Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog’s yarn about an eccentric (Klaus Kinski) obsessed with bringing Caruso and opera to the Amazon. Claudia Cardinale, Jose Lewgoy, Miguel Angel Fuentes., German filmmaker Werner Herzog has never done anything by halves. When Herzog tackled Fitzcarraldo, the story of an obsessed impresario (Klaus Kinski) whose foremost desire in life is to bring both Enrico Caruso and an opera house to the deepest jungles of South America, the director boldly embarked on the same journey, disdaining studios, process shots, and special effects throughout. The highlight of the story is Fizcarraldo’s Herculean effort to haul a 300-plus ton steamship over the mountains. No trickery was used in filming this grueling sequence, and stories still persist of disgruntled South American film technicians awaiting the opportunity to strangle Herzog if he ever sets foot on their land again. In the end, Herzog proved to be as driven and single-purposed as his protagonist, and it is the audience’s knowledge of this that adds to the excitement of Fitzcarraldo., Werner Herzog’s 1982 classic set in early 20th century Peru. To achieve his dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian rainforest, Brian “Fitzcarraldo” Fitzgerald leases an inaccessible tract of land rich in rubber, hoping to mine it. But to reach it, deep in the Amazon, he must enlist the help of the natives in an outlandish plan to move his steamship across land from one river to another., Werner Herzog, whose FilmFour-funded Invincible opens later this year, introduces his Cannes-winning epic. Based on a true story, it tells of one man’s (Klaus Kinski) grand obsession to build an opera house in the South American jungle. He intends to fund it by exploiting a rubber plantation but it can only be reached by boat if the craft is manhandled over a mountain to avoid impassable rapids.