It’s past time we condemned Fitzcarraldo
Fitzcarraldo (1982) dir. Werner Herzog
The production of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, in which several people lost their lives or had their bodies mutilated, is often held up as an example of courageous art on the part of the director. It is no such thing, and it’s long past time the filimic community cast a more critical eye on Herzog’s mystique.
The movie is about a 19th Century colonialist named Fitzgerald, who leads his indigenous workers up the river, to death and disease in order to achieve his dream of building an opera house in the jungle. You might expect Fitzgerald to be portrayed as a malevolent figure; a Kurtz or an Ahab. But director Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski see him as an eccentric romantic.
The film itself is clearly problematic, but the real-life experience of those who worked on the production is horrifying. The deadly ordeal was captured in the documentary Burden of Dreams. (a title echoing Kipling’s ode to colonialism) Like the semi-fictional Fitzgerald, Herzog too led his indigenous workers up the river, where they met death and disease.
Nick Thorpe for Sunday Herald Magazine describes some of the horrors:
“In one of the region’s driest summers on record, scavenging Amahuaca tribespeople launched a scavenging hit-and-run raid on the film camp. One man was lucky to survive an arrow through his throat, while his wife was hit in the stomach, necessitating eight hours of emergency surgery on a kitchen table.”
“The attack was only one of a catalogue of disasters, including two plane crashes – in which five people were critically injured, one paralysed – and the death of a young highland Indian who drowned after borrowing a canoe without permission. Among more than a thousand extras, a few perished from disease – though arguably not as many as might naturally have done so without the presence of the production’s camp doctor. A Peruvian logger bitten by a deadly snake made the dramatic decision to cut off his own foot with a chainsaw to prevent the spread of the venom.”
This description of the deaths of native peoples comes several paragraphs into Thorpe’s essay on Fizcarraldo. Their lives are given only a passing mention. I have not found any source the lists their names.
The lives and well-being of indigenous people seem to matter very little to film buffs. Roger Ebert, whom I generally admire, wrote of “the Brazilian engineer resigning and walking away after telling Herzog there was a 70 percent chance that the cables would snap and dozens of lives would be lost” — and yet Ebert calls the film “brave and epic.”
Ebert also wrote of a crew member who was bitten by a snake and had to cut his foot off with a chain saw. Ebert finds that Herzog “could have filmed his entire production a day or two outside Quito, the capital of Ecuador,” but the critic praises the director’s deadly decision because it made possible a few vast panoramas.
Even more repulsive is the essay at Classic Art Films. It repeats the story Ebert related where the engineer desperately tried to convince Herzog not to put his extras’ lives in danger, and follows with:
“Watching these extraordinary images up on the screen knowing what your watching is the real thing is absolutely breathtaking, and is something no CGI or any form of special effects could ever surpass.”
Imagine a similar scene taking place in America or Europe, in which an engineer tells a director there is a 70% chance of the crew being killed, and the director plunges ahead with the shot. Herzog may have ended up on a blacklist or faced lawsuits. But it didn’t happen there. It happened to indigenous workers, miles away from the nearest city. It is presented as a romantic example of Herzog’s obsession with his craft. And so, the incident actually elevates Herzog’s reputation as an artist — rather than diminishes his reputation as a human being, as it ought to do.
Most of the essays I’ve read on the dangers of the film focus the disputes between Kinski and Herzog, or the emotional difficulties Herzog underwent while trying to make his film. It makes sense to pay more attention to the director and the lead actor than the extras, but the myopic view of their superficial suffering compared to the deaths, illnesses and injuries inflicted on the crew and indigenous cast hearken back to the colonialist attitudes of the film’s setting.
It is more than possible to both make great art and to care for the safety and well-being of those who make it.
I'm also the proud father of two children.
Contact me: adamcallroberts@gmail.com
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White people period. You European whiteys and your dreams of enslaving the world to edit non European infested lands to make every corner of the earth comfy to white European standards. Go back to Europe, STAY and stop pushing your unwanted EVERYTHING on the rest of the world. Fuck Fitzcarraldo. Fuck Herzog. And fuck you sassy white person.. “rich white liberals I swear” go fuck your sister-mom inbred piece of Euro shit.
What a waste of lives, all this for a borefest of a movie, just like the other Herzog movies. No wonder he is german.
