Hacker Cinema
Fitzcarraldo
1982 · Film · 157 min
Directed by Werner Herzog
Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer who plans to build an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, so, in order to finance his project, he embarks on an epic adventure to collect rubber, a very profitable product, in a remote and unexplored region of the rainforest.
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There is also Fitzcarraldo: The Original Story which is his diary from the years making the movie. Quite interesting and like a fever dream, at times.
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
The terrible model work at the end of Fitzcarraldo pulled me right out of the (otherwise incredible) film. They could move over mountains but not film a convincing finale!
Shoah - a 9.5 hour documentary about the Holocaust https://letterboxd.com/film/shoah/
Sügisball - an Estonian movie that introduced me to the works of Bohren & der Club of Gore, now my favorite band https://letterboxd.com/film/autumn-ball/
Fitzcarraldo - Werner Herzog moves hell and earth in this film https://letterboxd.com/film/fitzcarraldo/
Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love - Wong Kar-Wai's movies affected me so much that when I went to Hong Kong about half my trip was just looking for the filming locations https://letterboxd.com/film/chungking-express/ & https://letterboxd.com/film/in-the-mood-for-love/
UHF - Probably the reason I like underdogs https://letterboxd.com/film/uhf/
I knew of Werner Herzog but recently got really interested in his work after he guested on Conan O'Brien's podcast. I'm reading his autobiography right now.
It's fascinating how he was begging some investor about how he had to make the movie Fitzcarraldo, because if he didn't, his life would be purposeless (I do hope I'm remembering this right). It got me wondering how he got away with things like forcing his crew to carry tonnes of ship over a mountain, but, also why shouldn't he get away with it, why should there be a strict construct of what's allowed or not.
Check out the movie “Fitzcarraldo” by Werner Hertzog!
The aforementioned Lessons of Darkness is obligatory, but as I said, it is less a documentary than a kind of audiovisual poem. The footage is incredible [1].
Of his "straight" documentaries, Encounters at the End of the World is great. It's a film about the people who live at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Like his other biographical documentaries, it mixes quirky people and humour with brutally realist view of the world, all to great photography and music.
The Fire Within [3], his 2022 documentary on the popular volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, is wonderful. It's a superior companion piece to his earlier films about volcanos (Herzog really likes volcanoes), Into the Inferno and La Soufriere.
Of his fiction films, you can't avoid Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo. But a personal favourite of mine among his 1970s films is Heart of Glass [4], a quirky and beautiful retelling of a Bavarian folk tale, set in the 1700s.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHfVnM_duRg
[2] https://letterboxd.com/film/encounters-at-the-end-of-the-world/
[3] https://letterboxd.com/film/the-fire-within-requiem-for-katia-and-maurice-krafft/
[4] https://letterboxd.com/film/heart-of-glass/
Fitzcarraldo is one of the better movies I’ve ever seen and the production was so famously difficult they made a documentary about it.
I recommend Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control by Errol Morris. It’s a series of interviews with passionate geniuses in various areas, including a naked mole rat scientist.
I watched it in the 90s and gave me awareness that there’s people who have very deep interest in a subject and achieve fulfillment in studying and working in an area.
Morris directed many other good documentaries- Thin Blue Line, Fog of War- but I think FCOoC is his best.
Also Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (there’s a documentary and a fictional portrays) is interesting to show how someone can work on a seemingly pointless and impossible task. This was helpful in programming as frequently areas of interest seem so confusing to people outside my mind.
After watching "Fitzcarraldo", be sure to watch "Burden of Dreams".
Another director would have used practical special effects (models) to film dragging the steamship over the mountain and riding it down the rapids. Herzog dragged a real steamship over the actual mountain and he and the film crew rode it down the rapids.
In "Aguirre Wrath of God" the conquistadors war party lose half of their equipment when a flood sweeps one of the rafts away. This was not part of the script, during on location shooting an actual flood swept one of the movie crews rafts away with a lot of the equipment and props.
One of the many glories of The Mandalorian is Herzog's role.
And if you haven't seen Fitzcarraldo, put down your computing device and go watch that movie instead.
Hackers (1995)
Not joking, it's a silly and campy movie but it captures the enthusiasm I had as a kid for making computers do things.
Not about coding, but about achieving something through persistence and hard work: Fitzcarraldo (1982)
I think that a lot of people here are forgetting that a project is whatever you make a project to be. It does not need to be operated like a bureaucratic profit seeking corporation. The problem is that the corporate world leaks their madness into our private lives. Just do whatever you want and have fun. Remember that you can choose any type of societal model to structure your project. And most importantly you are free to walk away at any time. But there exist two things here the real project and the social avatar of the project and how the people on the project interact with each other. What belongs to whom? and does it matter? Sub specie aeternitatis this whole thing feels like an effing Herzog movie. Please don't let yourselves get carried away by this nonsense. Like whats the effing point here Fitzcarraldo? I mean seriously people, as a humanity, where are we going so fast that we can't wait to get there and why don't get there with joy?
