Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Fitzcarraldo
1982 · Werner Herzog · Fitzcarraldo on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice there are no models standing in for the ship. (camera)
Herzog shoots the actual 320-ton steamer being hauled up an actual slope by hundreds of workers, with no miniatures or optical effects substituting for the real event.
Payoff: The strangeness on screen is stranger because none of it is a trick.
Listen for Caruso's recorded voice drifting across the river. (sound)
A gramophone on the ship's prow plays a nineteenth-century tenor's aria out over the jungle, a sound with no visible source anywhere near the boat.
Payoff: A single machine is carrying an entire idea of civilization into the wild.
Watch Kinski play grandeur without a trace of irony. (performance)
He plays Fitzcarraldo's megalomania completely straight and his tenderness without sentimentality, refusing to let the audience laugh at the character from a safe distance.
Payoff: You're asked to take the dream as seriously as he does.
Notice where Fitzcarraldo stands relative to the jungle's edge. (staging)
He is staged again and again at the boundary between civilized space, a cabin, a stage, and the uncontrolled green around it.
Payoff: His whole position in the frame is a man caught between two worlds.
Once you have seen it
Notice what actually changes in the plot once the ship crosses. (structure)
The impossible physical feat succeeds completely, and the rubber scheme it was meant to fund still collapses, so the deed itself accomplishes nothing practical.
Payoff: Moving the ship was never really about the rubber at all. In the reading: inversion-image. Deleuze calls a hero's grand will split from any practical outcome an inversion-image, and this is exactly that split.
Notice that Caruso's voice never has a body attached to it. (sound)
The recording drifts from a machine into the jungle air, self-standing, answering to nothing you can see, while image and sound run as separate wholes.
Payoff: Sound and picture stop needing each other to make their own kind of sense. In the reading: heautonomy. Deleuze calls image and sound each standing alone, touching only at a gap, heautonomy, and Caruso's voice is the clearest case of it.
Carry this in: Watch the ship on the hill. Herzog filmed it because it actually happened.