Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

by Werner Herzog

  There was much hammering and welding going on on the ship. Someone forced his way into the cabin where we had locked up the cameras and opened everything. We guessed it must be a member of the crew, who live in the other cabins nearby. Five hundred Swiss francs were stolen from the suitcase where Beatus keeps his cameras, as well as two $100 traveler’s checks, and Mauch, who was very angry that a storage for film magazines had been opened, went through the occupied cabins with me. We looked under the mattresses, but found only cigars and tattered porno magazines. The captain had twenty wristwatches in a battered shoulder bag made of ugly fake leather, but the watches were in such poor condition that it was not likely he would be able to pawn them off on anyone here, or on the Amehuacas on the upper reaches of the Camisea. As I stepped to the railing, I saw someone walking along the gravel bank in the dark, holding a burning branch. A light rain began to fall, looking in the glow of the floodlights like falling dust.

  The extent of our demoralization can be measured more and more clearly by the bad jokes that are making the rounds, especially among the camera people; today it was Jesus jokes: What was the first soccer team, etc. The weirdest one deserves to be mentioned: Why was not Jesus born in Mexico? They could not find three wise men and a virgin.

  Camisea, 6 June 1981

  At night I am even lonelier than during the day. I listened intently to the silence, pierced by the cries of tormented insects and tormented animals. Even the motors of our boats have something tormented about them. In the morning one of the Ashinka-Campa chiefs summoned me and gave me a little stone ax that had been found along the upper Río Tambo. At first I was utterly astonished and could not think what I might give him in return, but I noticed later that he had run out of film while taking group pictures of his people standing by the ship, so I quickly got hold of a few rolls and gave them to him.

  The first attempt to tow the ship did not go well, but at least we filmed the failure. After a few meters, the ship tipped and got hung up, and I heard the mighty steel cables in the winch creak strangely and emit unhealthy sounds. Finally one cable, as thick as a man’s arm, snapped, having heated up internally from the strain. It lay smoking on the ground. At the point of breakage I could see that the inner strands were glowing bright red. The ship gently slid backward, and it looked good, even if that does not help us much. The main actors in our disturbing drama, surrounded by the indifferent jungle as our audience, are no longer human beings but the steel cables, the Caterpillar, the winches, the tree trunks, the mud, the river, the rain, the landslides.

  Camisea, 7 June 1981

  Heavy downpours that caused the river to rise so much that it lifted the ship and the tree trunks we had slid underneath it were in danger of being washed away. Thick clumps of debris have washed up around the ship, decaying caña brava stalks, brush, leaves, branches. A landslide occurred between the two uppermost turnstiles on the slope. I saw no reason to get upset, went back to my hut and let the raging rage, though I knew that all it would take to break me was a few more of these gasping absurdities with which nature lashes out at me in my weakened state. But I refuse to bend as long as I am not bent. I had missed the drumming on an empty pot that summoned us to lunch, and Mauch stopped by, after he had eaten his fill, and asked me whether I thought being a martyr would stop the rain. That was not my intention at all, and I found some food still warm on the stove and the huge thighbone of a bull, still full of marrow. After that I fell asleep, worn out for no particular reason, and upon waking discovered that the malevolent weather outside had worn itself out as well. I wondered whether by sleeping I had averted a misfortune. 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. While hauling away a mud-smeared, uncooperative steel cable, one of the Indians farted from the effort with such force and duration that it sounded amid the roaring vulgarity of nature like the first indication of a human will to impose order. In my imagination my wishes carry me away to a place where people fly over church towers, church towers over farmland, ships over mountains, and continents over oceans.

  Indonesia has ordered the categorical clear-cutting of entire islands.

  Camisea, 8 June 1981

  Shooting. Several attempts with the ship; immense effort, immense disappointments. Struggling with the terribly heavy and uncooperative steel cables; placing extraordinarily heavy tree trunks under the body of the ship; iron hooks as thick as my arm bend like paper-clips. Huerequeque is having one of his cyclically recurring bouts of malaria; when I went to see him, his fever had already come down a bit. He was lying, wrapped in blankets and with a damp cloth around his head, all scrunched up in the hollow of his hammock. His eyes glowed dully from deep inside, but he told me that when we started shooting he would be there.

