Werner Herzog
Fitzcarraldo

Frenzied film by Werner Herzog and his favorite actor Klaus Kinski, "Fitzcarraldo" (1982) explores Latin America, and the dualism between nature and culture, in a seemingly less tragic and obsessive, but more spectacular way, than the duo's previous masterpiece ("Aguirre, the Wrath of God", 1972).

I summarize, as always in a concise manner, the plot of the film: Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, known to the local population as "Fitzcarraldo", is a passionate opera enthusiast, with the mad dream of creating an opera house in Iquitos, a Brazilian city in the heart of the Amazon. To realize his project, he will set out to conquer an unknown region of the Amazon, whose products will bring fortune to the local economy. The only way to reach this land is to ascend a river, cross a mountain, descend a valley, and then return to the city by descending another river: all of this - including the crossing - aboard a huge steamer.

I shall leave out any reference to the troubled production of the film and the inspirations drawn from the feature, especially with regard to the infamous crossing of the Amazonian pass by Fitzcarraldo's steamer, actually carried out by Herzog's crew, with perfect identification between director and protagonist, cinematic language, and metacinematic language.

Instead, I focus on some salient profiles of the story, useful for yet another interpretation that might be appreciated by DeBaser readers.

While in "Aguirre" man, attracted by dreams of wealth and power, got lost in the Amazon rainforest and simultaneously lost all psychological and moral balance, eventually destroying his fellow humans and madly proclaiming himself a godly messiah in a malignant and hostile land, in "Fitzcarraldo" the protagonist's journey is equally mad and visionary, but functional to a concrete and real project, as well as intrinsically poetic. Thus, in this film, there is no "panic" - and bearer of "panic"! - identification between "man" and "world" as seen in Aguirre, but rather a division between subjective perception (Fitzcarraldo's passions) and objective world (the river, the mountain, the land, the waterfalls) over which the protagonist exerts his power.

Fitzcarraldo does not merge with the hostile nature, regressing like Aguirre to "Homo homini lupus", but "acts" on nature with his own "technique", pursuing the goal - deeply bourgeois, for that matter - of spreading opera, and European culture itself, in a place seen and perceived as "wild". While Aguirre presented himself as an earthly deity, Fitzcarraldo seems, rather, the apostle of a certain idea of culture, modernity, Europeanism, as opposed to the Amazonian world. That the protagonist's values are "ideal", and at times in contrast with the reality of things, given the fine line between the evolved world and the wild world, is a theme on which one could write for years...

In conclusion, while in Aguirre, akin to the subsequent "Apocalypse Now" by F.F. Coppola (1979), and the same literary model by J. Conrad ("Heart of Darkness"), the protagonist's journey into the heart of nature and the darkness of man is "without return", as it becomes impossible to restore the previous balance after a physical and inner journey, leading to a destiny of death and/or madness, in Fitzcarraldo the journey appears precisely in function of a "return", as it is instrumental to the reaffirmation of the individual.

Almost like a Nietzschean superman, Fitzcarraldo's destiny is therefore that of eternal return, meant to be fulfilled through man's dominance over things (sometimes even over people: whether they are indigenous or others). A destiny that confers on the film a sometimes sinister charm, perhaps because Fitzcarraldo's ideals, in their absolutism, show us how man's madness far preceded the beginning of the journey.