opera, that most extravagant and illusion-filled of artistic media. (If, that is, you exclude movies.) Is Fitzcarraldo a great film? As fascinating as Kinski's eye-popping is to watch, he never transcends his persona as an actor to create a credible character. And I don't understand what Fitzgerald hopes to achieve by hauling the ship across the isthmus to the rubber plantation. Wouldn't he have to haul it back over again, this time with cargo, to benefit? But such considerations tend to fall by the wayside when viewers encounter the audacity of what's on the screen, and even more so when they learn the behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film. Fitzcarraldo falls into that category of cinematic overreaching occupied by movies like Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). If it isn't a great movie, it's certainly a unique one. And maybe we should be thankful for that.