Werner Herzog | Fitcarraldo / 1982

with the voice of caruso

by Douglas Messerli

 

Werner Herzog (screenwriter and director) Fitzcarraldo / 1982

 

Based on true life adventures of the Peruvian rubber baron, Carlos Fitzcarrald, Werner Herzog’s epic opera tale is almost overwhelmed by its own back story. In real life, Fitzcarrald bought a parcel of rubber trees straddling the Ucayali River which was unreachable because of dangerous rapids, but set off upstream on the Pachitea River, a secondary Amazon tributary, that flowed only several hundred meters beyond the Ucalian river, where he dismantled his 30-ton ship, carrying it with natives over the mountain, whereupon he set it up again. In Herzog’s film, the director used a 320-ton steamer, linking it to pulleys while steaming uphill over the mountain to the second tributary—a nearly impossible task which brought Herzog to describe himself as the “Conquistador of the Useless.”

     The original Fitzcarraldo was to be played by Jason Robards, with Mick Jagger as a secondary character, but Robards fell ill from dysentery and was able to complete the project and Jagger left the venture for a tour with the Rolling Stones, forcing Herzog to start over filming from the beginning, this time with the irascible and self-destructive Klaus Kinski, who some natives seriously offered to kill if Herzog would agree to it.

     Torrents of rain, mud, insects, snakes and the simple logistics of the journey nearly did the entire crew in, and three of the six involved with the shooting were injured in the ship’s free-fall crashes through the rapids.

      By comparison, the film’s events, beautifully filled by cinematographer Thomas Mauch, look more like a picnic. But, obviously, the real turmoil of the shooting is what helps to make the film so monumental. When the film’s dangerous Amazonia natives threaten the ship and its denizens, we realize that the actor-natives were, in fact, playing out some of their hate of Kinski.

      Fitzcarraldo, quite simply, represents the acts of a madman, the character simply standing in for the mad machinations of the director. A failure in his last business venture, the creation of Trans-Andrean railways, the dreamer hero finds himself in the backwater town of Iqauitos, in love with the local beauty, Molly (Claudia Cardinale), the owner of the town’s successful brothel. His only other cohorts are the several village children, who love his offers of free ice, and a pig. But Fitzcarraldo has a love even greater than that his love of the pig, children, and Molly: he is enthralled with opera, particularly with the singing of Enrico Caruso, and he is determined to bring Caruso to Iquitos to in sing a newly constructed opera house.

     The film begins with a hurried journey to another Peruvian city via a small rowboat, with Molly in hand, to see Caruso—a trip that has taken him several days and has resulted in lacerations of his hand. The couple does not even have a ticket to the gala event, which is nearly over by the time they reach the opera house, but they find a way to wheedle themselves in for the final moments of the opera and tell the opera house manager of their plans to build such a grand palace in Iqauitos.

     The opera house manager and the citizens of Iquitos perceive Fitzcarraldo for what he is, a kind of lunatic. But, we realize along with Molly, that it is often the unconquerable spirits of such truly crazed individuals who accomplish what might never otherwise be. And Molly, clearly in love with her crazy suitor is willing to bankroll his rubber land venture and helps him to buy the huge boat. Fitzcarraldo, along with an experienced, if slightly near-sighted Captain (Paul Hittscher) even manages to gather a crew, including the wily but traitorous Cholo (Migues Ángel Fuentes) and a perpetually drunken cook, Huerequeque (Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez), who insists on two women assistant chefs. The other men he finds for the trip are tough sailors, all fairly handy with guns and aware of the dangers of the trip.

    None of them, however, know of Fitzcarraldo’s mad schemes, and become disoriented the minute he begins their voyage moving off in the wrong direction on the wrong river. Dissention immediately arises but is eventually quelled with the firing of some men and the two women cooks, that is until they reach the region of the unfriendly native tribes who inhabit the jungle, and have previously killed and beheaded missionaries and other would-be travelers. The eerie voyage through the native territory, where they are met by a strange babble of noises, is so unnerving to the sailors that they mutiny, leaving the boat with only Fitzcarraldo, the Captain, Cholo, and the cook to continue.

