Les Blank's truly memorable documentary about the making of Werner Herzog's excellent "Fitzcarraldo", a historical adventure drama about an early-20th-century entrepreneur seeking access to rubber trees in the Andes who organizes having a 300 ton steamboat carried over a mountain. As part of making the movie, they actually did carry the steamboat over the mountain, with documentarians along the way collecting footage of the unbelievably nihilist, dour Herzog, the erratic rages of leading man Klaus Kinski, and more. One of those rare times, along with "Hearts of Darkness", that a "making of" documentary stands as a great movie in it's own right.
Contains the famous monologue from Herzog that is often quoted as being particularly illustrative of his character. Standing in the Andean forest, he says to Blank: "Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment." Check it out yourself, if it's still up, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQyQnXrLb0.
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