What a fantastic movie. I saw Aguirre: Wrath of God at the cinema a few years ago and decided I never wanted to see it on the small screen, but haven't foreseen a chance to see Fitzcarraldo so, so I submitted to seeing it on DVD. I watched it twice that day! Like Aguirre, it's visually a beautiful film, which makes far better use of the landscape than similar "white man goes nuts in the Jungle" movies. It's also far less patronising than "Mosquito Coast" and not as portentious as "Apocalypse Now".
Herzog can escape the tired jungle-as-Id cliché (one which he himself may have set the template for in Aguirre) because his and Fitzcarraldo's real dreamscapes are opera. It also has a far more honest approach to the jungle than those movies. Rather than setting it up as a primeval Conradian hell (a comparison which the interviewer sets up but Herzog seems to ignore in the DVD commentary) in which the basest instincts of man are unleashed, it is a strange but beautiful world which offers potential for banal business exploitation. The natives are not the virtual extraterrestrials of old but simply another social organisation with different values and ways of comprehending the World. Unlike Kurtz, it is not the Jungle that defeats Fitzcarraldo but the rather more modest natives who simply and innocently exploit Fitzcarraldo even as he is selfishly exploiting them.
At 2hrs 30m, it probably is too long for such a simple story but this has more to do with a very leisurely first act, establishing Fitzcarraldo's love of opera, the time and society of the rubber barons, and Fitzcarraldo's touching relationship with his Madame wife. It takes Fitzcarraldo an hour to actually set out up the river. And anyway, is that really such a harsh criticism in a world that can tolerate 3:15 hours of the trite Titanic and over 9 hours of the overblown Lord of the Rings. The film is packed with detail and incident but Herzog needs to present this as a slow painstaking endeavour. Cutting it down to 100 minutes (Herzog's usual running time, he's not known for making long films) would have diminished the difficulty of Fitzcarraldo's enterprise. The viewer needs to share at least some of that effort.
There's not much to choose between the English soundtrack and the German, though admittedly some of Kinski's line readings sound a little more stilled in English (mainly in a couple of admittedly redundant exposition scenes), but then the lip movements match better as the film was shot in English.
Herzog can escape the tired jungle-as-Id cliché (one which he himself may have set the template for in Aguirre) because his and Fitzcarraldo's real dreamscapes are opera. It also has a far more honest approach to the jungle than those movies. Rather than setting it up as a primeval Conradian hell (a comparison which the interviewer sets up but Herzog seems to ignore in the DVD commentary) in which the basest instincts of man are unleashed, it is a strange but beautiful world which offers potential for banal business exploitation. The natives are not the virtual extraterrestrials of old but simply another social organisation with different values and ways of comprehending the World. Unlike Kurtz, it is not the Jungle that defeats Fitzcarraldo but the rather more modest natives who simply and innocently exploit Fitzcarraldo even as he is selfishly exploiting them.
At 2hrs 30m, it probably is too long for such a simple story but this has more to do with a very leisurely first act, establishing Fitzcarraldo's love of opera, the time and society of the rubber barons, and Fitzcarraldo's touching relationship with his Madame wife. It takes Fitzcarraldo an hour to actually set out up the river. And anyway, is that really such a harsh criticism in a world that can tolerate 3:15 hours of the trite Titanic and over 9 hours of the overblown Lord of the Rings. The film is packed with detail and incident but Herzog needs to present this as a slow painstaking endeavour. Cutting it down to 100 minutes (Herzog's usual running time, he's not known for making long films) would have diminished the difficulty of Fitzcarraldo's enterprise. The viewer needs to share at least some of that effort.
There's not much to choose between the English soundtrack and the German, though admittedly some of Kinski's line readings sound a little more stilled in English (mainly in a couple of admittedly redundant exposition scenes), but then the lip movements match better as the film was shot in English.