  We inserted a fourth crossbeam under the ship, somewhat farther to the back, just to be safe. Because the trunks are so infernally heavy, such operations proceed only a centimeter at a time, taking all day, with steel cables and lever systems. Like our enormous deadman anchor post, these trunks are of a wood so heavy that they immediately sink like a stone in water. It is as hard and difficult to work as iron. The tree is called the chivavaca, or goat cow, but I suspect that is a distortion of a word in Quechua, not vaca but huasca or something of the sort. On a trunk that was cut in the forest recently, parasitic leaves continued to grow for days, perfectly fresh. The bark is dark red on the inside and can easily be pulled off the trunk in fibrous strands. The wood underneath is a whitish yellow. The captain of the Narinho went swimming in his pants, shirt, and hat, because the water was too cold for him, he said. Before he dove under the hull, he swam to the speedboat first and deposited his hat in it. Someone told me that Pentecost is past already.

  At night in the deathly quiet camp someone was playing the flute. Finally I got up at midnight and found one of the young kitchen helpers playing on a white plastic water pipe, into which he had drilled holes. The night was so unusually quiet that I had to strain to hear anything, and got up again much later to assure myself the river was still there.

  In Shivankoreni two scruffy young Americans showed up, having come through the Pongo on a small balsa raft, accompanied by a peón. They had placed an inflated inner tube from a truck tire around their luggage. It turned out they were actually from Israel.

  Camisea, 11 June 1981

  We positioned the chata with the platforms for the cameras farther down the river. Two boats were attached on the right and left, and in front there was another free-floating boat. In the smooth, swift-flowing water by the gravel bank the chata with its six-meter-high super-structures promptly drifted into the trees on the riverbank, which pulled down the rope ladder attached to the top, and for a moment it looked as though the whole structure would collapse on the crew of about twenty. I shouted to Chirino, the daydreaming boatman, that he should untie his boat immediately, but he just stared at me in rapture. The wobbling of the structure above him thrilled him. The next moment the chata swiveled around its own axis and buried first one, then the other of our large boats, since they were roped together, and forced them to the bottom. Then the chata rolled over them, crushing the boats, and I saw Chirino and the other boatman swimming away. Bobbing on the water were the red fuel canisters, plastic oil bottles, and smaller gas drums. I leaped half-dressed into the water, followed by three or four other men, and we managed to pull the boats out from under the chata and turn them so they were floating keel-up. We towed them close to the bank, and there, with great effort, we were able to flip them over. Then Beatus, who had been photographing the scene, also jumped into the water and was able to capture three fuel canisters farther downstream. The boats had not been crushed but merely had a few more leaks and scrapes than before. The whole thing was so grotesque and had happened so fast that we all laughed. One of the boats had lost its battery, but the current was so fierce that we did not even try to dive and recover it. />
  We reached the chosen shooting location three kilometers downstream, just above Shivankoreni. There, with Vignati’s help, I under-took to stretch a sturdy hemp rope across the river, but it was tugged so powerfully by the current that it was almost impossible to get it across the river and fastened. Later about eighty dugouts and small rafts hooked up on it. With Miguel Vazquez, El Tigre, and three motosierristas we prepared the trees that were supposed to fall into the river behind the canoes as a barrier. Miguel attached dynamite sticks to two of the largest trees because I was afraid the timing would not work out if we felled them manually. Mauch did not make the task any easier; he thought the line of canoes looked skimpy and insignificant, and he wanted us to call a halt. I had to take him around in a boat so he could see that at least sixty canoes full of Indians were tied up along the bank under overhanging branches, ready to leap into action. In the meantime Chirino kept bumping with his boat into the rope holding back the rafts, and wandered into camera range so often that I finally had to pull him off the river entirely to keep him from ruining the scene. I sent our best swimmers, among them Beatus, to organize the arrangement of the canoes. When the light was almost completely gone, I shooed all those who did not have parts in the scene back behind the cameras, and when several of the smaller raft islands had drifted into the right position, I radioed instructions to fell the first tree, which was the signal for the Campas to start rowing. All this had to be done unrehearsed. Since it took quite a while before all the canoes were moving and well distributed, I waited a long time to have the next, really large tree felled by a dynamite charge. The delay almost made the others lose their nerve. When Klausmann, standing next to me, heard the signal for the explosion, he panned with a long focal length just as the tree came crashing down, and as he followed the movement he managed to take in all the canoes spread out across the river. I had the enormous tree on the other bank felled at the very moment when I felt he had to have reached that spot with his pan.

