From: Richmond Times Dispatch
NONFICTION
In 1979, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog set out to make "Fitzcarraldo," a feature film about a man obsessed with building an opera house deep in the Amazon rainforest. Famously, Herzog's undertaking itself became a seemingly impossible, monomaniacal project.
While filming on location in the jungle, Herzog lost his lead actor through a combination of illness and bad nerves, replaced him with a raging, emotionally unstable actor, faced Indian attacks and braved shipwreck and a variety of injuries in the name of art.
He also pulled a 320-ton steamship over a large hill in the middle of Peru, despite studio demands that he instead film a plastic model ship in a studio or possibly shoot the scene in a botanical garden in Los Angeles or a hothouse in San Diego.
As he writes in his hugely entertaining daily journals, newly published as "Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo," Herzog told studio executives that it "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."
As Herzog notes, "The pleasantries we exchanged from then on wore a thin coating of frost."
It was the last frost Herzog was to see for a while; even the beer in South America is warm -- at least the bottles that Herzog found. But warm beer was a minor nuisance compared to what the jungle had in store for Herzog.
"The jungle is obscene," he writes in one journal entry. "Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin."
Later, while trying to pull the steamship over the hill, he writes, "In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel."
Even the jungle's survivable insults have a way of scratching away at one's sanity. After traveling for two weeks, Herzog returns to his jungle cabin and discovers that his bookshelf is "encased in a termite mound." His most recent journal is among the destroyed items. After peeling it out of the mound, he finds only a single passage has survived. It reads like something out of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": " . . . broods a storm. Hate is seething over the rain forest. Where in the depths of history has the word 'reprobate' gone missing?"
Presumably, Herzog didn't write these journals with a wider audience in mind, and "Conquest of the Useless" shouldn't be approached as a detailed account of the making of a film. ("Burden of Dreams," Les Blank's documentary about the making of "Fitzcarraldo," is a great source for that.) As Herzog writes in the book's brief preface, these are journals only "in a very general sense. They might be described instead as inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle."
In fact, "Conquest of the Useless" is as much an account of angst-ridden suffering as it is the story of monomaniacal determination. In one journal entry, Herzog gazes up at the starry sky and writes, "[I]t seemed as alien to me as I do to myself."
In another, he describes searching for a man who has drowned in the river. "In defiance of all reason I kept diving in the dark, so the others would not see how depressed I am," he writes. "The river is as amorally beautiful as ever."
At least Herzog faces his sufferings, both physical and mental, with admirable stoicism. Francis Ford Coppola, seen briefly in the book's opening pages, doesn't fare as well. On a visit to San Francisco, Herzog disdainfully makes note of the "Godfather" director's recovery from a hernia operation.
"Coppola did not like the pillows and complained all afternoon about the various kinds that were rushed to the spot; he rejected every one," Herzog writes.
Jason Robards Jr., the first Fitzcarraldo, fares even worse. Herzog had cast Robards in the film's title role, but the jungle soon proved too much for him. Herzog declares the actor to be a coward, and Robards's final scene in Herzog's journals is scathing.
"I had seen Robards at the crack of dawn, when it was actually still quite dark, hurrying through the camp without his dentures, his hair flying and his eyes crazed, like King Lear through the deserted chambers in his castle," Herzog writes.
The jungle is at best amoral, at worst actively murderous, Herzog suggests. But that doesn't justify flight -- much less toothless flight. After all, Herzog didn't flee -- and he has a cinematic masterpiece to show for it.