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Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (Paperback)

By: Werner Herzog (Author)

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Review

"[M]esmerizingly bizarre....Obsessed with the bird, animal and insect worlds as a way of avoiding the human one, Mr. Herzog keeps a steady record of the perverse spectacles he encounters....In this context one man's plan to haul a steamship overland between two rivers becomes as reasonable as anything else."

"[CONQUEST OF THE USELESS] reveals [Herzog] to be witty, compassionate, microscopically observant and -- your call -- either maniacally determined or admirably persevering."

"Herzog's stylistic approach captures the desperate, dreamlike atmosphere of the shoot, such that his fans and film buffs in general will appreciate all the sacrifices that went into making [FITZCARRALDO]."

"[T]he befogged internal swirl of Herzog's mind becomes an improbably apt vantage point from which to view the history of FITZCARRALDO. For all his maddening opacity..., Herzog renders a vivid portrait of himself as an artist hypnotized by his own determined imagination."

Annotation

Werner Herzog's FITZCARRALDO is that rare cinematic event wherein the final product pales in comparison to the story of how the film was actually made. In order to depict the true story of an opera-crazed Irishman who hired natives to drag a steamship across part of the Amazon jungle, this cinema-crazed German did the unthinkable: he hired natives to drag a steamship across part of the Amazon jungle. Strangely enough, as documented in this collection of Herzog's journal entries and production notes, this literally Sisyphean task was not the most trying aspect of the production for the director. That distinction went to attempting to control the obstinate lead actor Klaus Kinski, whose megalomaniacal madness was such that several of the hired natives sought Herzog's approval to kill him. Always a riveting story teller, here Herzog has his best material, including a ranting Mick Jagger, a rainforest teeming with predators and poison, and one 300-ton boat being hauled up a hill. Even better, his vivid descriptive language is made even more hallucinatory by the jungle setting.

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