Lol happens quite often mate, go read heart of darkness and then the “contrarian” essay on the subject by Chinua Enchebe. The canon isn’t a fixed entity and challenging it can be important. Having a moral standpoint doesn’t make you a liberal, crawl back under the rock you were born under
I was just seing fitzcarraldo and the production of the movie seemed as exploitative and colonialist as Fitzcarraldo delirium. So I started looking for texts linking the movie with neocolonialist ideas and got to your text. I totally agree with the point you're making here, the relation between the ego of the director represented by the odissey of his protagonist, are reality and representation of the ideology of the progress for the progress and the imortalization of the I in history no matter how many lives or destruction it takes that moves capitalism. Herzog's great deed with this movie was perhaps portrait this capitalist predatory and narcissist way of thinking. Really shameful, he should really respond for this incidents specially his negligence.
i have never seen either the film or it's documentary companion piece,but in reading about them just now, I'm happy that the era of brown people being the backdrop, utilities, the other, or the object of movies where whites are the centre, the lead, the subject and the only POV is mostly over. That's not to say I wouldn't watch them, in fact I have them somewhere in my eventual to do list, but I will only appreciate them from a distance of historical perpective
lol destroy your phone you native. Stop using white technology
i hope youre aware that "tea, sugar or cotton and even gun powder " are a huge part of the white technology and industrial revolution
Adam Call Roberts who wrote this article looks like the most dangerous thing hes ever done is pour hot water into his coffee cup, if hes brave enough to even drink coffee, probably tea or hot chocolate, what a sour weak little character, looks too scared to even use a safety razor or electric.
It's not as though the indigenous people were somehow unexposed to the dangers of inter-tribal warfare, drownings, and snakebites before Herzog arrived. The fact that food/water scarcity triggered a raid on the camp showed that Herzog provided resources (including food, water, money, medicine, and access to a trained doctor) the natives otherwise went without. Nick Thorpe also mentions that the natives organized a revenge attack against the raiding tribespeople. Does the author really think that the number of people injured during the creation of the film (which was over a period of 5 years) really exceeded the previous incidence of injury in the area over the same time period? Thorpe mentiones the death of only a few people (from disease) among thousands of extras living and working in a harsh, resource-scarce part of the world. Not to mention the fact that most of the people who were injuried were reported to be non-natives. Yes, Herzog took irresponsible risks for his film, and he was too cavalier about the possibility of harm, but there's no need to exaggerate it for the sake of making a point about colonialism. Besides that, the author seems to overlook the fact that art can be appreciated despite whatever sordid past might underlie it. The criticism of the other film critics for managing to genuinely like the film comes across as quite shallow and ignorant.
Nonsense We should therefore cancel The Great Wall, Haga Sophia, Pyramids, St Pauls, Hoover Dam, Machu Picchu and many more just because people lost their lives as well when making these?
exactly what I wanna say. Maybe I really don't know much about art or films, but it really doesn't take casualties and injuries to make good art.
He paid twice the going wage to the locals. How is the making of this movie any different than any other undertaking? People (mostly men) die at work all the time and Werner Herzog has always said he would never ask anyone to do anything that he himself wouldn't do.
Excuse me? An indigenous tribe attacks a movie camp and murders as many of the crew as it can (one of the Indians drowns in a canoe stolen from the movie company) and the lesson to this writer is "The lives and well-being of indigenous people seem to matter very little." Apparently the lives and well-being of some Europeans trying to make a movie mean absolutely NOTHING to him.
Art now has to filtered through some sort of “woke” lens these days apparently. I hope this trend doesn’t start to limit what sort of films and music that can be made.
I agree so much with this article. Both Herzog films in the jungle transpire with despise of the people and the land where it takes place. At best indigenous are depicted as exotic curious beings. They got hurt ans some died. The film maker and it's crew put their lives in deadly danger. And how hurtfull it must have felt for the most locals to tear apart the land, destroying part of the forest! You don't understand some fought back! Sorry but I do! And I regret that all these narcissist racist bastards didn't all get killed there! There bodies being eaten by nature would have been more useful than those pointless films
Thank you for enlightening us all! I WAS a loyal Herzog fan prior to seeing this film and now I have such disdain for his lack of concern for the well-being of others and their land. I'm grateful to be living in the information age when stories like this can no longer be buried into obscurity. Thank you for bringing truth to power!
