It is now time for some selected excerpts from Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, written during the making of Fitzcarraldo. I'll keep posting if people are interested.
>Preface
>For reasons that escape me, I simply could not make myself go back and read the journals I kept during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. Then, twenty-four years later, my resistance suddenly crumbled, though I had trouble deciphering my own handwriting, which I had miniaturized at the time to microscopic size.
>These texts are not reports on the actual filming - of which little is said. Nor are they journals, except in a very general sense. They might be described instead as interior landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle. But even that may not be entirely accurate - I am not sure.
>>62872419
I'm interested
Can't wait to watch this, going on a Herzog run in a few weeks
>>62872419
keep posting senpai
>>62872444
ok. I would recommend watching Aguirre first, they go well together as companion pieces
>Prologue
>A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal world, in unreal misery - and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.
>Los Angeles, 19-20 June 1979
>Executive floor of 20th Century Fox. It turns out that no proper contract has been signed between Gaumont, the French, and Fox. The unquestioned assumption is that a plastic model ship will be pulled over a ridge in a studio, or possibly in a botanical garden that is apparently not far from here - or why not in San Diego, where there are hothouses with good tropical settings. So what are bad tropical settings, I asked, and I told them that the unquestioned assumption had to be a real steamship being hauled over a real mountain, though not for the sake of realism, but for the stylization characteristic of grand opera. The pleasantries we exchanged from then on wore a thin coating of frost.
>Iquitos, 28 June 1979
>Gloomy mood this morning. Call it quits? After so many months of work? A mild case of the flu, my nose constantly running. Fitzcarraldo's ship in the jungle by Puerto Maldonado. The lookout point at Tres Cruces. Casting propellers. The business with the dolphins. Striking teachers locked themselves into the church ten days ago and are ringing the bells. At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey - it looked like a naked child.
Herzog movies always have god tier endings. That Cobra Verde and Stroszek ending. fuck.
I just love these weird little scenarios he always seems to get himself involved in
>Iquitos, 30 June 1979
>Afterwards I went to Belen to have a brandy in one of the dives. The cardplayers were so loaded that they were playing in slow motion. When they had to pee, they did not even leave their stools but just swiveled around and pissed against the board walls. In the one where we were drinking, which was as small as a newspaper stand, the tavern keeper's wife and child were sleeping on the floor, without a mattress, blanket, or pillow. A scruffy, drunk old Chinese man showed us open scabs on his forearm. He approached us several times, wanting us to take a good look.
>Steep steps by the slaughterhouse on the river where murder takes place; what I saw there bore no resemblance to proper slaughtering. A cow escaped into the river and swam away. Two men jumped in after her. In the slaughterhouse one of the Indian butchers cut his own toe by mistake and was bleeding heavily, but because he was wading up to his ankles in slimy blood and guts he did not really notice at first and had to hunt around to figure out where his blood was coming from. He sat down on the stomach of the cow that had just been killed and was still thrashing around and examined his foot. Next to him was a pig that had been pierced in the heat; after a while it got up and walked away.
>At the Indians' request, we bring chain saws, machetes, and shotguns to the Rio Cenepa, as well as a large canister of poison for arrow tips. They no longer know how to make it themselves. Vivanco says they will pay for a spoonful with a gold nugget.
>Rio Maranon, 3 July 1979
>A local man had hollowed out a tree trunk and filled it with a hundred pounds of cocaine, which he set adrift. He followed the floating tree trunk for weeks in a dugout, until he reached Leticia, over the border in Colombia. There the trail of the drifting tree and its escort was lost.
>When I went into the forest to take a shit, a pig followed me, snuffling and waiting with shameless greed for my shit. Even when I threw sticks at it, the animal took only a few symbolic steps backward.
>Rio Maranon, 4 July 1979
>In the Rio Santiago the body of a soldier who had been shot came floating along, on his back, swollen, the legs bent at the knees and the arms bent likewise; he looked as if he were raising his hands. Birds had already hacked out his eyes and eaten away part of the face. The comandante here advised letting him float by - so as to avoid any trouble; they would have to deal with him farther downstream. He gave the swimmer a gentle nudge with his boot, and the corpse spun around once before the current took hold of him.
>Our cannister with twenty-six kilos of pure curare, for poisoning arrow tips, made a great impression. For a spoonful of this black, sticky mass, you can get yourself a woman to marry, I was told in a respectful whisper by a boatman, as he cleaned his toes with a screwdriver.
