Fitzcarraldo Literature

After watching Fitzcarraldo, I was left with the vague feeling that he was a very self--centered character.
Sure, he remembered the armchair for the pig, and he wanted to bring Opera to the masses so they could experience the joy that he did -- but he exploited his undefined partnership with Molly to fund his whims. When she asked if he loved her, he gave an indirect answer. She would gaze longingly at him, but he would always seem to be somewhere else...
Another example of his (probably unintended and unconscious) self-centered-ness is when the native died in the attempt to move the ship up the mountain. He ignored the warnings and continued jumping around, and didn't even seem that upset until he wasn't able to get the rest of the tribe to stop staring at the river.

This movie was very different from the others that we've watched so far in class, so I took the liberty of searching through a few Jstor articles for interesting sections to share with you guys.

From Gitlin's review of the film:
After rumors spread that Werner Herzog was going to work them to the bone and steal their land, even boil them down into lard, angry Amazonian Indians drove him and his crew from their first encampment.

In one memorable sequence, late in the film, Herzog fulminates against the very Nature he went halfway around the world to find. Just as the Romantic idetfies with Nature's unspoiled qualities, its wildness or peace, now the thwarted Herzog inverts the image, and some decidedly unpretty themes leap out of the German past: "I see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and rotting. The trees here are in misery. the birds here are in misery - they don't sing, they just shriek in pain. Erotic? No! There is an overwhelming fornication! There is a curse on this landscape, and whoever goes too deep into t has a share of this curse! We are cursed for what we are doing here! It is a land that god, if He exists, has created in anger!

(He goes on about the lack or order and harmony, but you get the point. Herzog was not a fan of the Amazon. This quote reminds me of the other articles we've read about the underlying fixation with eroticism in Germany.)

[About the sacrifice of the ship to the angry river god] The conquistador has met his match; he has defeated nature but been defeated nevertheless. Momentarily, he's crushed.

From Davis and Jenkins' Exotic and Perverse

Both the historical figure of Fitzcarraldo and Herzog himself were brutally motivated aliens penetrating deep inside a strangely vibrant environment. It is not accidental that the maps of the region, shown in close-up three times during the course of the film, suggest fertility symbols, nor that Fitzcarraldo is given precisely nine months to exploit the jungle's natural resources.

(See the similarities?)

There are a number of disturbing similarities between Fitzcarraldo and Herzog's relations to Indian affairs. They both used the Indians to drag a ship over a hill. They both took Indians from a variety of areas to work a long way from home. They both paid the Indians very little. In short, they both exploited the indigenous people for personal gain...Herzog himself underwent the hazards faced by his protagonist, sharing the same mental and physical agony.

Without scripts or cutting-room access, the Indians souls are literally stolen in the sense that their image can now be flashed onto a screen anywhere in the world without their knowledge and without them having any say in how they are portrayed, or even how their occasionally subtitled speech is interpreted.

(Related to Walter Benjamin, perhaps?)


From Koepnick's Colonial Forestry

[The film] staged a colonial enterprise destined to fail due to the hero's inability to escape his Western imagination, to relate to the semantic multiplicity of the jungle, and to demarcate the kind of boundaries that provide for personal and collective identities in the first place.