Read "Conquest of the useless", Herzog's journal that he kept during the making of the film. It will paint a whole different scenario with more NUANCES. Don't assume shit because someone wrote an essay. Everything is subjective, my opinion as well. Many journal entries tell of a very warm and caring relationship between Herzog's team and the natives. Women who needed maternal medical care, surgery for three natives who had been attacked by another tribe and so forth. A big oil company was moving in, "employing" natives for the building of a huge pipeline, tearing down forests and digging up rivers. Peru was also on the verge of a potential border war with Ecuador during the making of the film. Herzog knew what he was doing and risking and was prepared to suffer the consequences. Luckily, everything went fairly well if you look at it over the 5 years it took to make. He also, as someone points out in this commentary, paid the natives TWICE the wages of what the locals would have paid them. Bold visions don't equal genius. And yes, in the name of "filmmaking" a lot of morality gets blurry which could be put in to question. But I think that only shows how much art really means to us as humans ;)
Herzog's journals are likely biased in his own favor, so I wouldn't rely on that as an authority. Herzog loves painting himself in a certain light and is notorious for telling tall tales all in pursuit of some nebulous artistic "truth", so frankly I don't put much stock in his statements. He's definitely an entertaining weirdo in interviews though.
There is nothing more annoying and tiresome than a pretentious white middle-class liberal taking things out of context so that he/she has an excuse to get up on a soapbox and preach about the evils of white people. What Adam Call Roberts neglects to mention is Herzog paid the natives exceedingly well, ensured that they were fully accommodated during shooting, and assisted them in resisting the oil companies who were destroying the land. The deaths that occurred were the result of the inherent dangers of the Amazon; Herzog had barely anything to do with them. Herzog was undeniably reckless when he made Fitzcarraldo, but his recklessness endangered his European crew just as much as it endangered the natives. Obviously, endangering everyone involved is not something to be applauded or defended, but it's worth mentioning since Roberts heavily implies that Herzog's recklessness had an undercurrent of racism to it, which is not the case at all. In fact, Herzog was notoriously reckless long before he made Fitzcarraldo. With La Soufrière, he shot near a volcano that was about to erupt. If it had erupted during filming, Herzog and his entire crew would have been killed; it's sheer luck that they didn't all die a horrible death. And yet I don't see articles by Roberts about how it's disgusting that Herzog put himself and his crew in danger for La Soufrière.
Ironically, this article is more racist than anything Herzog did while filming Fitzcarraldo. The writer of this clickbait trash treats the tribespeople like helpless children who had no understanding of what was going on during the making of Fitzcarraldo. It's as if he fast-forwarded during all of the parts of Burden of Dreams where the tribespeople intelligently negotiate terms with the film crew. The writer's attitude is one of the most disgusting examples of white savior narcissism I've ever come across. Don't worry, you stupid, ignorant savages: a sheltered white man is here to get offended on your behalf!
Almost everyone in this comment section highlights that Herzog paid the DOUBLE of their normal wage. Who cares? This is not about money, it is about putting people's life in danger and about using people as props. Not every society in the world is like the U.S.A., money doesn't justify everything.
" This is not about money, it is about putting people's life in danger" And as has been pointed out, Herzog has done this repeatedly throughout his career, whether the people involved were white or not, so the writer's pontification about colonialism is pure clickbait sensationalism. "using people as props." Again, Herzog is a notoriously reckless director who is willing to risk others, and himself, to achieve his vision. You can argue about the morality of that, but the premise of this article is that Herzog should be condemned for colonialist attitudes, and as I have already pointed out, that premise is ridiculous. "Not every society in the world is like the U.S.A., money doesn't justify everything." Do you see the tridespeople that Herzog worked with complaining? Here, I'll answer for you; no. So if they aren't complaining, why are you getting offended on their behalf? You're assuming they feel exploited, but that might not be the case at all. They might even be very happy with how things turned out; or maybe you're right and they're angry. The point is, we don't know, and since we don't know, it's both silly and condescending to speak on their behalf. Stop acting like a white savior.
I'm sorry, but this article is packed with errors too numerous to list. This is an example of someone trying to rehash secondhand misinformation to get some traction with a poorly written article. I stumbled upon this by accident and am a bit gutted that I actually read it because it's disappointing that I can see by so many of the comments that people are reacting to it without knowing or asking or researching whether it's accurate or not. It is an extremely misleading article. What a disappointment.
Would you mind listing at least one of the errors so I can correct it?
You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mister hot take
I am excited to read your next article about burning all of Caravaggio’s paintings and the follow up to this about condemning Tiwlight Zone: The Movie. I sure hope no one else tries to drag a boat over a mountain.
This is a critique about the making of Fitzcarraldo. The author seems horrified that genuine film critics (not film reviewers) refused to condemn the film for what happened on set. That isn't their job, nor will it ever be. The film stands on its own merits, not as a safety film for OSHA.
As I write in the first sentence, my critique is that film buffs proactively *praise* the production of the film and what happened on set.
