Werner Herzog's "Overland Boat" is one of the greatest images in the history of cinema, and one of the most absurd and absurd images, and the two are inseparable from each other.
The film is about an opera obsessed maniac determined to pull a boat from one river to another by land.
In the process of making the film, Herzog was determined to really do just that, which was far crazier than the claim that "the story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald of the Irishman inspired him".
"Overland Boat" is one of those extremely deadly epic films. Like War Apocalypse and 2001: A Space Odyssey, we know the film itself and are familiar with its filming process.
Herzog could have used special effects to capture the scene of a three-hundred-and-sixty-ton ship pulling up a forty-degree slope in a tropical jungle.
But he believes we can see the difference: "This is not a plastic boat. ”
Watching the film, watching Fitzkald roar through the jungle in his white suit and fluffy Panama straw hat, watching the Indians operate a pulley system to pull the boat out of the mire, we are shocked by the fact that things are really happening, and that the ship is slowly being pulled onto land – meanwhile, Fitzkald (who called it that name because the locals don't make the "Fitzgerald" sound) serenades his rustling Caruso tape at the jungle.
What happened during the filming of "The Land Boat" became known through the documentary "Cinematic Dreams" by Les Blanc and Maureen Gosling.
They had an unforgettable time in the jungle with Herjinger, his unruly team and his deranged protagonist.
After you see Herzog's film and The Cinematic Dream, it's clear that everyone involved in the film has been left with a mark — or rather, a lot of wounds.
Herzog
Herzog has a frenetic remark in Cinematic Dreams in which he denounces the jungle as "disgusting and despicable" and says: "It is a land created by God—if he exists—with anger." ”
"Overland Boat" opens with a crazy tone and slows down all the way. In the dark emptiness of the Amazon there appeared a ship, its engine reimbursed, and an angry Kinsky rowed manically at the bow, his mistress sitting behind him, watching anxiously.
The opera was playing out, and they were late. He made some money from an ice machine, and she was an old bustard who opened a brothel and worked for wealthy rubber merchants.
As they walked into the theater, Fitzkaard realized his goal in life: to make a lot of money, to build a theater in the jungle, and then invite Caruso to sing in it.
The wealth of the land was built on the rubber industry, and he was granted the right to operate a four-hundred-square-mile land, but the land was considered worthless because a strong rapids made it difficult for ships to get close to it.
But if he could drag a boat from another river, his dream could come true.
And the real Fitzgerald himself only moved a thirty-two-ton ship to another river, and he dismantled it from the beginning and carried it in pieces.
Herzog, who heard the story, was struck by the image of a ship moving up a hillside, and then expanded his script accordingly.
We can describe his filmmaking process as a collection of uneven and rising emergencies. The border battle between Peru and Ecuador at the time prevented him from using the location he had originally chosen.
He picked another location location and then shot it for four months with Fitzkald, played by Jason Robarts, and his madman helper played by Mick Jagger.
Robaz then contracted amoebic dysentery and flew back to his hometown for treatment, where his doctors forbade him to return, and Jagger withdrew.
Herzog then turned to Klaus Kinsky, a well-known madman who had worked on his Achilles, Wrath of God (1972) and Nosferatu; Ghost of the Night (179) played the main character.
Kinsky is a better choice than Robaz, and the same reason is that the real ship is better than the model: Robaz may be able to play a lunatic, but Kinsky's innate mania and magic make his role more convincing.
Herzog has always been more obsessed with the picture than with the story. Here, he imprinted the picture into the film. He worked with the indigenous Amazons Indians, whose faces became an important element of the work.
In a scene shortly after the film's opening, Fitzkaard wakes up from his slumber to find himself surrounded by a group of small children. In another scene, the Indians stare indifferently at the river, not even noticing that Fitzkalad was walking back and forth in this row, looking straight into their faces.
There are also scenes of him and his crew having dinner, Indians huddled in this messy room, staring at them, and some scenes showing only wary, scrutinizing faces, trying to predict what drove the man in the white suit to come here.
Herzog said he should have done the entire film in a short time just outside Ecuador's capital, Quito. However, he ran to the rainforest five hundred miles away from the nearest big city to shoot.
So he shot Fitzkald and his captain, standing on the platform at the top of the tallest tree, looking down on the endless landscape.
He spoke of "voodoo sorcery on location", which led him to use the same scenes in part of No, Sferrato: A Ghost in the Night as in Maunau's 1926 silent version of Nosferatu.
He felt that jungle locations might "bring something special to the cast and even the crew".
The actual effect was more real than he could have guessed, and in his fourth year of struggling to make the film, he was exhausted, saying: "My imagination has dried up and I don't know what else can happen here." Even if I had made this ship over this mountain, no one in the world would have made me happy about it, not until the day of my great departing day. ”
"Movie Dream" tells the story of archery in the rainforest, about the boat sliding back down the mountain, and about the Brazilian engineer who quit and left the team after telling Herzog that there is a 70% chance that the rope will snap and break and kill dozens of people.
More horrific details are known in some of the commentary reports, when a crew member was bitten by a venomous snake that could kill a man, grabbed the chainsaw next to him, and without hesitation, immediately sawed off one of his feet, which saved a life.
In a cut from Cinematic Dreams—Herzog later used it in "My Devil," which tells the story of his stormy relationship with Kinsky, we see actors furious on the set.
There's a scene in Cinematic Dreams that is enough to represent the entire filming process: Herzog trudges through knee-high mud, dragging his legs along with difficulty.
It's not a perfect movie, but it's extraordinary. The story could have been taken without this location, and not filmed in this way.
It could have been perfect without compromising the integrity of the film. For example, the cigar-smoking scene at the end of the movie is an anti-climactic approach.
But after a ship is towed up the hill, whatever it takes is a tiger's tail. The point is that Herzog is not in a hurry to tell his story, nor does he seek to promote the plot, what he seeks is the echo and resonance of the picture.
Imagine the ship really making a loud noise, slamming into that section of the death rapids, and if another director had switched in, he might have used the conventional shooting of action scenes, using fast editing and many sound effects, Herzog would have processed it into a slow, frightening march.
A real ship, falling into a real rapid, a phonograph playing Caruso singing until the needle is broken. Watching this huge ship slowly drift towards its destiny seemed even more frightening.
In the past four decades, has there been a director who has had a more adventurous and exciting life experience than Werner Herzog?
Most people have only seen some of his films, some of them have not seen one, and if you have seen many of his documentaries and obscure feature films (such as "The Glass Spirit" and "Schussier's Wanderings"), then you will definitely admire him to the ground.
His 2005 film "Grizzly Man" tells the story of a man who spent thirteen years with an Alaskan grizzly bear, Fitzkaard's spiritual brother—men of both ages who are driven by their obsessions to challenge nature.
In his films in Africa, Oceania, Southeast Asia, and South America, he himself is constantly summoned by the deepest and farthest parts of the earth within human reach, attracted by the people who live there, and presents images that have not yet been poisoned by the chicken soup of the mass media.
"I don't want to live in a world without lions and without lion-like people." He said so in "Movie Dreams".
During the darkest filming of "The Land Boat," when Roberts contracted an illness and had to be absent for four months, Herzog went back to investors to ask for more money.
The investor heard that Herzog himself had realized that pulling a ship up the mountain was an impossible task, so he asked him: Is it a wiser choice to stop the horse from the cliff and abandon the shooting?
His answer was, "How can you ask such a question?" If I gave up this movie, I would become a person without dreams, and I would not live like that. I live for this movie, and I will take this movie with me to death. ”
For Herzog, this is no joke.