“If it was necessary to climb down into hell and wrestle a film out of the claws of the devil,” Werner Herzog once said, “I would do so.” If it was necessary.

In FITZCARRALDO, a man whose dream to host opera in the jungle leads him to risk and lose indigenous lives on a harebrained scheme to drag a boat over a mountain – all so he can steal natural resources to fund his manic vision. Its production, including the real-life towing of a real-life boat over a real-life mountain in Peru, was similarly plagued by injury, death, and exploitation.

Herzog’s biggest movie makes you feel like you’re falling into a trap. Can the value of a dream realized outweigh the cost of realizing it? No. The answer’s no. That’s why FITZCARRALDO can be hard to swallow: It’s a monumental Movie-movie about the persistence of the human spirit that is itself an example of how the products of pointless dreams – fame, riches, opera in the jungle, a movie about fame and riches and opera in the jungle – crumble in comparison to the sacrifices made to realize them.

In this episode, we discuss how we feel FITZCARRALDO’s hubris, imperialist undercurrents, and literal loss of life (both on-screen and behind the camera) all but rob the movie of its essential point and reason for being.

Resources

“Making Films, Taking Lives: How the Present Looms Large in Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo” by Chris Polley for Perisphere, the Trylon blog: https://www.perisphere.org/2021/11/16/making-films-taking-lives-how-the-present-looms-large-in-herzogs-fitzcarraldo/

Werner Herzog promoting FITZCARRALDO on Late Night with David Letterman, October 11, 1982: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruY1FrVW9KE

Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trylovepodcast and email us at [email protected] to get in touch! Buy tickets and support the Trylon at https://www.trylon.org/.

Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters. Outro music: “Bella Figlia Dell'Amore” from Verdi’s “Rigoletto” sung by Enrico Caruso (tenor), Bessie Abott (soprano), Louise Homer (contralto) and Antonio Scotti (baritone), 1907.

0:00 - Episode 146: FITZCARRALDO (1982)

1:38 - The Patented Aaron Grossman Summary (patent pending)

4:13 - Jason’s thoughts

8:31 - Cody’s thoughts

13:06 - Harry’s thoughts

20:41 - A dream as disgusting as the tools used to realize it

25:39 - Contrasts in FITZCARRALDO

37:30 - Satire?

39:55 - Why self-aware readings of FITZCARRALDO fall flat

43:21 - Final thoughts

53:51 - Cody’s Noteys: Fitzca-runtime (runtime-based trivia)