>Santa Maria de Nieve - Rio Cenepa, 5 July 1979
>Apparently rumors are swirling around to the effect that we are planning to dig a canal from the Rio Cenepa to the Rio Maranon, and that they will dry up the fields. A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.
>Something entirely different is brewing on the nearby border with Ecuador; the Cordillera del Condor, visible from here in the misty, steaming forest, forms a natural barrier. There is a strong military presence, and a mortally afraid Indian soldier, not more than seventeen, fired a shot at our boat on the Cenepa; it struck the water near us. All those in the boat froze. I was about to slip into the water, but was then embarrassed and decided not to, because the young man seemed much more shocked at having shot at us than we in the boat were, his target. Here you have to show identification everywhere, even the Indian natives. The white people, the teacher told me, have always come to plunder, never for any other reason. A few months ago a lieutenant in the Peruvian army went berserk at a remote outpost on the Rio Santiago. He declared war on Ecuador and attacked with twenty-four soldiers. He advanced over thirty kilometers into enemy territory along the river's upper reaches, and apparently it cost a great deal of effort to go after him and bring him back.
these are noice
>Wawaim, 6 July 1979
>With all the rumors flying around, with the pressure created by the military presence, whose effect on the people exacerbates the situation, and with the problems the oil company has created with its pipeline project - what is going to happen to us? An additional factor is that the community here is very split politically and furthermore under pressure from a political alliance that wants to extends its influence to Wawaim by means of threats and acts of violence. I was so starved for salt that I ate a whole handful; then I sharpened a machete in the company of several young men who were sharpening theirs.
>Another argument broke out over who would translate, and eventually the translating was done by someone affiliated with the Indian council from farther downriver, who, as Jaime de Aguilar told us afterward, having listened from close by, had intentionally distorted the meaning of our words and even translated some parts completely wrong. He wanted to play himself up as a protector of the comunidad. It was crucial that we be prevented from digging a canal that would partially transform the settlement into an island. Among some in the crowd a brand of hostility sprang up that I had encountered previously only in the reports of early seafarers, except that now the natives were wearing "John Travolta Fever" and "Disneyland" T-shirts. It ended with everyone shouting at me and making menacing gestures, and one man brandished a spear and forced his way toward me, snorting furiously. He thrust the spear right at my belly, but retracted it with only centimeters to spare. Somehow I realized that this was just a sort of ritual attack, and to my own astonishment I stood there very calmly.
>>62872688
>>At the Indians' request, we bring chain saws, machetes, and shotguns to the Rio Cenepa, as well as a large canister of poison for arrow tips. They no longer know how to make it themselves. Vivanco says they will pay for a spoonful with a gold nugget.
I feel like you could make a movie based on this blurb alone.
>tfw never watched a Herzog-directed film
>Saramiriza, 9 July 1979
>At the military outpost of Teniente Pinglo none of the soldiers knew how high the water level was. They merely pointed out that a few days ago a boat with eleven men on board had disappeared without a trace.
>Suddenly we were facing a wall of raging water, into which we crashed like a projectile. We received a blow so powerful that the boat went spinning into the air, the propeller howling in the void. For a moment we hit the water vertically, and I saw like an apparition a second wall of water towering in front of us, which struck us even harder, twirling the boat into the air again, this time in the opposite direction. Before we entered the rapids I had already secured the anchor chain so firmly that it could not fly overboard and get tangled in the screw, and the gas tank was fastened in place with iron clamps, but suddenly the battery, as big as a truck's, went hurtling through the air. Or rather, for a moment it hovered in the air on its straining cables directly in front of my face, and my head collided with it.
>In Borja at the lower end of the Pongo they did not want to believe their eyes, because no one had survived the passage when the water level was sixteen feet above normal, and our level had been eighteen.
absolute madman
This is some fucking bizarre story shit he's got here.
Is the whole book like this? Could the making-of be a film in and of itself?
>>62873764
Burden of Dreams (1982)
>>62873575
wasn't even going to post this but since you brought up the ascent
>Los Angeles, 17-18 July 1979
>Two nights ago I had a kind of seizure such as I have had a few times before, once on the island of Kos, when I thought low-flying aircraft were attacking, and I roused all the others and made them get out of bed, and once in Taormina, when first the room and then the whole earth began to tilt, and I tried to brace myself, already awake but perhaps in a form of somnambulism even so. What happened to me two nights ago was so vivid and physical that I have not had the courage to describe it yet, because I am afraid it could have been something under than sleepwalking.