     The unstoppable Fitzcarraldo, however, offers his increasingly hostile enemies the only thing he has to give: his operatic love, playing out Caruso’s voice on his wind-up gramophone, which so awes the pipe-playing natives that, as they close in, they not only allow the men to live but feed them and sign themselves on to the trip.

      They continue upstream with good cheer until they discover Fitzcarraldo’s insane plan to move the ship over the mountain. But even here, the audacity of the event elicits their help, until the ship falls backwards down the slippery hill, killing one of their own. The natives disappear, but eventually return, clearly with some reservations. When Huerequeque suggests they use the boat’s engine along with the pulleys, however, the trip up the mountains resumes, miraculously ending with the boat slipping down, like a thirsty elephant, into the Pachitea. A drunken celebration follows, at which the boat’s original crew members pass out. Late in the night the head of the natives cuts the boat’s securing rope to appease the river gods, sending it downstream in a mad fall into the rapids.

     After several crashes into the rock-laden shores of the river, the boat surprisingly survives, but the down-hearted Fitzcarraldo arrives back in Iquitos without any rubber. He is able, however, to sell the refurbished steamboat back to the rubber baron, and, before giving over the vessel, sends the captain off to the distant opera house to bring back Caruso and the entire cast to perform on its deck, finally bringing opera to the backlands.

     While this truly “operatic” story may seem slow-moving at times and highly unbelievable, we recognize that it really happened—not in the past, but in Herzog’s cinematic present. And that very fact turns this film from a cinematic fiction into a kind of daring cinematic act, a spectacle of insistence that movies really matter, that they can create realities vastly larger than life. Few directors—I am reminded of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Tarkovsky’s films—have dared to put so much on the line in filmmaking. And if, in all these works there is something, at times, “over the top,” we also know that we are seeing something we will never encounter again, and could never exist otherwise in “real” life.

 

Los Angeles, August 26, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (August 2012).

Andrzej Wajda | Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) / 1977

the paragon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aleksander Scibor-Tyiski (screenplay), Andrzej Wajda (director) Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble) / 1977

 

Wajda's documentary-like film, Man of Marble, centers around a young film student, Agnieszka (a character based, in part, on the real-life film director Agnieszka Holland) who has chosen as her subject a national hero of the 1950s, a bricklayer Mateusz Birkut (played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz). Her faculty advisor strongly discourages her from tackling this subject, trying to steer her on to something about steel and industry, as opposed to the now obscure figure who helped build the Polish city for 100,000 people, Nowa Huta.

 

                   No one has yet touched on the 50s. Why don't you deal with a

                   subject that has no risk of ambiguity? A better project would be

                   facts—facts are steelworks and their output.

     Exactly why Agnieszka has chosen her subject is unclear; apparently she is simply interested in finding out more about her father's generation. But once she has begun her research she (and the audience) becomes more and more spellbound by the mysterious story surrounding Birkut. At first, even the head researcher is skeptical about the young director, and is disinterested in the forgotten documentaries she has uncovered for Agnieszka: obvious propagandist pieces of the day with titles such as "Birth of a City" (an uncompleted film, where the second director, so the credits list, was Wajda himself) and "Architects of our Happiness." But as she grows to know the younger woman, it is clear she becomes more and more fascinated by her behavior and obsessions.

     The lanky Krystyna Janda plays Agnieszka in a manner attune to the blaring, jazz-inspired score of composer Andrzej Korzynski. Her every move is a rush forward, her body itself a dare to anyone who might stand in her way. Awake, she is in near-constant motion, edgy, nervous. The rest of the time she collapses into sleep. With the help of three camera men, one an old-timer who admits this may be his last film, and who has a somewhat difficult time adjusting to her insistence on the use of a hand-held camera. She barges into a national museum and slips into a back room where no one is allowed to enter, clandestinely shooting a large marble image of Birkut. When the assistant queries her about her interest in the back room, insisting, "We've got better sculptors here now." Angieszka's response is an ironic, "I daresay."

