Did You Ever See a Boat Walking?

By RICHARD CORLISS

FITZCARRALDO Directed and Written by Werner Herzog BURDEN OF DREAMS Directed by Les Blank

Werner Herzog is in love with the impossible. It seduces, challenges, obsesses him. It lures him to forbidden kingdoms, from the Sahara to the Amazon, where holy misfits are given the chance to realize or cheat their destinies. The risks this German film maker takes -- with his subject matter, with his and his company's safety, with an audience's willingness to accede to his demons -- make a reckless ad venturer like Francis Coppola seem stodgy by comparison. For Heart of Glass Herzog hypnotized his actors, and on the receptive viewer his films have a similar effect: their spectral landscapes, brain-fevered protagonists and eruptions of lyricism can weave a mesmerizing spell. In achievement and originality his movies stand above and apart from most contemporary cin ema. They have the remote beauty of fairy tales decoded from a lost civilization.

Herzog's compatriots, gimlet-eyed burghers such as Volker Schlondorff, Wim Wenders and the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, made their mark by refracting the cynical spirit of postwar Germany through a lens as hip as the new Hollywood's. Herzog renounces the rubble and babble of his homeland; none of his nine fiction features is wholly set there. Instead, he is drawn to legends and nightmares. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1973), a Spanish officer of the 16th century dreams of conquering South America and ends up alone on a raft, blithe and demented, lording it over some monkeys. In The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1975), a young man appears in a Nuremberg square in the 1820s, with no recollection of his past; the townspeople attempt to "civilize" Kaspar, treating him as their pet, their lab rat, their ignorant savior. In Heart of Glass (1976), a mountaintop savant predicts the fall of a small village's glass industry; panic and madness ensue. Herzog paints his pictures in colors as vivid as dream life and instructs his actors to proceed with the elegant gravity of silent-film stars. Aguirre, Kaspar and Heart of Glass are three solitary landmark films of the past decade.

In contrast with these soul struggles, Fitzcarraldo must have seemed like a shaman's summer vacation when Herzog conceived of it five years ago. He would return to the Peruvian Amazon, not too far from where he had filmed Aguirre, to shoot a sunnier version of that pathetic tale. At the end of the last century, an entrepreneur named Fitzcarrald dreamed of bringing his passion, grand opera, to the savage Indians upriver; to fulfill his dream, and with the Indians' help, he lugged a small riverboat across a narrow strip of land that separated two tributaries of the Amazon. It was a feat of autocracy and artistry, of engineering and enlightened madness--a readymade metaphor for Herzog's kind of film making. The movie would also be his first "big" production, with financial help from Coppola and with Jack Nicholson as the star.

Nothing worked out. As is shown in Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's documentary on the making of Fitzcarraldo, everything went wrong. Herzog was caught in the crossfire of a border dispute between Ecuador and Peru, and in a war of neighboring Indian tribes. The German branch of Amnesty International published charges that Herzog had conspired in the imprisonment of four Indians. Jason Robards, who succeeded Nicholson as the movie's star, was struck with amoebic dysentery six weeks into shooting; and because his scenes would have to be reshot with another actor, Co-Star Mick Jagger had to bow out to prepare for the Rolling Stones' U.S. tour. The longest drought in the region's recorded history prevented Herzog's ship from navigating its prescribed course. The film was shut down twice. Said the besieged writer-producer-director: "I shouldn't make movies any more. I should go to a lunatic asylum. This is not what a man should do with his life."

Typically, Herzog connived to make his life more difficult. He could have shot Fitzcarraldo within a day's travel of Iquitos, a port city with sufficient amenities; instead he took his crew hundreds of miles into the jungle. The historical Fitzcarrald's riverboat weighed 30 tons and was transported overland in 14 or 15 pieces; the steamboat used in the movie weighed 320 tons and would have to be dragged in one piece. Herzog's engineer demanded that the boat's inclination up the hill be no more than 20DEG; when Herzog insisted it be 40DEG, the engineer quit, predicting a 70% chance of catastrophe. Replied the film maker: "If I abandoned this project I would be a man without dreams. I live my life or I end my life with this project." Like his heroes, Herzog tempts fate as much as fate tempts him.

Herzomania is traced carefully enough in Burden of Dreams, now released in its complete 94-minute version after being shown truncated in June on PBS. The company must import food, bottled water, spare parts that often do not fit and, for the idle crew, prostitutes. In a precious outtake, Mick Jagger, as Robards' half-wit nephew, declaims the opening speech from Richard III with berserk authority. Herzog, suffering his own winter of discontent, displays the tip of an arrow that almost killed one of his extras. "Maybe I will give it to my little son," he muses. "He will be excited to know this went through the neck of a man."

But there is also a film called Fitzcarraldo, and if it lacks the magnetic obsessiveness of Herzog's three great films, it is likely to be all the more accessible to a general audience. By force of will, Herzog has managed to create a helium-light adventure movie in which Fitz, the crazy white man, charms the jungle's savage inhabitants, only to be flummoxed by the "bare-asses," to his own final ironic amusement. The imagery is spectacular: lush, stark and delicate. A sky at dusk blends the colors of Munch and Rousseau; Fitzcarraldo's boat skims noiselessly over water as soft and mysterious as silk. Jungle melodies come virginal to the ear: an unseen bird's distant wolf whistle or, when Fitzcarraldo's axes fell a tree, an ecstatic Wheeee! from the Indians that sounds like Munchkins celebrating the death of the Wicked Witch.

Fitzcarraldo is unusual for a Herzog film in providing a gallery of delightful supporting performances. Claudia Cardinale, as Fitz's mistress Molly, radiates sensuality like a healthy year-round suntan. Jose Lewgoy, who plays an unscrupulous rubber baron, takes immense and innocent pleasure in his character's venality. Miguel Angel Fuentes, the boat's mechanic, is a huge ivory totem, twice as large as Arnold Schwarzenegger and with three times the dark charm. Grande Othelo, who starred 40 years ago in Orson Welles' unfinished film It's All True, is the wrinkled old retainer of one of Fitz's broken dreams. And steering the vessel through precarious waters is Klaus Kinski, once the psychotic stalker of Herzog's Aguirre, Woyzeck and Nosferatu, now a Kodachrome picture of the imperialist as jolly fantast. It is one of the many odd pleasures of Fitzcarraldo to watch Kinski's 80 or so teeth, which are usually forged into a vampire's carnivorous sneer, here forged into the semblance of a Teddy Roosevelt grin.

"Conquistador of the useless," a rival calls Fitzcarraldo. Fitz says: "I am the spectacle in the forest." This is Herzog talking, of course, not Kinski or Fitzcarraldo. Or rather, Herzog is all his characters, all his actors. He is the dreamer, the savage, the engulfing river. This time, Herzog steered his craft through rapids and longueurs, outside dangers and his own follies. A madman and a survivor: a moviemaking Ahab who lived to tell his fabulous tale. --By Richard Corliss

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