His movies are insufferable, they mock humanity, they are low-ingredient-count/genuine, and they convey very few life lessons to take outside the movie. But the flip side of these attributes also make these movies great.
Insufferable: He doesn't just convey a feeling to his audience. He makes the audience feel it directly. If he wants to convey boredom, he bores you. If he wants to convey patiences, he makes you wait patiently. If he wants to convey discomfort, he'll make you feel uncomfortable.
Mocking: He mocks his subjects in many ways, but mocking also seems to be his main way to express admiration. He mocks man's battle against nature. "Man is a fool. Nature wins" is a binding theme, yet he believes greatness only comes form that struggle (hunting in the taiga, an impromptu hike through France and Germany, Fitzcarraldo, playing chicken with an active volcano, etc). The more highly his subject thinks about himself (and it's always a "he"), the more he savages them with mockery (that includes all PhDs in his movies, and every character who wants to be on camera). The more prestigious the character, the more he lunges at them. And if he can't make them flinch with his mockery, he holds the shot steady long enough for the viewer to flinch. He needs someone to flinch in his mockery/respect/admiration game.
Low-ingredient/genuine: In his older films, his actors were raw (either because they weren't actors, or because they were Kinski). Hertzog portrays himself on the scene through his characters, and criticizes himself. The struggles he documents remind him of his own follies. He makes fun of his characters to criticize himself. It's a form of bullying for sure, but it's also a genuine form of self-criticism.
No life lessons: You might walk away thinking "what did i learn from that movie?" Usually you'll have learned nothing (Rescue Dawn might be an exception, because it's really a Hollywood film. But think about his documentary about the skiing wood carver. You learn zero things about skiing or wood carving). But you've walked away with a shitload of feelings. You've been through the ringer. These feelings seem to dissipate soon after the movie, but the sounds, the music, the tone of his voice, the periodic movements in the scene all stay with you. These images have a taste, and you'll remember their taste for years to come.
I hate his movies, but I've watched every one of them to understand why I hate them. I wish kinski had succeeded in strangling him, or that pellet had not be so insignificant, or that Alice Waters had let him choke on that shoe. But there's no escaping the images, I'll always feel haunted.
Not just documentaries, but films too. Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde, and Aguirre Wrath of God are some of the best films ever made.
Thanks, I enjoyed that a lot more than I enjoyed the actual movie. (although I enjoyed that too) A bit like Burden of Dreams vs Fitzcarraldo[0]. In both pairs, the fictional story seems trivial in a lot of ways compared with the real story. Maybe that's often or usually the case? Well, I don't think it's likely I would've enjoyed Terry Gilliam's Quixote or Jodorowsky's Dune more than I did the amazing documentaries about them. (Lost in La Mancha and Jodorowky's Dune)
[0] Fitzcarraldo (1982) is a Werner Herzog movie about a guy who wants to build an opera house in the jungle, which plan involves hauling a ship over a hill between 2 rivers. Burden of Dreams is Les Blank's documentary about the making of the movie.
I'm reminded of the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzcarraldo - based on a real story, the making of the movie was even more ambitious than the original event.
"The film production was an incredible ordeal, and famously involved moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill. This was filmed without the use of special effects"
I also recommend his documentary on his contentious relationship with his long time collaborator Klaus Kinski: "My Best Fiend". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Best_Fiend
Kinski was a very, shall we say, capricious actor (also, a psychopath and as, it turned out later, child molester) whose intense acting had a big part in the success of Herzog's earlier movies (Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, Nosferatu). During the filming of Aguirre (in the middle of the jungle), Herzog supposedly forced Kinski to fulfill his contract at gun point. The natives which were hired to help and act in the film also offered to kill Kinski for Herzog because he was such a maniac.
No, not really. You can tell a true story with a narrative film, or a documentary; what Herzog believes is that there is a truth beyond a strictly factual accounting, and he makes movies informed by this belief. There are a variety of techniques, but the most obvious is inserting himself into someone else's story, whether this is talking explicitly about the difficulties of making Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, or the scenes in Grizzly Man where he views Treadwell's death footage and then makes an in-camera judgement about showing it more widely; or basically all of Little Dieter Needs To Fly, wherein he takes Dengler back to Indochina and subjects him to much of the same suffering he experienced in his escape.
This also works in reverse, of course, notably with Fitzcarraldo, where he replicates an insane feat of human ingenuity that wasn't actually part of the real life Fitzcarrald's story.
In any event, all of Herzog's movies are worth viewing from my highly fan-boyish perspective.
I didn't really like Little Dieter. Herzog's best films were made in the early part of his career (back in the 1970's), and he's gotten a lot weaker with age.
Herzog's masterpiece is Aguirre:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068182/
It is head and shoulders above anything else he's ever made.
Fitzcarraldo and Nosferatu are also good:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083946/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079641/
The rest of his films range from awful to meh.