     Through these forays into the past, interviews, and the documentaries, the filmmaker comes to play the role of detective, gradually revealing the story of a simple believer, a true "paragon." Like thousands of other such workers, Birkut, lured from a small village to work on the vast construction project, was, as he is later described, a real country bumpkin. His handsome good looks and his obvious innocence and belief in the system—despite the deplorable working conditions and the insufficient food served the workers—make Mateusz the perfect victim for the up-and-coming filmmaker Jerzy Burski, who in order to promote Stakhanovite principles—ideas based on the theories of Aleksei Grigorevich Stakhanov, who encouraged workers to engage in competitive battles, resulting in contests in which miners, for example, mined 607 tons of coal in one shift, etc.—challenges the young bricklayer to participate in an event where he and others will lay 30,000 bricks in just a few hours. To Agnieszka, Burski boasts, "He was my greatest discovery, my biggest coup!"    

     Birkut wins the challenge, laying 30,509 bricks before he nearly falls over in exhaustion. That film and his youthful, handsome demeanor make him a national hero, and for a short while, the young country bumpkin rises in the party ranks, touring the country with his friend Wincenty Witek in an attempt to explain his techniques and stimulate the workers.

     At one such event, however, Birkut is handed a heated brick and badly burns both hands. Instead of recognizing the dissention of workers against the Stakhanovite methods, authorities prefer to describe the event as a traitorous act emanating from outside the country, focusing on Witek (who was wearing gloves when he handed his friend the burning brick). Birkut's attempts to defend Witek end in Kafka-like episodes. At one point when Birkut accompanies Witek to the criminal offices, he watches his friend enter a small room with one door, only to soon after discover an official sitting alone at his desk, who insists he has not seen Witek. Traveling to Warsaw in Witek's defense, Birkut is told to leave the case alone; if there is an error, it will be corrected.

      Having displeased the authorities, Birkut and his wife are forced to leave their Nowa Huta apartment; in one documentary Agnieszka observes authorities removing a banner of Birkut and replacing it with another. The man of the people, the "paragon," has fallen into disgrace. Clearly now disillusioned, Birkut hires a gypsy band and travels with them to the office of Internal Security, where he throws a brick through the front door.

      In yet another documentary discovered by the film school's researcher, we see Birkut at the trial of Witek. Hearing that Witek has confessed to delivering the burning brick, Birkut astonishingly admits that he has been a co-conspirator, that he knew about the event beforehand. Birkut is found guilty, along with the so-called Gypsy Band of conspirators, and is himself imprisoned.

     Later in the film the young director discovers that Witek has been rehabilitated and is now head of the Katowice steel mills. Flying over the mills in a helicopter, we witness a Witek who has sold out to the system, ironically running a company that Agnieszka has been encouraged to focus on for her diploma film.

    Birkut is also released, but he returns to Nowa Huta as a stranger, discovering that his wife Hanka has left after having denounced him. Tracking her down in a bourgeois apartment where Hanka has indentured herself to a local restaurant owner, Agnieszka is told the story of how Birkut came to her, pleading for Hanka's return. Her answer is a painful admission of her moral decline. Now an alcoholic, she is beaten by her restaurant-owning lover.

    By this time in Wajda's powerful film, we have witnessed enough to know that Agnieszka's film within a film is a significant one, a work of utter honesty about a world where everything is lied about or hidden. In such a world it seems inevitable that the school refuses to accept the reels she shows them and demands that she return the camera.

     Dispirited for the first time, we now witness her at her father's home, lying upon a couch in a near stupor. Her father argues that it is ridiculous that they have turned down a project to which they had previously committed. If I were making such a film, he argues, I would want to talk to the subject. As he leaves the house, he slips his daughter some money.

