Word: fitzearruldo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WHEN YOU SHOOT in elephant, he sometimes stays 10 days on his feet before topping over," a character declures near the begining of Fitzearruldo. With this hit of incident dealogue, the German director Wener Herzog has hit open a sadly apt metaphor forhis new film. Over a 21/2 hour stretch of celluloid, Fitzearruldo lurches and becomes like some Teatonic pachyderm. Drunk on its own significance it dies at our feet collasping under its own weight...
Watching this film fold is in itself an unnerving spectacle. Though Fitzearruldo is almost as overbudgeted, overproduced, overblown as many Hollywood bondanzas, the added symbolic and idenlogical freight produced a particularly land thud when the whole thing falls aprt...
...Fitzearruldo (Klaus Kinski) is the Indians name for Brian Sweency Fazgerald, a half-crazed, half-Irish failed enterpreneur who is driven by an extraordinary obsession with opera. He hits upon the grand scheme of building an aperu house in the middle of the Peruviam Amazon jungle--a shrine to his god Caruso. To finance his brainechild, Fitzearruldo attempts to claims a large expanse of unexplored territory and cash in on the huge rubber free crop. In order to reach the area, however, he must unvigute up one river and cross over a ridge of land to another river--drugging...
WITH THE GROUNDWORK thus laid out. Herzog sends Kinski and his crew up the river. They chug in a rickety steamship chiristened the Molly-Aida--a name which contains the symbolic kernel of film. The yoking of Molly (Claudia Cordinate), a brothel madame, and Fitzearruldo's mistress, and Verdi's opera is a neon sign for the Juxtapostio of Prostitution and Art. It's Imperialism and the Musc, strolling in hand up into the old Heart of Darkness. Unfortuantely, this potentialty interesting irony is crushed by the film's mass. P>Early in journey upstream. Herzog achieves one scene...
shortly afterward, the film arrives at its intended climax, which proves to be its downfull. Contronted with the ridge separating him from his destination. Fitzearruldo decides to cross it by taking the entire boat along with him. This action tries to capture the madness of the quest. But a symbol requires subtlety, and once again. Herzog stitles, all nuances. The ship is indeed dragged across the land with help him the Indians who, having stepped out from behind their ominuos drumbeat, trurn to be disappointingly sullen rather than mysterious. For at least a half hour they pull the creaking ship...
| 1 |