Herzog Publishes his Journals from “Fitzcarraldo”

Werner Herzog’s 1982 film “Fitzcarraldo” was based on 19-century Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrold’s travails in transporting a steamship across the land between two rivers in order to access and reap financial reward from a vast rubber tree field. In filming “Fitzcarraldo,” Herzog insisted on authenticity, no special effects, which meant the cast and crew itself and many, many native Indian tribespeople transported a 320-ton steamship up a steep hill in the recreation of Fitzcarrold’s adventure. Herzog’s decree called for the actual navigation of dangerous waterways in the steamship. Three cast members were hurt in serious rapids. Hewing so closely to Fitzcarrold’s steamboat adventure allowed Herzog to successfully mine the rubber baron’s life; it allowed viewers to live vicariously through both the director’s and Fitzcarrold’s lives; and it allowed Herzog to invent his own harrowing adventure story along the way. The parallelism that developed between Fitzcarrold’s and Hertzog’s struggles was captured in “Burden of Dreams,” the documentary by Les Blank about the filming of the movie. So very meta, but still very interesting. Now, as a kind of companion offering to Blank’s film, Herzog has published Conquest of the Useless: Reflections From the Making of “Fitzcarraldo,” his diaries from the three years in which he made the film in the jungles of Brazil and Peru. The book, which is set for release by Harper Collins on June 30, is filled with Herzog’s unique reflections on the entire journey. An excerpt from the LA Times review on June 28:

[Herzog] can be scathing — the “people in Satipo were like vomit — ugly, mean-spirited, unkempt, as if a town in the highlands had expelled its most degenerate elements and pushed them off into the jungle” — and sensitive, as when cinematographer Thomas Mauch tears open his hand and undergoes surgery without anesthesia: “I held his head and pressed it against me, and a silent wall of faces surrounded us. Mauch said he could not take any more, he was going to faint, and I told him to go ahead.”

A small taste of Werner Herzog looking young, adventurous, and dashing in the Amazon.

via ‘Conquest of the Useless’ by Werner Herzog – Los Angeles Times.

via Conquest of the Useless, Harper Collins Publishers