recently watched: the duellists (for the first time) and fitzcarraldo (for the second time after many, many years).
i liked the duellists quite a bit, even if visually it seemed somewhat like barry lyndon-lite. scott always seems more interested in images than narrative, and i think comes closest in this film to fusing them. ferraud’s obsessive revenge on d’hubert is mirrored by the film’s obsessive interest in costume and the trappings of chivalry–and the general fussiness of day to day life during the napoleonic wars throws into relief the simplicity of ferraud’s mania. i don’t know how many of you have seen it or remember it clearly, but i’m interested in your take on the feud that drives the narrative.
*spoiler alert for those who have not seen it.*
here’s my take on the characters. at the beginning of the film my sympathies were entirely with d’hubert, ferraud’s anger at him seeming entirely irrational and macho-chivalrous. however, by the end of the film i almost began to like ferraud more. i can’t tell if this is a misreading on my part that reveals my own psychosis or whether this is engendered by ambivalences in the film (or in the original conrad story it is based on). ferraud invents a reason to fight and kill d’hubert but the rationale he comes up with after the fact–that d’hubert is a “general’s lackey”, an unprincipled military bureaucrat–seems to actually be proven as the film goes on. leaving aside the relative merits of the napoleonic and royalist causes (of which i know nothing) the conflict between ferraud and d’hubert, between id and super-ego, if you will, also becomes a conflict between those willing to die for principles (howsoever quixotically defined) and “realists” (as d’hubert describes himself) who survive by not having strong allegiances to anything–the gentlemen’s code being the last thing tying them together, in a death grip. the film ends with ferraud in a rare contemplative stance (though, as always, he is not given contemplative speech) but i can’t tell if the elegiac feel of the closing scenes signals anything other than scott’s desire to film a beautiful sunset. i really should go track down the conrad story and see how he frames this.
fitzcarraldo i was more ambivalent about this time around. cinematically, conceptually it remains an overwhelming experience, but i was more troubled on this viewing by the film’s relationship to colonialism generally and the representation of natives specifically. i haven’t quite been able to articulate this yet but would be interested in your thoughts (especially mark, who i know loves this film). tonight, i’m going to watch it again with herzog’s commentary, and i also have burden of dreams in my netflix queue.
okay, so i watched again with the commentary on, and sunhee and i discussed the film as well, and i am able to articulate my misgivings better. but first, some notes on the commentary itself:
first some trivia (which may already be covered in burden of dreams, which i need to get next).
1. the film was made in english–the only language all the actors spoke (though not all, some mexican actors were dubbed even in that version) but herzog thinks the german dubbed version is more authentic anyway. i’d agree–the commentary track is overlaid on the english audio channel and the “original” english sounds like a bad case of dubbing.
2. the film originally starred jason robards and mick jagger. they had 40 minutes filmed before robards fell ill and had to pull out; jagger then had to leave as well for schedule reasons–his part was not recast but instead composited into the character of fitzcarraldo as played finally by kinski. nicholson was also considered in between. at one point in the commentary the producer says nicholson was scared to go to the jungle; later herzog more diplomatically says that he couldn’t commit to the length of the shoot. he says that if they hadn’t got kinski he would have played the role himself.
commentary on the commentary
3. herzog takes great pains (both he and the producer speak perfect english, by the way, and herzog also speaks spanish) to note that he does not go out of his way to make shoots difficult or to put his actors in uncomfortable situations to get performances out of them. he just shoots where he thinks is best for the scenes, and says he would have been happy if the perfect location had been just outside a big city.
4. he debunks various myths about the filming, including some things he says les blank got wrong in burden of dreams. at the same time he seems quite committed to the myth of herzog. mostly, i think he wants to duck the question of exploiting the indians in the film, and of knowingly putting his people in harm’s way. otherwise he takes great relish in recounting the various catastrophes that befell the shoot.
