Conquest of the Useless
Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo
Werner Herzog
Translated from the German by Krishna Winston
FITZCARRALDO:
To your dogs’ chef! To Verdi! To Rossini! To Caruso!
DON ARAUJO:
To Fitzcarraldo, the conquistador of the useless!
FITZCARRALDO:
As truly as I stand here before you, someday I shall bring Grand Opera to the jungle! I will outnumber you! I will outbillion you! I am the grand spectacle in the forest! I am the inventor of rubber! Only through me will rubber become a word!
—Dialogue from the film Fitzcarraldo
Contents
Map
Preface
Prologue
Begin Reading
Epilogue
Persons and Places
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
PREFACE
For reasons that escape me, I simply could not make myself go back and read the journals I kept during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. Then, twenty-four years later, my resistance suddenly crumbled, though I had trouble deciphering my own handwriting, which I had miniaturized at the time to microscopic size.
These texts are not reports on the actual filming—of which little is said. Nor are they journals, except in a very general sense. They might be described instead as inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle. But even that may not be entirely accurate—I am not sure.
W.H.
January 2004
PROLOGUE
A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal world, in unreal misery—and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.
San Francisco, 16 June 1979
In Coppola’s house on Broadway. Outside the wind is howling, whipping the laurel bushes. The sailboats in the bay are lying almost flat, the waves sharp-contoured and restless. The Alcatraz Light is flashing signals, in broad daylight. None of my friends is here. It is hard to buckle down to work, to shoulder this heavy burden of dreams. Only books provide some measure of comfort.
The little tower at one corner of the house, foolishly designed for meditation, is flooded with such glaring light that whenever I venture into it, I stay for only a minute before being driven out again. I have pushed the small table against the one available unbroken stretch of wall, all the rest being taken up by windows that are filled with this demented light, and on the wall I have used a sharp pencil and a ruler to draw a mathematically precise reticle. That is all I see: set of crosshairs. Working on the script, driven by fury and urgency. I have only a little over a week left of staring mindlessly at that one spot.
The air is cool, almost chilly. The wind rattles the windows so hard that I lose sight of the point and turn around, facing directly into the light, so clear and piercing that it hurts the eyes. On the Golden Gate Bridge those moving dots are cars. Even the post office at the foot of the hill offers no shelter. As I toil up the steep slope, blown leaves on the ground catch up with me. It is the tail end of spring, but the foliage is yellow and dark red. The wind whips the leaves ahead of me across the rocky hillside, and by the time I reach the top, the fist of the void has swept them away. 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 surreptitiously to see whether anyone is watching me. The hill becomes transformed into a mysterious concrete monument, which makes even the hill take fright.
San Francisco, 17 June 1979
Coppola’s father plays me a tape of his opera. As he listens, his face takes on an entirely uncharacteristic expression, chiseled, stern, and intelligent.
San Francisco, 18 June 1979
Telegram from Walter Saxer in Iquitos. Apparently things are looking very good, except that the whole situation might collapse from one moment to the next. We are like workmen, appearing solemn and confident as we build a bridge over an abyss, without any supports. Today, quite by chance, I had a rather long conversation with Coppola’s production man. Over a hamburger and a milk shake he tried to convince me that he would take the project’s fate in hand. I thanked him. He asked whether that meant thank you, yes or thank you, no. I said thank you, no. Coppola is not completely back on his feet after a hernia operation. He is displaying a strange combination of self-pity, neediness, professional work ethic, and sentimentality. The office on the seventh floor was trying feverishly to get a hospital bed delivered and set up in the mixing studio, and another one in some other location. Coppola did not like the pillows and complained all afternoon about the various kinds that were rushed to the spot; he rejected every one.
Los Angeles, 19–20 June 1979
Executive floor of 20th Century-Fox. It turns out that no proper contract has been signed between Gaumont, the French, and Fox. The unquestioned assumption is that a plastic model ship will be pulled over a ridge in a studio, or possibly in a botanical garden that is apparently not far from here—or why not in San Diego, where there are hothouses with good tropical settings. So what are bad tropical settings, I asked, and I told them the unquestioned assumption had to be a real steamship being hauled over a real mountain, though not for the sake of realism but for the stylization characteristic of grand opera. The pleasantries we exchanged from then on wore a thin coating of frost.
In the evening off to the cinema, where Les Blank cooked for the audience watching his films; he calls these performances smell-around. For the first time I saw the tattoo on his upper arm, two masks on strings: death laughing and death weeping. I could not stay for the end of the last film because my flight was leaving at midnight, a wretched affair with stops in Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, Houston, and Miami; the stewardesses, who had to put up all night with an impossible first-class passenger, call this flight a milk run.