You silly, dangerous (yes, for encourage the politically correct totalitarianism) dupe for the western Marxist agenda - it is 'useful idiots' like you who empower the modern-day tyrant sand encourage their destruction of our very freedoms. If you want to be under the yoke of psychotic control-freaks, them either move to North Korea, Communist China.... OR stay right here and continue to empower the crypto-Communist agenda and you will soon reap the rewards of being a useful idiot.
I call Burden of Dreams a home movie of my time on the Rio Pachitea, as my dissertation research was in a time before iPhones. Herzog meant well, but many of his decisions demonstrated the importance of hiring an anthropologist if you are going into the unknown. If I had been consulted, I would have warned him against providing his local boat captain unlimited beers prior to filming. The captain was thrilled to offer his friends beer, and an opportunity to paint the ship he would actually guide through the rapids, but clearly drunk on the day of filming. Ashaninka, known as the last head hunters, were not particularly social: often living in family groups, even if joining forces for hunting, or slash & burn. Herzog put hundreds together, including extra women. Wives were taught to inject husbands on return from Pulcallpa, but for activities kept separate from daily life.: GC estimated to infect 60%. The raiding was undoubtedly due to fears of one more encroachment on lands already invaded by loggers, not to mention government planners speaking about the great highway to come. Jason Robarts and other cast members should have been getting liquid Pepto- Bismol and daily milk of papaya to keep amebiasis & other parasites away, or at least minimal: Western physician would not know. All these observations, and I still understand Herzog’s perseverance. Life in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon was unreal. Two plane crashes are not unusual, as pilots demanded to fly 5-6 persons in a 4 person Cessna! The added weight led to multiple attempts at takeoff, and landings could be equally difficult. Mortality was high among indigenous, and life expectancy around 50 years. Indigenous returned from logging camps with uta at a time with no treatment: gun powder into ulcers, then lite. Herzog should have known there was no powder form of snake anti-venom. I had a WW2 ámpula of morphine with me in case of a Bushmaster attack or coral snake bite: one was death, the other pain on flight to hospital. Did I mention a nice Jewish girl, I stayed at the home of an escaped Nazi hiding from Mossad? Life in the Peruvian jungle, on the Rio Pachitea in 1980-81 was just different. Death was an acceptable risk of everyday. Herzog did take efforts to protect the indigenous populations, including returning the jungle to jungle, paying tribal leaders with acquisition of land rights, but he was in way over his head. Directors take note: hire an anthropologist to help prepare. We would be watching Fitzeraldo with Jason Robarts and Mick Jagger.
No one forced the natives to participate. But judging by most of the comments you seem to have achieved your goal of pompously condemning so-called colonialist impulses. It’s also telling that most of those comments are crude and full of contemporary cliches. It’s too bad Ebert isn’t alive to defend himself. Because if he were he would put you in your place.
Herzog is a brilliant artist but clearly a charlatan to some degree or another. He's fond of exploitating situations and people for his own benefit and now in recent years has been more concerned with milking his own elaborately constructed persona than producing great art, appearing on Star Wars shows and crappy Hollywood movies. I used to think that Herzog was a defiant outsider who made bizarre and unconventional films out a genuine sense of sympathy for other outsiders and marginalized people, but the more I learn about him it's pretty clear that he's just another Bourgeois voyeur who loves a good freak show. Still, Strozsek will always be a masterpiece in my eyes.
Maybe he loves being involved in the movie industry and is not a stuck up snob who would refuse to appear in star wars and movies that don't appeal to you.
Your claims don't hold water. The only valid point is the decision to not not follow the advice of his Brazilian engineer. Whatever gut feel he had that it would not end in disaster or risk mitigation put in place, it worked as no one died or was injured in that scene. Basically this article sucks.
Thank you.
You wrote an entire article venting about Herzog causing worker deaths, yet said nothing that indicated he caused worker deaths. You wrote of an attack by Amahuaca tribespeople, two plane crashes, an Indian who drowned after borrowing a canoe without permission, and "a few" who perished from disease. You gave us no reason to believe that any of these things were Herzog's fault. You also wrote that Fitzcarraldo "leads his indigenous workers up the river, to death and disease" -- which he never did in the movie. He lead some indigenous workers up the river, and they abandoned him. The indigenous people who then helped him, for their own mysterious reasons, were clearly the ones in power; the movie makes it clear at several points that Fitzgerald and his handful of people are always at their mercy. You seem to be fishing awfully hard for an evil colonialist narrative of exploitation that you desperately want to find, in the movie and in its making, but you didn't find it in either place--or, if you did, you neglected to mention any actual evidence of it.
I was unjust. The episode with the Brazilian engineer was bad, or sounds like it was bad. But it's not enough to construct a grand narrative around; and besides, I don't trust you to have told the story straight. Your bias is too obvious.