     Previously Agnieszka has been unable to find either Birkut or his son. But she now suspects that the son is working, not under the name Birkut, but with his mother's name, Tomczyk, in Gdansk. There, armed with a camera she has obviously purchased with her father's gift, she finds a man that looks amazingly like Birkut (the role is also played by Radziwilowicz), who admits he is Maciej Tomczyk and explains that his father has died. That death is unexplained in Man of Marble, but in Wajda's later film, Man of Iron, we discover that Birkut has been killed along with other striking workers in Gdansk. (That Wajda has brought us to this place three years before the Gdansk Solidarity Movement is no accident; the leader of the 1980 strike, Lech Wałesa, lost his job there in 1976, and appears as a character in Wajda's 1981 film).

     Tomczyk enters the shipyards, while Agnieszka waits. Upon finishing his day, Maciej finds her where he left her, admitting that he knew she would not give up. In the last scene we see them quickly striding forward down the hall of the film school, apparently convinced that her picture will now be made.

     It is a hopeful ending to a rather ambiguous reality. In truth, Wajda was forced to cut his original ending, which showed the 1970 events in which Birkut was supposedly killed. Although the film was released in Poland in 1976, it was withdrawn from distribution two months later, with Wajda being accused of "falsifying history." Perhaps the image of one of Agnieszka's instructors about to enter the hall as the young director and Birkut's son move purposefully forward is more telling; that man quickly returns to his office, closing the door. Truth is always a difficult thing to face.

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2009).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

 

Corrin Evans | Jellyfish / 2017

the cure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesse Pepe (screenwriter and composer with Benny Salz) Corrin Evans (director) Jellyfish / 2017 [6. 45 minutes] [music video]

 

J. Pee (actor/singer Jesse Pepe) is sitting on the beach with another man, who decides he wants to jump into the ocean waters, J. Pee refusing to join him, suggesting his friend will “freeze his ass off.” Fortunately, his ass is just fine, but he almost immediately cries out in terrifying pain: he’s been stung by a stingray and it hurts.

     Most medical and surfing sites suggest that in such a situation, you must immediately remove any of tail barb that might have been embedded in your skin, and then wash it is saltwater, flushing the area (yes, seawater will work as long as you don’t further call up through your motions other sting rays). The important thing in order to not get infection is to be sure to remove all the barbs and venom in the leg, washing it heavily with saltwater.

     However, the well-known folk remedy, as the San Diego Reader points out is urine, since the venom is as acid and urine is alkaline. Believers in this method insist that urine neutralizes the poison. Most professional sources advise against this method and insist that urine may have no or even detrimental effects.

     It doesn’t matter. Jose Pepe has obviously bought into the folk wisdom and has read the San Diego Reader, and is absolutely delighted, in his often-provocative gay sexual films, to make the best of it. “I have an idea bro, you’re just going to have to go with me on this, all right?”

    Pee, who loves to take gay themes to their over-the-top level in this case opens up a subject of a gay fetish which has not been often portrayed in LGBT+ movies (although it did pop up as the subject of Julian Dieterich’s 2023 short film Wet Hair), as his loosens his swim trunks and we hear the splash of piss across the wound, which quite miraculously relieves his friend’s terrible pain.

    As the two, unable to talk about what just happened, but nonetheless seeming to have enjoyed the event, resolve their silence as the friend suggests we may go back in, while J. Pee counters, “I think I’ll get my tan on.”

     “Be careful in there, he shouts to his friend as he reenters the ocean.”

     His “bro” soon returns, suggesting that he’s now been stung by a jellyfish again, this time near his lips. What’s a friend to do? J. Pee stands ready to help, “I can fix that” as his muscular pal falls to his knees, J. Pee breaking into song:

 

“I can't lie, I've been wanting to pee on someone my whole life

Would I ever get the chance?

How could I know, that the one I was meant to pee on was my bro?

How could I say no?

You have always been a best friend of mine,

And now we're so much closer with the help of my urine

In your eyes

Will we ever get to do this again?

Or was it meant to happen just one time?'

