Werner Herzog and the Voice Of Caruso: The Fitzcarraldo Diary

You, dear reader, probably aren't as big a fan of Werner Herzog's as Opera Chic, because she's kind of obsessed by his quite unique blend of crank and genius and you probably aren't -- but if you liked Fitzcarraldo, or even if you didn't, but you like the films -- and the books -- that just had to be made, or had to written, if the literature and cinema of necessity are your thing, well, then Herzog's diary of the Fitzcarraldo production is a must-read for you, too.

A tasty morsel:

A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong.

As it should be.

Comments

[Kevin Edmund Youkilis 4 MVP]

Herzog is the king of the indies but he hangs out with Harmony Korrine and that reflects badly on him.

[John West]

My copy has been staring at me for months. Now seems a good time to watch it.

[Warren]

I share your "kind of" obsession with Werner Herzog. Not many film directors have such a powerful, driving aesthetic that it just takes over and utterly pervades their work like Herzog's aesthetic and vision does. Antonioni comes to mind, maybe (early-mid) Bertolucci. Hardly any American film directors I can think of have the artistic-visual originality and coherence of the great Europeans. But Coppola is up there, even with some of his very under-rated '80's stuff like 'Rumblefish'.

Having said that, I get bored at certain moments in "Fitzcarraldo", though it's worth seeing definitivement (and not at all bored at the moments when Caruso's voice is soaring through the jungle on the old gramophone!). Overall, I think "Aguirre, Wrath of God", also with Kinski, is a better film though (w/ very similar Amazonian setting).

[R.A.D. Stainforth]

I watched Herzog's Grizzly Man last night in a tent in the middle of nowhere in Shetland. You know, the one where the bear hugger gets eaten by a bear.

Herzog himsef narrates:

"I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder."

I agree.

[ariel]

Warren , try Huston's "THE Dead " he can match any Italian, Pole , French, director
you can name except Fellini who none
of them can match . I believe there are many great American directors that can match any European in concepts -except
that money enters the picture to a degree that a life style becomes more
important than the film and the audience
that you play to becomes paramount -
in terms of $$$$. For creativity I go to Fellini then the rest- try also Peter Greenway " Prospero's Books"

[Warren]

Thanks for the recommendations, ariel. Yeah, John Huston is a great director, I love his work. "The Maltese Falcon" and "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" are definitely on my top 20 favorites list. I haven't seen "The Dead", though. I can imagine Huston being good with Joyce material. Anyway, that's a major gap in my cinema watching/knowledge. I'll check it out from the library. I'll check out Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" as well (though I believe he's British).

I'll grant you that there's more of an equivalence in stature, in terms of concepts, between the best European and American films, point well taken. On the visual-artistic front, though (to the extent one can split these things off, if at all), I'd say you have a lesser number of inspired American directors than Europeans, IMO. But there are some, John Ford, Francis Coppola, Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, (many would say Scorsese but I'm not an overly-huge Scorsese fan, in fact I think he's over-rated, gasp!), Michael Curtiz, even your guy John Huston has some of that. When I think about it, maybe it is more even on both sides of the pond in terms of respective visual-aesthetic greatness than I first allowed...