Caracas, 21 June 1979
No one came to meet me. My passport was confiscated immediately because I had no visa; allegedly they will return it to me when I leave. Several men who looked German were standing around expectantly, scrutinizing the incoming passengers, but I did not have the nerve to approach them.
Caracas, 22 June 1979
Caracas, Hotel Ávila. Slept a long time, woke up quite confused. I must have had horrible dreams, but do not remember what they were. There is no running water; I had wanted to take a long shower. I am keeping Janoud’s money with me; I have a feeling things get stolen in this hotel.
The morning meeting with filmmakers was lively. I saw a bad feature film and lowered my expectations to a flicker. Caracas caught up in a frenzy of development. Nasty little mosquitoes are biting my feet. It rained heavily in the morning, and the
lush mountains were shrouded in billows of mist, which made me feel good. The taxi drivers here are not to be trusted. I have not eaten all day. Signs of Life is playing; the guards at the entrance are bored. There is a melancholy peeping in the trees; I thought it was birds, nocturnal ones, but no, I was told, they were little tree frogs.
A young man from Caracas who wants to make a film about the mad poet Rafael Ávila, known as Titan, told me about him and gave me one of his poems. Titan lived in a village near Maracaibo, sang in bars, and went mad. There is a plaster bust of him in the cemetery, with a large mustache, a contorted face, and unkempt hair. Someone has painted his hair and beard in bright colors. His gravestone carries the inscription
Las vanidades del mundo
Las grandezas del imperio
Se encierran en el profundo
Silencio del cementerio
Caracas, 24 June 1979
Five hours at the airport, with some passengers hysterical because the flight to Lima had been canceled without explanation; the next flight does not leave until four days from now. That gave me time to inquire about my passport. It was not there, and only after a series of coincidences did it turn up. It is a mystery to me how I managed to get on the overbooked Aeroperu flight. On the plane a stunningly beautiful Peruvian woman was seated next to me, clearly a member of the country’s wealthy oligarchy. First she said it was too hot, a short while later too cold. As we were changing planes in Bogotá, she called after me that it was very hot, and on the plane she said it was very cold in Lima at this time of year, and I should have a warmer jacket. She said this not so much in a spirit of helpfulness in the stifling, grimy, overcrowded plane; rather, she spoke to me in the tone she would have used to reprimand her gardener or her house servants.
Lima, 25 June 1979
A sleepy country at which God’s wrath has cooled. At first they did not want to show me the article in Spiegel because it was utterly shameless, but they would not tell me what it said, either. Then we were off to the stadium. The entire segment of the playing field in the eastern curve, where our goal was located, was raised about ten meters by means of a hydraulic system. For warming up, the goalie had spread out several rubber mats, scattered far apart, which allowed him to throw himself here or there. When the game got under way, the goal was actually lowered to be level with the rest of the ground, but the net had sagged so low that it looked like a tunnel. The opposing team, which was probably the Spanish national team, had on utterly confusing jerseys, with the result that they merged with our players into a single undifferentiated riot of color. After the first wrong pass, made by me in the honest belief that the ball was being passed to someone on our own side, I ran up to the linesman and asked for a time-out, then ran after the referee, because there was already great confusion around our goal as to who was who, and the Spanish players were also not that happy. But the referee claimed there was nothing he could do, and I yelled at him that all we needed was thirty seconds and we would take the field in white. But the guy remained stupidly obstinate, as if he was in cahoots with the opponent. I knew the only hope of winning the game would be if I did it all by myself; then no wrong pass to the indistinguishable opponents would be possible, so I would have to take on the entire field myself, including my own team, because they might confuse me with the opposing team, too. But that was not the end of the torment.
Lima, at Joe Koechlin’s new house. Lotus garden, blossoming trellises, cactus garden. His mother was using a shard of glass to scrape oil paint off an old rocking chair. Walter, Andreas, Janoud. Photos. Patagonia came to an end yesterday, and since a little while ago the dogs are all out: all of them have come to an end.
Lima, 26 June 1979
Vargas Llosa would like to be involved in some way, but he is tied up till the end of September. By then it is possible that everything here will have collapsed. Gold is the sweat of the sun, and silver are the tears of the moon. From here on only fragments. Uli and Gustavo at the airport, but as if in black-and-white photos. All night long arguments over how we should do the work.
