Fitzcarraldo

SINOPSIS

This is German director Werner Herzog's true masterpiece, a labour of love that almost engulfed him. It's the story of a quest by the white-suited Brian Fitzgerald (the Fitzcarraldo of the title, played by Klaus Kinski) to build an opera house in the South American jungle, funded by profits from a rubber plantation. To achieve his ambition, Fitzgerald is required to drag a 320-ton steamship over a mountain. This, the film's central motif, Herzog actually did. Kinski, so vivid in Herzog's Aguirre: Wrath of God (which this film's setting recalls), again proves an imperious presence. There is far more to this lengthy film than a boat going up a hill, but it crowns an unforgettable piece of cinema. The making of this epic (captured in the 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams) sometimes threatens to eclipse the work itself, but that would be a tragedy.