Recencies van critici

Fitzcarraldo carries a Buñuelian vulgarity in its satirical bent as well as in the controversy the film courted from the film makers... Herzog's "ecstatic truth" is manifold; watching Kinski's mystical gaze into the distance throughout the film has us almost believe he is a deity. As the film progresses we can never quite be sure how or if he has the natives under his spell, in actuality it was Herzog who was casting spells over everyone.

The obstacles for both Fitzcarraldo the film and Fitzcarraldo the character would prove more logistical than financial. As has long been documented, Herzog's intended opus, like the task of his unintended surrogate, was at once hampered and heightened by its leader's vision and that vision's allegiance to cinematic verisimilitude.

Though there was a distinct possibility that the much-publicised and characteristically fraught production saga of Herzog's movie would overshadow the completed film itself, it turned out to be some kind of appropriately eccentric and monumental marvel.

Werner Herzog is a documentarian of the unreal - he combines a fascination for extreme human behavior with a preference for the most weirdly antidramatic moviemaking. The results are such nerve-wracking hybrids as his latest gothic-realist extravaganza, Fitzcarraldo.

"Fitzcarraldo," the latest production from German director Werner Herzog, appears to be an advanced case of directorial self-absorption and self-glorification.

''Fitzcarraldo'' may well be a madman's dream, but it's also a fine, quirky, fascinating movie. It's a stunning spectacle, an adventure-comedy not quite like any other, and the most benign movie ever made about 19th-century capitalism running amok.

“Fitzcarraldo” is not a perfect movie, and it never comes together into a unified statement. It is meandering, and it is slow and formless at times. Perhaps the conception was just too large for Herzog to shape. The movie does not approach perfection as “Aguirre” did. But as a document of a quest and a dream, and as the record of man’s audacity and foolish, visionary heroism, there has never been another movie like it.