Iquitos, 28 June 1979
Gloomy mood this morning. Call it quits? After so many months of work? A mild case of the flu, my nose constantly running. Fitzcarraldo’s ship in the jungle by Puerto Maldonado. The lookout point at Tres Cruces. Casting propellers. The business with the dolphins. Striking teachers locked themselves into the church ten days ago and are ringing the bells. At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey—it looked like a naked child.
Iquitos, 29 June 1979
When you shoot an elephant, it stays on its feet for ten days before it falls over. When I got back on the ice after two minutes in the penalty box, a puck struck hard from a short distance away smashed into my head. There was a pulsing flash of light before my eyes, and I became weightless. On the boat to Belén: roast alligator was served. Women delousing children, children carrying much too heavy burdens held by forehead straps. Boats passing, everything in slow motion. A large pile of empty tortoise shells. Chickens tied by the legs, swinging in an empty-looking radius. At night the cooking fires glow. Enormous fish at the market, fruit juices surrounded by swarms of flies, filth. Children playing marbles between the houses’ stilts. 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. Cattle heads, skinned and bloody, on a hand cart. The women crouch in the brownish water, doing their laundry. In a bar a man was lying on the floor unconscious, dead drunk. By fifteen most of the girls already have one or two children. This city seems to be inhabited exclusively by children. Today is a holiday. In the evening up the Río Momón by boat.
Iquitos, 30 June 1979
The house en route to the Río Nanay is slowly getting organized. An ailing chicken is supposed to have its neck wrung if it does not get better today. The Indian who does chores here has instructions to that effect. Discussion with the carpenters, but every tone, every gesture is so transparently and ineptly acted that you can see they are lying. A discussion about the basic question of having women in the house. The decision: all right to have local girlfriends, but they should not stay in the house when their men of our crew are away for a while. It is not right to have female friends from the village become a permanent majority. They should all rather live in their own houses here, as the men of our team, just because some of us are almost always away in the jungle. Yesterday on the Río Momón an American tourist with whitish folds of belly fat paddled toward me. He was in a fake canoe made of plastic, and said hi. At the lodge he will be out of circulation for a few days at any rate.
In the evening to the movies, an Italian horror film, so extraordinarily bad that even the locals noticed. Guests arriving at a lonely castle are all murdered. It turns out that the countess is mad, and the count shoots her as well, because she kissed the blond, vigorous hunk of a poet. He does not have long to live, either. In the end all that is left are the dogs, howling and snarling their teeth; earlier they tore one of the guests limb from limb as he was trying to get away, for the lord of the castle shot himself in his chamber, unable to bear the truth any longer.
Afterward I went to Belén to have a brandy in one of the dives. The cardplayers were so loaded that they were playing in slow motion. When they had to pee, they did not even leave their stools but just swiveled around and pissed against the board walls. In the one where we were drinking, which was as small as a newspaper stand, the tavern keeper’s wife and child were sleeping on the floor, without a mattress, blanket, or pillow. A scruffy, drunk old Chinese man showed us open scabs on his forearm. He approached us several times, wanting us to take a good look.
In the house a calculator has been stolen. Our watchman checks the same drawers thirty times to see whether it is still missing. To find a spot for oneself in the house is not easy, becaus
e the two rooms are too small and crammed with stuff, and the table in the entryway serves as the workplace for everyone, including the strangers who come and go and drink beer.
Steep steps by the slaughterhouse on the river where murder takes place; what I saw there bore no resemblance to proper slaughtering. A cow escaped into the river and swam away. Two men jumped in after her. In the slaughterhouse one of the Indian butchers cut his own toe by mistake and was bleeding heavily, but because he was wading up to his ankles in slimy blood and guts he did not really notice at first and had to hunt around to figure out where his blood was coming from. He sat down on the stomach of the cow that had just been killed and was still thrashing around and examined his foot. Next to him was a pig that had been pierced in the heart; after a while it got up and walked away.
The butchers knock the pigs to the ground, grab a foreleg and pull it up, bracing one foot on the pig, and then they stab their knife with calm accuracy into the heart. Because the pigs scream so hard, a pink piece of lung is often extruded from the wound.
Foundry: a crucible in the ground like an iron volcano with a scalloped rim. Corrugated tin on poles forms a roof over the whole thing. Pails on yokes for carrying, pigs grunting, chickens, ducks. In the midst of all this a pig is slaughtered, children are nursed. A dwarfish, crippled woman is sewing on a sewing machine; she can hardly reach the pedal. In the background palm trees, between them a decomposing pile of garbage in which hens peck around. Scrap iron, molds, a bench vise, a bellows. The whole thing resembles a Bronze Age midden heap in which blacksmithing and pouring goes on. This is where we will have to work.
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