The man Klaus Kinski plays is named Fitzgerald (called "Fitzcarraldo" by the men working with him), an Irishman in Iquitos on the Amazon River who decides that it would be grand to ford a steamship from one branch of the river to the next so that he might build an opera house deep in the jungle, where he will invite the great Enrico Caruso to sing on opening night. It's a ridiculous skylark, a visionary's dream that the real-life Fitzgerald tried to see through by dismantling the ship before its land-crossing. He failed. So Herzog, of course, demanded that a ship, whole, be dragged up a narrow mountain pass with a series of levers, pulleys, and blocks--upping the stakes in a way that's only describable with words like "insane" and "arrogant." ("Reckless," even.) A feeling of doom pervades Fitzcarraldo, but it's not the mundane variety of foreboding. Rather, it's the kind of doom reserved for mythology and Greek tragedy: stories of men emboldened by mad visions attempting to break through the thin cartilage separating a man from the gods beating inside his chest. No other actor besides Kinski could convince of the furnace required to stoke hundreds of labourers on their fools' errand, and no other director besides Herzog could wring so much poetry from an umbrella rescued from a rain-swollen river, the absolute silence greeting a peoples' first encounter with a piece of ice, or a phonograph playing Caruso as it's carried to its ruin on the deck of a broken ship.
Available individually as well as within Anchor Bay's Herzog/Kinski box set, Fitzcarraldo comes to DVD in a stunning 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. Colours are lush while stopping short of saturated--the transfer preserves the kind of filmic vérité that enhances Herzog's dance along the line between fiction and documentary. Shot in English (but cryptically dubbed in German for its North American release), the film receives sterling DD 5.1 remixes in both English and German; I found either option to sound relatively faultless (the English track is brassier with more background hiss, though it's not distracting), although my preference, still, for Herzog in his native German biases me towards the dub even knowing it's a dub. Most importantly, every tortured scream of the flat-bottomed boat as it's lugged across an alien landscape is reproduced in the booming magnificence of digital fidelity. Along with a scrubbed trailer, a lengthy stills gallery, and Anchor Bay's excellent talent bios, find an excellent commentary featuring Herzog, Norman Hill, and producer Lucki Stipetic that goes from particulars like the minutia of lighting to more global concerns like the logistics of pulling the boat and how Herzog imagined the movement of the boat as a vision sprung full flower from opera and fever dream. Every time Herzog says "a steamboat moving up a mountain, it's not possible," I get a little thrill--because, Blow-up like, there it is.-Walter Chaw
1.85:1 (16x9); German DD 5.1, English DD 5.1; English subtitles; DVD-9; 157 minutes; Anchor Bay
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| AVAILABLE INDIVIDUALLY OR AS PART OF ANCHOR BAY'S "HERZOG/KINSKI" BOX SET (Amazon USA, Amazon Canada, Compare Prices) |
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A hallucinogenic western about a human stain that still seems like a bad dream, Cobra Verde doesn't exactly impresses with its realism--but as a tale told almost completely as an allegory, it contributes images of slavery that boast palpable weight, starting with the titular bandit's entrance. As Cobra Verde, Klaus Kinski opens the film in a field of bones, looking through red-rimmed eyes at a mission-style ranch whose blanched white clay walls themselves suggest the shell of a great beast left to cook in the Brazilian wasteland. After murdering his boss at a mud-caked gold mine, he's taken on at a sugarcane plantation and promptly impregnates its manager's three mouthy daughters. ("I am Cobra Verde, the bandit. I do what I do.") And yet his actions appear to have a motivating factor, observing as he does the master of the house molesting his servants upon coarsely declaring it odd that a day has gone by in which he hasn't knocked-up another of his slaves. Cobra Verde haunts the next sequence as well, hovering on the outside of a meeting of plantation owners during which they plot to send the bandit to West Africa, where he's sure to meet his doom at the hands of the slavers there. Cobra Verde iFilm Freak Central - Herzog on DVD: The '80se Woman Pretty rFilm Freak Central - Herzog on DVD: The '80sv Woman Woman |