Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

Anyway, let me conclude with a correction. A fortnight ago, I suggested the movie disaster Brexit was most like was Heaven’s Gate, simply because that notorious flop effectively collapsed a studio much in the way this crisis is threatening to collapse the UK. But I have since wondered whether the most closely analogous flop is Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (don’t worry, you needn’t have seen it), which even its director came to see as “the conquest of the useless”. Stop me if any of this feels familiar, but during the making of it Herzog claimed to have stopped sleeping entirely – “I just have brief, strenuous fainting spells” – while actors he accused of immense stupidity were required to do things like drag a steamship over a mountain. Everyone on the movie behaved appallingly. Indeed, when I look back over all the progressively insane and insatiable demands of the ERG and others during this sorry saga, I think of the story of Herzog’s leading man Klaus Kinski, who on the very day he arrived on set screamed: “Not even my hairdresser is allowed to touch my hair!” And things went downhill from there. One of the crew was bitten by a snake and sawed off his own foot. Some of the extras offered to kill Kinski. Herzog talked them out of it on the basis that the film wouldn’t be finished.

When I tossed a cigarette butt, still glowing, into a metal sewer grating, suddenly something like a snake shot up out of the damp, black sewer, seized the butt, dropped it again at once, and disappeared just as fast. It was a very large frog.

Our kitchen crew slaughtered our last four ducks. While they were still alive, Julian plucked their neck feathers before chopping off their heads on the execution block. The albino turkey, that vain creature, the survivor of so many roast chickens and ducks transformed into soup, came over to inspect, gobbling and displaying, used his ugly feet to push one of the beheaded ducks as it lay there on the ground bleeding and flapping its wings into what he thought was a proper position, and making gurgling sounds while his bluish red wattles swelled, he mounted the dying duck and copulated with it.

But in the film the geography has to be visible: two rivers that almost touch, with only a mountain ridge between them, over which the ship has to be hauled. Without that understanding the point of the story is lost says Herzog.

All that is to be reported is this: I took part.

In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel

Once more, despite all my attempts at fending it off, a shuddering sense creeps into me of being trapped in the stanza of a strange poem, and it shakes me so violently that I glance around superstitiously to see whether anyone is watching me.

Does the monkey dream my dreams in the branches above me? I ordered a beer, and my voice sounded altered, like the voice of a parrot imitating operatic arias. The sun sank in an angry blaze. For a moment, and for the only time I think I can remember, the earth struck me as motherly, covered with a decaying forest that seemed positively humble. A large brown moth was boring into the smooth concrete floor as if it wanted to go down into the earth, and beating its wings so violently that the wooden sound it created blended with the electrical hissing and crackling of a dying fluorescent bulb overhead like a symphony from the depths of a ghastly universe, a universe readying itself for the final harvest.

The jungle, existing exclusively in the present, is certainly subject to time, but remains forever ageless. Any concept of justice would be antithetical to all this. But is there justice in the desert, either? Or in the oceans? And in the depths? Life in the sea must be pure hell, an infinite hell of constant and ever-present danger, so unbearable that in the course of evolution some species—including Homo sapiens—crawled, fled, onto some clods of firm land, the future continents.

I looked around, and there was the jungle, manifesting the same seething hatred, wrathful and steaming, while the river flowed by in majestic indifference and scornful condescension, ignoring everything: the plight of man, the burden of dreams, and the torments of time.

I responded, half jokingly, that our prayers resembled intense comments directed into a darkened room from which no answer came and which we had to assume was completely empty, not even occupied by a large, taciturn guy on a throne, who might be able to hear us but did not even bestow on us so much as an echo from the void, other than the echo of our stupid hopes and our self-deception. After I had got that off my chest, we laughed and had a beer.

When Kinski had his next outburst, the Ashininka-Campa chief and the chief of the Shivankoreni Machiguengas cautiously drew me aside and asked very calmly whether they should kill him for me. To be sure I had heard right, I said, Kill? Whom? They pointed at Kinski, and the way they spoke left no doubt that they were prepared to do the deed in the next sixty seconds.

Profoundly unreconciled to nature, I had an encounter with the big boa constrictor, which poked its head through the chicken wire surrounding its wooden cage and looked me fearlessly in the eye for a long time. Stubbornly confronting each other, we were pondering the relatedness of the species. Both of us, since the relatedness was slight, felt sad and turned away from each other.

Vultures that spread their wings like Christ on the Cross and remain in that statuelike position, presumably to cool off or to drive away itching mites. In early times it was interpreted as the posture for prayer, and because of the mites the eagle became the favorite heraldic bird for coats of arms.

When I went into the forest to take a shit, a pig followed me, snuffling and waiting with shameless greed for my shit.

A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.

The only striking thing about today’s taxi was that it had no steering wheel; the driver steered it with a large monkey wrench…

…the floor had a large hole, covered with a sheet of black plastic to make it less noticeable. In the dark I stepped into the hole and descended in slow motion to the ground floor, pulling the plastic with me and landing in the midst of the innkeeper’s sleeping family.

When the float plane arrived, the only noteworthy event in the entire week, a few people here were spurred into action, a lethargic, reluctant action, as if this were a disruption, the incursion of history into the sluggish slumber of time.

…the image, the great metaphor, of the pig in Palermo, which I heard had fallen into a sewer shaft: it lived down there for two years, and continued to grow, surviving on the garbage that people threw down the shaft, and when they hauled the pig out, after it had completely blocked the drain, it was almost white, enormously fat, and had taken on the form of the shaft. It had turned into a kind of monumental, whitish grub, rectangular, cubic, and wobbly, an immense hunk of fat, which could move only its mouth to eat, while its legs had shrunk and retracted into the body fat.

