Film

There are opera lovers, and then there is Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, a.k.a. “Fitzcarraldo” (Kinski). This is a man who will row in a boat for three days, with bloodied hands, just to see Enrico Caruso perform for five minutes. He’ll interrupt a party full of muckymucks and brave getting eighty-sixed by blasting Verdi from a phonograph. Fitzcarraldo is so determined to get his fat-lady-singing fix that he goes to extraordinary lengths to fund a miniature La Scala deep in the Amazon: risking bankruptcy with a get-rich scheme, letting local Indians believe he’s a deity, moving a mammoth ship over a steep mountain.

Substitute film for opera, and the above description could apply to Werner Herzog. Thanks to Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982)—more of a Siamese twin to the fictional feature than a making-of doc—the jury is still out regarding who qualifies as the bigger megalomaniac: Herzog or Fitzcarraldo. But the German director’s need to match his subject’s extreme measures gave birth to a cinematic leviathan. IFC’s revival restores the film’s original English soundtrack (it was released theatrically in German). Everything from the shot of a steamer inching diagonally up an incline to Kinski’s insane-in-the-membrane performance in Herzog’s jungle cruise, however, comes across as epic regardless of the language.