5. he is vehemently opposed to storyboarding–which he describes as cowardice–and also didn’t bother with the dailies, saying as long as the lab told him they were saturated properly he was willing to trust his instincts. not sure if this is his normal modus operandi.
6. he speaks about how in hollywood he would have been made to shoot the film in a studio with a scale model of the ships (they used more than one). for him location shooting gives film a kind of palpable authenticity and atmosphere which he believes audiences can sense and which they react to. hence, presumably, some of the greater excesses of this shoot–which includes the fact that they were actually on the ship when it went down the rapids (resulting in terrible injury to at least one person).
well, this has been long enough. i’ll place my comments about the film’s narrative and representations of and relationship to colonialism etc. in a separate comment later.
“…but I was more troubled on this viewing by the film’s relationship to colonialism generally and the representation of natives specifically.”
Arnab – I have been giving this some thought, though I don’t think I’ve come up with much. Simply put, the question that bothered you about the film barely registered for me. I’ll excuse that in two ways: One, as I said, it’s one of my favorite films, and as such, I am willing to forgive it all of its flaws, which it no doubt has, and in fact, I may be oblivious to those flaws. Your point is valid however. From what I remember of my thoughts watching it (most recently around the time of the release of My Best Fiend), I carelessly swept the Indians away as part of nature, part of the jungle. Like the pack animals, butterflies, or snakes, the native people in the film could be useful, colorful and interesting to watch, or dangerous. But I never wondered about the terms of the relationship between the main characters and the Indians, and even less did I think about putting that into the larger context of colonialism.
Here’s the second part of my excuse: Maybe Herzog intended the film to be seen in this way. Kinski’s character is so outrageous, that he attempted to bend the entire world to his will: Be it Europeans, South Americans, boats, rivers, mud… I can’t imagine Herzog intended Kinski’s character to ever consider the relationship, though that certainly wouldn’t excuse the viewer from doing so.
Arnab, I”m afraid what you are going to have to do is sit through Herzog’s Cobra Verde now. It deals directly with slavery, and will almost certainly blow my “Herzog intended for me not to notice the Indians were human beings” theory out the water, as well as giving you more to think about regarding Herzog’s political subtext in his films. And while it’s not as good a film as Fitzcarraldo, it also has a wealth of incredible imagery and visual ideas. The scene at the end where Kinski grapples with the boat is heartbreaking.
It’s Herzog’s connection to/battle with nature that I love in his films. (Grizzly Man especially displays this dichotomy) That, and the way he tries to probe the disturbed minds of his main characters, be it Dracula, Woyzek, Tim Treadwell… Those are the things I always take from his films, and as such, other things obviously get past me.
Also – regarding your third point, you MAY want to check out his strange debut film, Even Dwarves Started Small. The entire cast is made up of dwarves, and they are put through some daunting dangerous looking tasks. Apparently Herzog promised that if the shoot finished with no one getting hurt he would throw himself into a cactus patch, which is what he did.
I am a fan of Fitz, and an even bigger fan of Burden. These posts are both fascinating, and I haven’t too much to add, except:
I watched Fitz very soon after seeing a bad little vhs copy of Aguirre. The latter film’s more explicit colonial critique framed my subsequent viewing of Fitz; even if it had been Robards, I probably would have seen in the lead a “romantic” hero of the arts uncomfortably echoing the vicious brutality of the conquistador. The fact that Kinski played both made the echoes more like two notes playing one chord.