Cuz weekly would be nice.

 

Jellyfish, oh jellyfish

You granted me my secret wish

I've always wanted to piss on someone that I love

If you're out there jellyfish I want to say 'thank you for this gift'

From the bottom of my bladder

Jellyfish”

 

     Clearly, something has now happened to give J. Pee such a joyful pleasure that he cooks ups a new plan for several of his gay friends who he’s invited to a house pool party. Into the warm water, J. Pee pours a few lovely sting rays. “Ya-all want to jump in?”

     Of course, they’re all ready to go for a swim. As they each begin to scream out in pain, our hero rushing forward, his swim trunks falling the floor as we hear, in the final seconds after the screen has turned black, the sound of piss being sprayed over their all-to-compliant bodies.

 

Los Angeles, August 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Matías Risi | Diaz Pesos (10 Pesos) / 2003

payment for services rendered

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matías Risi (screenwriter and director) Diaz Pesos (10 Pesos) / 2003 [6 minutes]

 

Risi’s short retelling of O’Henry’s “The Tale of the Tainted Tenner” begins in our times in the bathroom of a gay bar, money found by a young handsome bargoer, who quickly passes if off to the bartender for drinks, who just as suddenly hands it over to an older man standing beside him at the bar, either his boss or a would-be customer seeking out a floor-dancer’s sexual services.

     The middle-aged man quickly gives the dancer a blow job and pays him with the 10 pesos bill which he simply drops upon the boy’s sweaty body.

     A park hustler quickly passes it off to a policeman, who hands it to his female lover or perhaps his sister beautician, from whom her young son picks it up. He colors and decorates it and just and secretly passes in on in his classroom to a friend, who before we can even catch our breath, takes it a grocer to purchase some candy.

     A hassled woman enters seeking some change for parking, the clerk passing her the ten pesos bill. In the car she rolls it up nicely for her cocaine fix and stashes it in her blouse between her breasts.  

 

    Back home, in exhaustion she sits down to the table with her husband (who appears the same man who paid the bar dancer for a blow job?) downing a glass of wine, as her maid finds the ten pesos bill as her evening pay.   

    On her way home the maid encounters what seems to be a mad man throwing away just such bills as he lectures on the street. She gathers up as many of the bills as she can. Clearly the original 10 pesos note has brought her, far removed the corrupt activities previously related to this bill,  much deserved good luck—the credits show us a close-up view of this Argentinian bill which features the image of Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano y González, an Argentine economist, lawyer, politician, and journalist who took part in the Argentine Wars of Independence, designed what became the modern flag of Argentina, and is regarded as one of the Founding Father of that country—the film’s numerous credits crowding into the crevices of the 10-pesos.

Los Angeles, August 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Kon Ichikawa | 野火 Nobi (Fires on the Plain) / 1959

normal people

by Douglas Messerli

 

Natto Wada (screenplay,  based on a novel by Shohei Ooka) Kon Ichikawa (director)野火 (Nobi) (Fires on the Plain) / 1959

 

Just three years after The Burmese Harp, Ichikawa again tackled a story that focused upon the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, this time concerning the retreat of soldiers in the Leyte-Philippine front in 1945. In Fires on the Plain all traces of sentimentality have disappeared; the commander of this straggling platoon, far less sympathetic than Captain Inouye of the earlier film, begins the movie with a harangue against one of his men, Tamura, who, having contracted tuberculosis, has returned after just a few days at the hospital. His sergeant, who hasn’t enough rations to properly feed any of his men, declares that Tamura is of no use to him, demanding he go back to the hospital and insist upon being admitted. If they will not admit him, he proclaims, he must commit suicide.

      The seeming insanity of this command is only the first of a series of absurd demands put upon the living-dead soldiers of Ichikawa’s darkly comedic work, a tale which reminds one, at times, of Beckett’s utterly confused and immobile figures.

