The director’s thought-film was released on 4 March 1982: the legends on the set are countless, between the abandonment of Mick Jagger and the conflicts with the actor-friend-enemy
On March 4, 1982, when it comes out in German cinemas «Fitzcarraldo», The then forty-year-old director Werner Herzog and its actor-fetish-alter ego-friend-foe Klaus Kinski they are in their fourth collaboration after «Aguirre, fury of God» (1972), «Nosferatu, the prince of the night» (1978) and «Woyzeck» (1979). And their tormented relationships on and off the set are already legendary. Their story, however, began many years earlier as a true epiphany, one of those minimal events that with hindsight are able to brand an entire existence: as a teenager, in fact, Herzog lived in Munich in conditions of extreme poverty with his mother and brothers in a small pension where the thirty-year-old, eclectic and already “cursed” actor (always immersed in a “private” performance even in “real” life without fear of being taken for mad), ended up accidentally spend a few days of his life disconnected. An unmistakable sign of destiny.
From this brief symbiosis, it definitely matures in Herzog the certainty not only of wanting to work “grown up” in cinema, but also the will to have Kinski in front of his camera sooner or later. Their meeting on a set took place in 1971 with “Aguirre, furore di Dio”, the film that consecrates the still very young director among the greatest exponents of Neuer Deutscher Film and that temporarily removes Kinski from his very long and varied curriculum of wild horse in works mainly of genre. It is the exploit with which Herzog definitively attests that dimension of challenge with his cinema of inaccessible or inaccessible, uncorrupted or deserted places, of natural scenarios as solemn as they are risky, and defines a style that rides fiction and documentaryism, intersecting objectivity of facts and “remodeled” reality, panic embrace and philosophical reflection, surreal thrust and provocation. That is, what he himself calls “ecstatic truth” (“I’ve always been interested in the difference between“ fact ”and“ truth. ”And I’ve always felt that there is such a thing as a deeper truth. […]. It’s more or less like in poetry. When you read a great poem, you immediately feel, in your heart, in your guts, that there is a profound, inherent truth, an ecstatic truth “). And it is the film that, precisely by virtue of this ambivalence of reality, finds in the duality of Kinski’s very existence the deepest figure of him.
“Aguirre, fury of God” marks the beginning of an indefinable partnership: no longer a simple collaboration but a sharing of, precisely, fury and madness, of almost self-destructive pushes towards a limit whose bar continues to move more and more horizontally beyond its own definition. The production is a tour de force between Herzog’s elephantine / utopian needs and Kinski’s furious genius, so understood and compressed in the character of his conquistador in the equally chimerical search for Eldorado that the boundary between staging and lived is indistinguishable: the set becomes a battlefield in which Kinski hurts extras, screams, eliminates empathy with the crew and the director with schizoid utterances, increasingly unreasonable demands, head shots. And everything on the screen is extraordinarily transparent, disturbing, highly visible and “never seen”. Their paths from that moment become one. They come back together for the proletarian anti-militarist tragedy Woyzeck, a “strange” adaptation project of Georg Büchner’s unfinished play on the progressive madness of a soldier, and for a second masterpiece, Nosferatu, prince of the night, which remains the highest and most disturbing always by Kinski. Other sets remembered by those who took part as real territories of war and tension.
But when Herzog decides to throw himself into that which has remained to this day his most reckless and grandiose undertaking (fourteen million German marks, eight billion lire at the time, almost entirely taken out of his own pocket), Kinski is strangely not “foreseen”. The filming of «Fitzcarraldo» was born with the dean Jason Robards as the protagonist and the rolling stone Mick Jagger as his “shoulder”. But after a month and a half of production and with 40% of the film already completed, Robards’ precarious health conditions require a stop destined not to be temporary: it is only then that, eliminating the character of Jagger in the meantime made unavailable to the commitments with the band, Herzog starts shooting again and calls Kinski on the set to reconstruct, romanticizing it, the titanic epic of the real life Carlos Firmin Fitzgerald, Peruvian adventurer remembered for having really hoisted a ship on top of a mountain. In Herzog’s version, in the late 19th century Amazon, the fictional idealist Brian Sweeny Fitzgerald (Kinski) alias Fitzcarraldo (the name by which the protagonist calls himself because the natives cannot pronounce the real one correctly), already frustrated in his desire to build a trans-Andean railway, he wants to crown his new dream at all costs: to build a majestic opera house in his village of birth, Iquitos, isolated from the civilized world, so that it can host an exhibition, among others, of the mythical tenor Enrico Caruso, admired by him in the temple of opera in Manaus. To do this, he will try with the financial help of the brothel-keeper lover Molly (Claudia Cardinale) and the practical one of the Indians to transport an entire river boat over a mountain.
But despite the help of the natives, convinced that “Fitz” is the god of their legend destined to lead them to heaven, the operation will prove to be a new failure. “Fitzcarraldo” is Herzog’s thought-film of those years, and its protagonist an obvious personal transference: cinema as a colossal physical / mental enterprise, an idea of ”risk” that transcends the mere concern of economic return to crawl in jeopardizing his own physical and mental safety (as evidenced by the extraordinary documentary / making of by Les Blank Burden of Dreams). A work that is involuntarily “Kubrickian” in its own way but which transfers and dirties the myth of the technological director-demiurge into the completely unpredictable dimension of the “unknown deep space” of a natural context that is inevitably hostile and not regimentable by a production plan. Amidst misfortunes worthy of Coppola in “Apocalypse Now” (1979), who not by chance declared himself openly inspired by Herzoghi’s insanity, Fitzcarraldo is also the film that pushes the conflict between Herzog and Kinski beyond the already very subtle level of guard.
The legends from the set are countless (the most famous concerns the Indians, clearly exploited by Herzog and always on Kinski’s side during their countless outbursts, who would have killed the director if they had received a specific request from the actor), as it was never really clear if Kinski had agreed to take part in the film to “save” the production to Herzog or with the intention of putting it further into crisis to make him pay for being a “second choice”. Now rarely programmed on TV (perhaps also due to its two hours and forty duration), “Fitzcarraldo” (awarded at the Cannes Film Festival for best direction) obviously did not have success (nor perhaps Herzog cared about it), and it is one of the many “forgotten” films of a Cinema that is literally making its “high” history invisible despite the reckless proliferation of platforms and the exponential multiplication of disconsolately useless, transitory, impermanent viewing offers. And recovering it today, forty years after its release, could still be an intense and unexpected experience.
Kinski and Herzog cross their paths again only once, five years later, for the “smaller” but somewhat similar «Cobra Verde», the scene of more modest outbursts. But eight years after the death of the actor, who died in 1991, they are ideally a couple again: when a now pacified Herzog decides to face the narration of their relationship in first person in a poignant documentary-masterpiece with the unequivocal title: “My enemy more expensive”. Where there is no secret of the time often spent by both meditating on their mutual murder (“If you leave the film you will find yourself with eight bullets in the head before reaching the next bend in the river and the ninth will be for me” is a historical phrase and witnessed hissed by Herzog to Kinski on the set of «Fitzcarraldo»), but in which the unfathomable power of the bond that united them is testified by one of the most moving final shots ever. At your eventual desire as treasure seekers to find out which one.
March 3, 2022 (change March 3, 2022 | 10:37)
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