Still, even Aguirre is a Conrad-like critique of colonial impulses, where the natives are more than extensions of the natural surroundings but less than human agents.
here’s the part about the film and colonial narrative:
the film is so visually powerful that it almost makes us forget that what is driving fitzcarraldo’s insane dream is the even more insane dream of colonialism. one might say, that’s fine, the film isn’t about colonialism, it’s about dreams (and herzog repeats this latter part over and over in the commentary) but i’m not sure the two can be separated. the fact that this bizarre reverie on dreams and the white man who follows his is set in this place brings in the ghost of the text herzog tries to subvert: heart of darkness. and it is interesting to see where this leads us and him.
achebe has asked of conrad why it is that his meditation on european subjectivity has to take place in africa, and not on a journey up the thames, and herzog knows he is susceptible to the same question. and this is where his treatment of the indians comes in. when we first enter their territory we hear the drums (an echo of the drums in conrad’s text) and his cook tells him of a myth the indians believe in, of a white god in a divine vessel who will free them (echoes perhaps of rider haggard). fitzcarraldo says he will exploit the myth, but herzog turns it around: the indians know he is not a god, and it turns out they have their own reason, their own dream, as herzog puts it in the commentary. (sunhee didn’t care for the caruso vs. the jungle element. this bothered me less, but i’ll try to lure her on here to add her own critique.)
so far, so good. herzog’s natives are not conrad’s unseen savages on the riverbank. they are unsettling figures, they have dignity, they are not exoticized. herzog is not conrad–he’s not pitting european rationality against african silence. but his romantic vision finally can’t escape its colonial setting. what i mean is that the colonial setting is the very necessary condition of his story. that is to say, none of the events of the film can take place without a colonial power-structure in place. he doesn’t deny the brutality of colonialism but he attempts to sidestep it. he takes pains to separate fitzcarraldo from the other rubber barons. fitzcarraldo himself marks the difference–they are dandies who think they can buy anything, he says; he, on the other hand, is a dreamer. they want rubber plantations, he wants only to build an opera house. but this dream can only be realized in certain parts of the world. fitzcarraldo is the flipside of kurtz–he is not recoiling from existential horror, he is instead trying to live entirely in a world of imagination.
it is interesting in this regard to compare the end of this film with the end of gilliam’s munchausen. there we find that the power of the imagination cannot finally be a channel of escape from the brutality of the world. here, fitzcarraldo is redeemed, is given a final victory. and this i think is where the film fails to hold the tension of its founding contradiction–that this dream can only be supported by a brutal power-structure that enables fitzcarraldo just as it enables the rubber barons. it turns out in the commentary that herzog admires the audacity of the lifestyle of the other rubber barons as well; he describes them as dreamers as well!
i don’t know if all of this holds together. and i certainly don’t mean this as an exhaustive critique of the film, which i like a lot as well. now, on to a second viewing of aguirre .
so, i watched burden of dreams last night. perhaps it is because i listened to all 2 hrs and 38 minutes of herzog’s commentary on the fitzcarraldo disc but i wasn’t particularly impressed by this. though i must say that given how much time this film spends on the controversies the production ran into with various indian groups, and herzog’s own contradictory attitude to interacting with/”contaminating” them i am surprised none of this registered on mark. herzog’s thoughts about the jungle etc. amplify some of my reservations in the comments above but i’m too lazy to spend more time articulating them further.
i was expecting to see a lot of kinski fireworks but he is in fact very charming in this film–rarely flipping out, actually being helpful most of the time with tasks no hollywood star would go within 2 miles of. the disc does include an outtake from this shoot which herzog used in my best fiend (which i have not seen) in which kinski does have an all-out meltdown.
a very nice extra on the disc (from criterion) is an earlier short documentary by les blank, werner herzog eats his shoe. i had no idea herzog was the one who pushed errol morris to make his first film. i’m sure mark has seen this short but it does seem like essential viewing for any herzog fan–he makes some interesting statements about cinema and images and so forth. plus he actually cooks and eats his shoe (making good on his motivational ploy for morris–herzog told him he would eat his shoe if morris actually started and finished a film).
Julien Donkey-Boy
eh?
I havent seen that short, but yes, I should.
I dont remember the stuff in Burden about contaminating the Indians, but yes, you’re right.