On the grocer’s counter two scrawny boys were sleeping, their lanky limbs contorted, as if an explosion had hurtled them into a terrible, everlasting sleep. I gazed up at the starry sky, and it seemed as alien to me as I do to myself.

Belén caught up as usual in its comforting tropical chaos. Pigs in the bog, children in such large numbers that there might as well be no adults…

The baby carriages form clumps where the infants’ employees gather to chat.

I recall that in Tokyo once, in the innermost inner city, among the metastasizing concrete, I actually heard roosters crowing at daybreak.

…are not stars that are moving away from us at a speed near that of light also on a collision course with us, as in mathematical reality a bullet we fired on earth that flew around the globe would have to hit us in the back?

Our monkey escaped from his cage and is stealing things from the set table when no one is there. He has taken possession of almost all the forks.

…the great moment when I showed my son, five at the time, the mountains of the moon through a telescope.

I borrowed a bow and arrow from a tattooed Indian and shot an arrow into the sky.

The jungle is steaming now as if after a thousand years of rain.

…is it worthwhile to live out there in a decoded world, inhabited by decoded people?

…the idea came to me: why should I not play Fitzcarraldo myself? I would trust myself to do it because my project and the character have become identical.

Stupid girls in bikinis, tanned surfers who had nothing to do and were revoltingly vapid.

If I had debts of $20,000, I should be worried, but at $3 million in the red, the worries cease.

…the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.

I was picked up at La Guardia by a limousine with darkened windows, and felt as though I were in a movie. The woman who picked me up was wearing a mink coat, and as the car rolled along she revealed that she had nothing on underneath.

I do not know what real sleep is anymore; I just have brief, strenuous fainting spells.

Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air. The jungle revels in debauched lewdness.

All morning a very large moth sat on my dirty laundry, its proboscis bent forward as it feasted on the salt from my sweat. It flapped its wings from time to time, and, when it folded them upright, rubbed them against each other like two plates until they were even; the impression was one of ecstatic well-being…

…went off by myself and stared into the river, which is smacking its lips lazily and happily, satiated with mud and leaves and rotting branches…

…if a person hangs himself in the attic and a breeze is blowing, how many additional ropes would one need to prevent the hanged man from swinging, or more precisely, from moving at all? The answer: one additional rope stretched from his feet to the floor and another from his belt to a wall, so the corpse cannot rotate around its own axis. But how many ropes would one need, if necessary infinitely long ones, to fix oneself in the universe, definitively and unchangingly, and free of rotation? Is a fixed position in the universe even possible?

The banana fronds to the left of my hut are bursting with growth, shamelessly sexual.

After hours of his incessant ranting and raving, I ate the last piece of chocolate I had been keeping hidden in my cabin; I ate it practically in Kinski’s face, which he was holding very close to mine as he screamed his lungs out. He was so dumbfounded by my act of self-indulgence that all of a sudden he fell silent.

There was a surging and thrumming and whooshing, and stones, hissing in their rage at being jolted out of their inertia, rolled toward the sea, which they would reach only once they had been ground to sand.

The river was rushing, and since it had no knowledge of anything beyond its own reality, it simply did its thing.

Some of the Campas have used short strips of 35-mm film that they must have scavenged from the trash to make themselves hair bands, and today Machiguenga women from the big camp turned up with similar adornment, though made of 16-mm film…

…the edge of the jungle, where Kinski amorously leaned his cheek against a tree trunk and then began to copulate with the tree. He thinks this is immensely erotic: the child of nature and the wild jungle. Yet to this day he has not ventured so much as ten meters into the forest; this is one of his poses. His Yves St. Laurent jungle suit is far more important to him than the jungle itself, and I snapped at him without any real reason when he expected me to happily agree that the primeval forest was erotic. To me it was not erotic at all, I spat, only obscene.

In the last rays of the sun an enormous tree suddenly burst into bloom with blossoms of glowing yellow, as dense and as yellow as a hail of gold. It happened so fast that from one second to the next the blossoms were there, as if a light had been switched on, and just as quickly they were extinguished again.

We talked about tortoise dances, about fish dances. The notion that fish dance preoccupies me.

In a Viennese café a man orders a coffee without cream. They were out of cream, the waiter says; would it be all right to have a coffee without milk?

In Communist East Germany a man goes into a department store and asks for a refrigerator. He had come to the wrong place, he is told; the store across the way had no refrigerators; over here there was no furniture.

While he was sounding off, I was using a needle to dig a thorn out of my foot, and was so focused and calm that suddenly my calmness carried over to him.

In the midst of Kinski’s bellowing and raving, which brought all work to a standstill, I stood like a silent rock wall and let him crash against it.

Water is raging through the camp. It rained so hard in the morning that everything is paralyzed except the water…

In the evening I finished reading a book, and because I was feeling so alone, I buried the book on the edge of the forest with a borrowed spade.

I asked for a half-hour recess, withdrew to the very edge of the raft, sat down with my back to the others, and cried.

Toward evening I called everyone back to work after all, because it was better that way and because we had a task that was more important than we were…

…there are widely divergent views as to what day of the month it is; no one knows for sure.

Kinski came toward me on a speedboat on the Camisea. He was bellowing and foaming at the mouth. As he stood in the bow, he flailed with his machete at an enemy only he could see.

Another name for hamster is corn piglet.