Somewhere in the Amazon basin, an isthmus between the Urubamba and Camisea Rivers serves as the principal location for the feat of dragging a boat over a mountain, captured on film by Werner Herzog in his true-to-life creation Fitzcarraldo. It is a strange, obsessive, somewhat outré take on the historical legend from which the movie takes its so-called inspiration, the rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, who apparently took over the mountain a smaller and less back-breaking boat disassembled and later reassembled on the other side. But Herzog was having none of that, and his obsessive desire to film it all is proof of the often significant difference between the facts of inspiration and the imaginative creation.
At one point in the interviews conducted by Les Blank in his captivating and truthful documentary on the making of Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, Herzog states plainly that “if I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams and I don’t want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life, with this project.” This is the almost maniacal mentality of a director that makes a point of pride of the extremes to which he’s willing to go to capture an image in its authentic and realistic depiction, and it is something to behold. It’s also part of his belief that his art, like all art, is the vehicle for a universal emotional expression for which others might lack the means, and so making him, Werner Herzog, the beneficent and altruistic voice for an inarticulate mass of humanity.
It’s a high-minded vision, and from the interviews where he reveals himself to the camera and seems so sincere as an idealist, if not an artist, dedicated to his craft and prizing aesthetic ideals so highly that they sustain his very existence, I’ve gotten a picture of what could be an inspiring renegade—and a maybe figure too willing to subjugate himself to his vision. Because of the extreme mentality of its creator, Burden of Dreams raises a question about the often slight difference between egomania and art. When does the artistic creation stop becoming a high-minded pursuit of the aesthetic ideals of its creator and turn into something pointless, navel-gazing, and egotistical?
The question is all the more important in the case of Fitzcarraldo and the aesthetic medium, the cinema, in which Herzog tries to realize his vision. Only in a medium requiring crew members and actors, artists and designers, support members and technicians, together with a budget and the imperious desire to do location shooting can the ideal of the artist be called into question as sheer egotism, if not megalomania. With almost any other art, you could easily concede the artist the liberty of plugging away by himself for as long as he wants. He’s often alone in a room and suffering from the unending solitude of what he’s undertaken by himself, and he’s not inflicting his egotism or his aesthetic visions on anyone else, at least until they are polished, digestible, and consumer-friendly. But the film director, especially one with Herzog’s ideals and in his austere conditions? Watch out, I’m telling you.
So is Herzog’s vision that of an egotistical maniac, or a high-minded artist? Given the actual value of the end product of Fitzcarraldo, which is not as interesting by far as Les Blank’s documentary about its making, I’m inclined to say that neither is the case, and that this might be one of an artist letting things get out of hand—which doesn’t, by any means, deny the fact that it would have been a prodigious and jaw-dropping undertaking for any man. But a man first, maybe, and then an artist.