Again, I love these movies, but obviously havent developed an all-encompassing understanding of them. And I havent seen them in a few years. I do remember there being a fair amount of overlap between Burden and Best Fiend.
mark, very little of this occurred to me either when i first saw it many years ago. and i have contradictory responses of my own to many texts that i might be expected to have a certain kind of response to, given my academic/political affiliations. heart of darkness in particular remains important to me despite all the very valid postcolonial critiques of it (and the same is true of conrad generally).
one discrepancy between what herzog says about kinski in the fitzcarraldo commentary and what we actually see in burden of dreams:
if i remember correctly on the commentary he says of the scene in which fitzcarraldo and company are eating dinner tensely on the boat with the newly arrived indians surrounding them and playing their flutes at fitzcarraldo that kinski exploded as soon as the camera stopped running. in the doc. however, which films the filming of this scene, he actually very sweetly says that the indians are not very good actors but they’re trying really hard. it is possible i’m misremembering, that herzog was referring to a different scene, but i don’t think so. i have to see my best fiend of course, but i wonder to what extent kinski is constructed by herzog.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192194/
yes, but why are you mentioning it?
star wars
Herzog’s latest film–a Vietnam flick? I find this hard to believe, but, um. Yes. There it is.
Christian Bale is going to die before he’s 40 if he keeps playing anorexics.
I finally clicked on why you mumbled about Julien Donkey-Boy.
well, herzog’s in it, but i still don’t know what it has to do with this discussion.
How is Julien Donkey-boy? isn’t it directed by Boy Wonder Harmony Korine who wrote “Kids?” He directed a film called Gummo, which is remarkable for the sureness of its pacing and doubly remarkable for the horrific condescension and cultural nihilism it brings to its subject matter.
Arnab, it doen’t matter whether or not Julien Donkey-Boy is relevant here. Besides, I don’t think it would work very well.
i’m going to have to mention au hasard balthasar on account of there’s a donkey in it. if it had worked well it wouldn’t have gotten into all that trouble.
I’d like to see Au Hasard Balthasar, now that you mention it. I really enjoy Bresson, and this one looks interesting. In the queue it goes! Michael, perhaps this film has something interesting to say about human-animal relations? Arnab, your comments are highly relevant.
Francis the Talking Mule movies has a mule in it, but I don’t know if a mule is the same thing as a donkey. or a jackass. I wish someone would explain to me the relationship between a donkey a mule and a jackass. oh christ, I forgot Burro–what the hell does that refer to?
I’ve got an essay forthcoming on Gummo (and Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and Boys Don’t Cry). I love Gummo but only in a Janet Maslin sort of way. On Gummo, Maslin writes: “Dirt is no crime, but willful stupidity should be.†Don’t ask me about accessibility to the journal as I think three libraries and a train station carry it.
what is your common thread between these films, Jeff? and is there some reason you are keeping the essay title and journal secret? is it dirty??
jeff, why don’t you start a new topic for korine’s films? unless there’s some connecting thread to this discussion (other than the appearance of herzog in one of korine’s films) it is just going to get lost in here.
Judging by his secrecy regarding that forthcoming essay, I suspect Jeff wants it to get lost.
I’m not sure this merits a new post. The essay is titled, in high academic fashion, “A Queer Sort of Whiteness: Circulations of Deviancy and Desire in Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Gummo, and Boy’s Don’t Cry.” Its being published in Genre: An International Journal of Literature and the Arts (something out of the California State University system) for their film and ideology issue. I borrow from from queer theory and whiteness studies to interrogate alternative and/or underground representations of boyhood in America during the 1990s (I have an interest in childhood as a central trope in constructing American national identity). Speaking of, did anybody read that creepy New York Times article on the webcamp porno star yesterday? I mean I’m all for outting pedophiles, but that kid’s narrative was problematic at best. Sorry arnab, I know this going to make you groan. Allow some of that interest in fragmentation to filter its way back into the blog. Anarchy rules dude, and Werner wouldn’t mind . . . he seems to be all about fucking with categories.