Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo won Best Director at Cannes 1982 — Herzog's largest-ever prize from the festival, after the earlier Aguirre, the Wrath of God had been competition-rejected as a German rather than international submission. The film consolidated Herzog as one of the most internationally famous European auteurs of the 1980s, and the on-set production stories — documented at length in Les Blank's extraordinary documentary Burden of Dreams — became one of the most-cited works in any subsequent making-of film tradition.

Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), an Irish-Peruvian rubber-trade entrepreneur in the early-twentieth-century Iquitos, is obsessed with bringing Enrico Caruso opera to the Amazon. To finance an Iquitos opera house, he plans to claim a remote forested concession of rubber trees by hauling a 320-ton steamship over a forested mountain that separates two parallel rivers — and then operating the rubber-extraction business with the capital that would generate. Claudia Cardinale plays Molly, the Iquitos-brothel madam who finances his early ventures.

Herzog's commitment to actually performing the central engineering operation — pulling a real 320-ton steamer over a real Peruvian mountain, with no special effects — produced a sequence of legendary on-set events including the lead actor (originally Jason Robards) being replaced by Kinski mid-shoot, multiple cast injuries, and the film's eventual three-year production span. Thomas Mauch's photography of the Amazon and Popol Vuh's electronic score are among the most distinctive 1980s European-cinema collaborations. The film stands alongside Aguirre and Cobra Verde as the central works of the Herzog-Kinski rainforest trilogy.