>Larisa Shepitko is dead. Two weeks ago she was on the way to a shoot and lost her life in an accident. Her minibus with six passengers collided with a truck carrying huge precast concrete units. The concrete piers broke loose and crushed her vehicle, and according to what we were able to find out, all the passengers were killed. When Tom Luddy said he had something to tell me and I should sit down, I suddenly knew, before he opened his mouth, that Larisa was no longer alive, and I had a vision of that night in Mannheim when we drank champagne into the wee hours and knew it was the last time we would see each other. She was so sure of that, and so convinced that she would die soon, that we said good-bye to each other very calmly.
>San Francisco, 20 July 1979
>San Francisco. Emptiness
This is amazing shit, thanks OP
>>62872419
Wait. Can you give some context to all of this. It's incredibly interesting but I don't really understand what he was doing and how the movie relates to these journal entries
>>62874150
so far all I've posted is just pre-production stuff, him scouting out Iaquitos and all that, setting up camp there, getting the natives to participate etc. so far, filming hasn't even begun yet
this is a few weeks later, when he's back in california
>San Francisco, 24 July 1979
>A report by telex from Walter in Iquitos reporting on the situation on the Cenepa. The group of Aguarunas from far downstream, who want to call attention to themselves, informed Vivanco that our camp would be attacked, and journalists would be brought along... At first it was just a geographical decision: two rivers that almost touch each other but are separated by a steep ridge, but now there is a political dimension, and possibly, lurking in the shadows behind that, a military one. For now I push aside the thought, hard to shake off, that on the very location chosen for our film a war with Ecuador could break out.
he promptly returns
>Iquitos, 8 August 1979
>The situation in Iquitos has become highly dramatic, because there is no money left, yet we have the ships under construction - we will need two identical twins - and we also have to create an entire infrastructure and continue to maintain the camp on the Maranon, even if the future there is looking very uncertain. According to a list of the most urgent priorities, we would really need $300,000 immediately, but I am still completely alone, without any partner to help with the financing.
>On the beach by Wawaim, 19 August 1979
>Yesterday he had talked for a long time about Aguirre, and a whole slew of horrible things came back to me that I had either forgotten or intentionally repressed.
>The way Kinski arrived in the jungle with tons of alpine equipment - down sleeping bags, ice picks, ropes, crampons - take on the wild alpines lopes high in the icy Andes. He did not want to accept the fact that the opening sequence, with hundreds of pigs in the midst of an army of Spanish conquistadors who were staggering from altitude sickness high on a glacier, had been written out long ago, even though I had told him so in letters several times...
>The way Kinski at first growled that he, a child of nature, would not be caught dead sleeping in a hotel, but the very first night he got so wet in his tent from a tropical downpour that we had to erect a thatched palm-frond roof over it; and by the second night he was already in what was Machu Picchu's only hotel in those days, where night after night he flew into a rage and chased his Vietnamese wife through the halls, beating her in his fits of raving madness and hurling her against the walls, until all the guests woke up and rushed to see what was happening, and only our bribes prevented the hotelkeepers from throwing Kinski out. Walter described how every morning at four he went around discreetly scrubbing off the splatters of blood that the madman's poor wife had left on the walls. Yet these were minor sacraments. To this day I have not dared to write down anything about those events.
and possibly my favorite
>Saramiriza, 20 August 1979
>A primeval tortoise came crawling through the store, rocking its head and its body like an autistic person who wants to have nothing to do with the world.
>>62875028
Anon these are amazing. I haven't seen any Herzog films either. Better start watching em I suppose.
where could i watch this?
>When I went into the forest to take a shit, a pig followed me, snuffling and waiting with shameless greed for my shit. Even when I threw sticks at it, the animal took only a few symbolic steps backward.
I love the way Herzog speaks. Especially about the jungle...
Damn, some of these journal entries are giving me Heart of Darkness vibes.
>>62875818
>>62876424
Herzog is a cool guy and all, and these excerpts are great, but when you actually watch the films... they ain't that great. I'm sorry to break it to you.
>>62879187
>my opinion is how it is
The hallmark of the asshole.
>>62872419
Any link? Interested in reading this
I love this book, it's absolutely fantastic. Herzog's other books are absolutely worth reading as well: Of Walking in Ice and Herzog on Herzog.
>>62872419
I'm not interested. I fucking read it already.
Herzog is such a stereotypical german tourist Jesus Christ.
>We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil.
>Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.
Those are Conrad.
Is Herzog actually autistic?
>>62879187
Maybe your taste is just shit son
gb2 jewish Hollywood flicks
great book, at least one laugh a page
>>62872583
>At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey - it looked like a naked child.