  As I had expected, Walter did not return from Lima. I had sent him there to get significantly stronger cables, reels, and hooks. Only if we have those do I think we have any realistic chance of hauling the ship up the mountain. It is not a question of available tractive power, because according to the laws of physics a child could pull the ship over the ridge with one finger, provided there was a pulley system with a conversion ratio in the thousands and enough rope. But you’d have to pull the rope two kilometers to move the ship two centimeters up the slope.

  It was already dark when I was called to the medic’s station in the big camp. Up on the plateau between the two rivers, woodsmen had been felling trees, barefoot as usual, and one of them had been bitten by a snake. Snakes had never been seen anywhere near chain saws, because the noise and the exhaust fumes drive the snakes deep into the jungle, but this man had suddenly been bitten twice in the foot. He had dropped his chain saw and just caught a glimpse of the snake before it disappeared into the underbrush; it was a chuchupe. Usually this snake’s bite causes cardiac arrest and stops breathing in less than a minute, and cases in which a person has survived a bite longer than seven or eight minutes without treatment are almost unknown. Our camp with the doctor and the anti-venom serum was twenty minutes away. The man, so I was told by someone who had been working next to him, had stood motionless for a few seconds, thinking hard. Then he had picked up the chain saw, which had stalled when it hit the ground, pulled the cord to start it, the way you pull an outboard motor, and had sawn off his foot above the ankle. I saw the man—his whole body was gray. He was alive, perfectly collected, and very calm. Before they took him to the doctor, the others had tied off his leg in three places with lianas: below his crotch, below his knee, and above the stump, and had twisted the lianas with sticks to make a tight tourniquet. They had stuck a kind of moss on the stump to stop the bleeding. I had a plane readied to fly him out to Lima the next day. It is better in any case to keep him under observation overnight to make sure he does not go into shock.

  Camisea, 12 June 1981

  The woodsman was flown out, having stabilized during the night. An hour later the American missionary arrived from his station north-east of the Pongo and drank a good deal of pisco with us and his people, his flock, who had come with him; I found him very likable. He had traveled on foot through the jungle for two years before finding a place to settle and establish a mission station. He had appeared on American television on a game show where there was money to be won, which he needed for his mission. For him to win the big prize, his name had to appear on the front page of all local newspapers on the day the show was filmed, he had to set twenty cuckoo clocks so that they would strike simultaneously, and he had to blow out a candle from a distance of twenty feet, which had been rigged in advance and was to be broadcast as a special gag. He submitted to all these humiliations—blew out the candle with the help of an Indian from the jungle who had come along with his blowpipe, and appeared with a report on his station on all the front pages, but he failed with the cuckoo clocks, which refused to open all their little doors at once and let the cuckoos peek out. They were too many seconds apart, and all he received was a consolation prize, but people watching the show and readers of the newspaper articles spontaneously sent money.

  At night I saw a satellite speeding by, eating its way through the constellations. A shy moon made the misty haze over the river, which seemed sunk in nocturnal prayer, even paler, even more ghostly. On both sides of the river, which was celebrating its nightly Mass, the jungle served as an acolyte. No animal voices, no nocturnal cries; but from a giant leaning tree an enormous leaf fell, like a pterosaur struck by an arrow. Everything outside seemed as if in prayer, unfulfilled, unredeemed. This leaves me unmoved; I am like a dry streambed being dredged. My life seems like a stranger’s house to me.

