Feeling like Fitzcarraldo

[Guest]

Gavin Plumley raises an interesting question in his blog ....

http://tinyurl.com/83emok7

Any thoughts?

[Lateralthinking1]

Annie Edson Taylor. The first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel which remarkably she achieved on her 63rd birthday. Anything is possible. She lived until 82.

[eighthobstruction]

Very readable....

[johncorrigan]

Reminded me that when I was last watching 'Fitzcarraldo', it seemed to me that in the famous scene when he's playing Caruso into the Amazonian Jungle, the sounds coming back at him are the Drummers of Burundi - how did they get there? Mind you, if Herzog can get a paddleboat over a mountain he can make just about anything happen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0P1BBYA6ds&feature=related

[Paul Sherratt]

>how did they get there?

Private jet.

[Flosshilde]

I've never managed to see 'Fitzcaraldo'. Perhaps I should put in a request at the GFT. Although the last time I did that - for 'Celine & Julie go boating' - I was on holiday when it was shown & I never saw it! Possibly just as well as it probably wouldn't have seemed as magical 2nd time around.

As for the subject of the thread (nothing to do with Herzog or Amazonian opera houses), yes, it's a great shame that there isn't any serious discussion of music in the press - or any other art. 'The Listener' is the only magazine I can think of that carried such discussion, & that died long ago.

[Paul Sherratt]

The trailer, Flosshilde.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pJ76nAkysM

[gurnemanz]

Herzog is a genius. The very making of the film (which also appeared as a film) was a bizarre challenge akin to the challenge of dragging a steamship up a mountain. He threatened to shoot Kinski when he was going to walk out on the film and had to set up an on-location brothel to keep all the native extras happy.

[Paul Sherratt]

Set to...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPKODzv1PD4

[Flosshilde]

Herzog is a genius. The very making of the film (which also appeared as a film) was a bizarre challenge akin to the challenge of dragging a steamship up a mountain. He threatened to shoot Kinski when he was going to walk out on the film and had to set up an on-location brothel to keep all the native extras happy.

Indeed; Herzog & Kinski were made for each other -both hovering on the edge of madness. The final scene of 'Aguire' is one of the greatest in cinema - Aguire/Kinski looking like Death sailing down the Amazon on a raft, surrounded by the bodies of his companions, while the camera circles, putting Aguire & the raft at the centre of of a dizzying, spinning world - desolation, loss, and madness but still posessed by a dream.