In the fourth part of Albert Camus’ humane and heartfelt masterpiece, The Plague, taking place in the French port of Oran on the Algerian coast, there is a moment of quiet surprise following a scene where an innocent child lets out a final, death-rattling wail as he expires in a hospital ward, tortured to the end by the deadly bacillus that is overtaking the town like a wildfire tearing into the heart of a forest. Wringing his hands and importuning God to the save the child, a lowly but faithful man of the cloth, the priest stands beside the cot helpless and abject as the doctor, Rieux, later discovered to…
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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…
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A fond and evocative re-creation of its forebear as directed by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu the Vampyre still contains all the hallmarks of its director, Werner Herzog. Like Murnau’s film, Herzog’s is a period piece that shifts between the Transylvanian highlands marauded by the sinister, malicious Count Dracula, and the sleepy port city of Wismar (filmed in Delft, Netherlands); like that film, this one contains a deft series of shots featuring Count Dracula—his face in close-up, his spine-tingling appearance in the castle, his mannerisms concealing a bloodlust that brings a more literal meaning to that word; and both films contain the deliberate, fearsome ponderousness of an atmosphere leading to the sucking…