  Camisea, 13 June 1981

  A gavilán hurtled down diagonally through the air, like a rock, and seized a small bird in mid-flight. Then I saw it perch on a bare branch, its booty in its talons. It paid no attention to the bird in its grasp for a long time, as if nothing were there. Don Aquilino’s sedan chair has been moved under the kitchen platform for storage; it had been standing out in the jungle for a few weeks. The footrest, and only that part, is densely overgrown with grayish whitish tree sponges almost as large as a hand.

  The new heavy equipment for hauling the ship will take some time to get here, because it has to be transported overland to Pucallpa, and from there up the river on a chata. Time pressure. Decided to move the whole operation to Iquitos because Claudia Cardinale cannot be put off any longer.

  Camisea, 14 June 1981

  Pressing ahead with the shooting, so as many Indians as possible can be sent home. A fiesta on the Urubamba with the Campas. Kinski’s tantrums. I went back to the Camisea barefoot in the dark. From a dark hut Guillermo, the little Campa boy we call McNamara in the film, called out a greeting to me. I recognized him by his voice and said to him, ma zonzarre, you are a tiger, and he laughed, because I had addressed him with the name the Campas have given me, by which they usually call me. Glowing coals were revived with a branch, and from the murky darkness many eyes stared at me.

  Camisea, 15 June 1981

  Last day of shooting on the Camisea, for now. I cannot recall ever working under so much pressure. Usually what we completed is a program for five days. Kinski screaming hysterically, then pretending to be deathly ill, making Paul prop him up, then another tantrum. During the afternoon’s shoot I happened to notice that the boatmen were moving a reel of cable weighing several tons from the chata to one of our freight boats by simply letting it roll from above. The boat promptly broke apart and sank like a stone. That was just one of the grotesque sideshows. When Kinski had his next outburst, the Ashininka-Campa chief and the chief of the Shivankoreni Machiguengas cautiously drew me aside and asked very calmly whether they should kill him for me. To be sure I had heard right, I said, Kill? Whom? They pointed at Kinski, and the way they spoke left no do
ubt that they were prepared to do the deed in the next sixty seconds. Kinski noticed that something was amiss, and quickly switched from raving mad to deathly ill.

  In the evening I helped load the boats, and we set out at two-thirty in the morning to rendezvous in Sepahua with a Twin Otter we had arranged to have meet us. A big breakfast in the middle of the night with salami, ham, landjäger sausage, fruit salad. It was so cold that I put on all my shirts and crept under a plastic tarp. Toward evening I had sent Kinski off in a small Cessna toward Iquitos, because I could not be sure the Indians would not pull off something without my permission.

  Camisea—Sepahua—Pucallpa—Iquitos, 16 June 1981

  The night was very cold, and I had already had a stiff neck. By morning I could hardly move. We stopped early in the morning in Picha to see the Dominican padre because our fuel was running low; we planned to borrow some from him. He was just reading morning Mass, and we waited. Everyone was in an excellent mood, despite all the frustrations. The one in the best mood was Paul, who laughed so loudly that all the others had to join in. Only Huerequeque was very quiet and thin, with glittering eyes. His malaria is pretty bad.

  Iquitos, 17 June 1981

  Preparations in the morning in House Molly. The evening before, I was at the Holiday Inn with Kinski and Claudia Cardinale. Actually I wanted to speak with her right away, but Kinski ranted and raved for two hours—it was ugly, sickening, in fact. As I always knew, the man has no resilience. He is like an overbred racehorse that can run exactly a mile and then collapses. Now it is as if the jockey has to carry the horse to the finish line.

  Claudia was a good sport, as always, and the team, too, was very attentive to me just when I needed it, so I drew strength from the last reaches of my self. Shooting with Molly and her girls. Kinski’s outburst, supposedly because Beatus grinned, but the reason might just as well be that he had tied his shoelaces too tight or had scratched his arm. Even so I enjoyed the work.