      Tamura, played by actor Eiji Funakoshi, is what one can only describe as a kind of wise fool, a good and obedient man with little of the ego of the men he meets. When he is told he cannot be given a bed—men still able to walk or even crawl are all refused refuge—he patiently waits with a group of others outside the hospital, many of whom are near death and survive only on tubers the local farmers long ago planted about the countryside.

     When the hospital is bombed by American planes most of the bed-ridden patients are killed, as the squatters and hospital staff run for cover, Tamura along with them. The deaths of the escaping patients, forced literally to crawl across the yard in an attempt to escape destruction, is one of the most startling images through which the director reveals the horrors of war.

     So begins Tamura’s near endless journey through the Philippine countryside, as he encounters other men from surviving units as they attempt to reach Palampon, where they hope to be evacuated. Sick, malnourished, reduced to eating soil and leeches, Tamura instinctively—if mistakenly—moves away from these soldiers toward the few signs of life he observes, small fires burning across the plains.

    That the path he has chosen is the most dangerous one is obvious. At one point, seeing a small church in the distance, he comes across an abandoned town, only to discover outside the small cathedral the bodies of dozens of Japanese soldiers, who en masse have been gunned down. Yet the return of a Philippine couple to retrieve a cache of salt they have buried in their hut, arouses his hopes that he can establish human contact. When he encounters the couple, however, the woman begins to scream uncontrollably, and after silently pleading for her silence, he is forced to shoot, killing her as her husband escapes.

     Startled by his own violent actions, he rids himself of his rifle shortly before encountering a pair of outlaw soldiers, Yasuda and Nagamatsu (the later played by popular Japanese entertainer Mickey Curtis), who follow the troops only to sell tobacco in return for food. Gathering with other men at a road and river crossing, they wait for nightfall, hoping to protect themselves from American guns, but as the crossing begins American tanks turn their lights upon the escapees, killing many.

   Those living, move gradually forward, some of them prepared to surrender. Again, Ichikawa demonstrates the impossibility of any sane action in war as a young Japanese man, waving a white flag as he runs toward a Red Cross truck, is gunned down by a Filipina guerilla soldier in an American jeep before the Americans can prevent her from what is clearly an act of revenge.

    The long march forward is brilliantly captured in a series of dark, satiric images in which one soldier, coming across a dead comrade, steals his shoes, leaving behind his own; a short while later another soldier takes these discarded boots, leaving, in turn, his own nearly soleless shoes behind; another takes these up as he rids himself a pair of shoes without any bottoms.

    Near death and nearly mad, Tamura once again encounters his bandit friends, joyful just to be in human company. They offer him monkey meat, but he cannot stomach food and his teeth, now rotten, fall out as he puts it to his mouth. Yasuda, now unable to walk, seemingly cannot survive without Nagamatsu’s help, yet the later sleeps far from him, his bed hidden in the forest, because, as he tells Tamura, he fears his “friend.” And we quickly begin to recognize what Tamura is unable to, that both men are more dangerous perhaps to one another than their being captured—or even death. Whether or not that includes their possibly starved sexual desires is never made clear. But we soon realize far more dangerous possibilities.

 

    As Nagamatsu goes in search of monkeys, Tamura follows him, suddenly witnessing Nagamatsu’s attempt to shoot another soldier before the gun is turned upon Tamura himself. “Don’t worry,” Nagamatsu assures him; he has no taste for infected meat.

     The meat they have been eating, quite obviously, is human flesh. When Nagamatsu discovers that his guileless friend has given up his grenade to Yasuda, he hides in waiting, shooting his former companion and, while Tamura looks on in horror, eviscerating his body as he swallows down his innards.

      Tamura has no choice but to slip away, running toward another fire he perceives in the distance. Of course, it is dangerous to move toward what he has previously been told are places where the natives burn their corn husks, but he is now desperate to reencounter what he imagines as “normal people.”

      In war, as Ichikawa has made clear, there can be no normality. Gun fire, presumably from Philippine partisans, shoots him down. 

 

Los Angeles, March 18, 2008

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2018).