Shawn Huelle

before finishing Fitzcarraldo then some days later

Attempted to watch Fitzcarraldo. Stalled an hour in. Before that, the only scene (well, hardly a scene?) I liked was the one wherein Fitzcarraldo presents his lady-friend with a portrait of the two of them he's had commissioned, and he's had the painter make him look just as crazy and as strung out as he looks (which, of course, is just as crazy and strung out as Klaus Kinski looks, but that's a different hypothesis). This is a man who knows and accepts what he looks like.

My brain just went on a long trip about portraiture in Wes Anderson's films, about how safe they always are (they = portraits (bad antecedent work on my part there)) and ended up at the beginning of a hypothesis about Fantastic Mr. Fox being the most representative of Anderson's films because it embraces the cartoonish so much more literally, but I don't know.

Fitzcarraldo seems fractured, as though there is little to no motivation for Fitzcarraldo's—but who writes a review of a film one hasn't even entirely seen?

***

(and then after finishing: Ebert talks about how the film really is about the making of the film, and yes, suddenly, Kinski and Fitzcarraldo and Herzog are the same person, and so the aforementioned portrait, the scene with the pig, and Fitzcarraldo/Kinski's wildly beatific expression at the opera become, in a way, more central to the film's message than the fact that Herzog actually pulled a steam boat over a mountain? But no, not really? Not having seen Burden of Dreams, I hazard the following: that to Herzog, the horrors of the jungle, the insanity of pulling a boat over a mountain, and the further insanity of running that boat through supposedly impassable rapids—all the danger and death, all of that is Herzog's Caruso. The film itself is the portrait in the film, etc.)