Kill James Bond! - S4E47.5 Fitzcarraldo

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Giraldo. What an interesting name. How do you spell it? Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Gooden talk, my Neliebeling listener. Cowabunga. Which is how I imagine. A German surfer. God, can you imagine that? That's how they were sort. Like the silver surfer, but German? Terrifying. Yeah. Or any other.

Starting point is 00:00:46 Color of Surfer, yeah, you get a name, I suppose. Der Zilber surfer? Dersilber surfer. Terrifying. Anyway, no, this is a highly novembrious bonus pick. One that I would like to introduce to you with the words, two hours, 37 minutes of Werner Herzog. You're so welcome.

Starting point is 00:01:08 It does clip by, though. It does go at a decent pace. So when I saw that big number, I was like, oh, God. But actually, it does go. And this is my hope. I love this shit so much. It was so good. Thank you for making me watch this.

Starting point is 00:01:20 Completely blind and was like, oh my word, this is fantastic. Yeah, I mean, Fitzgeraldo, which is the subject of tonight's episode, is one of my favorite films. It's a film that sort of moves me to tears every time I see it. And I'm just really excited to share it with both of you and with the listener as well. So we can just really get straight into it. Klaus Kinski was a sort of monster. Klaus Kinski is an interesting figure. I know nothing about this man.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Although my note, he says, Klaus Kinski looks like he's wearing a rubber mask of Klaus Kinski's face over Klaus Kinski's face. He does, yes. He looks incredible in this movie. But who is this man? Yeah, so Klaus Kinski was a sort of like early collaborator with Werner Herzog. We may be familiar with Werner Herzog, the German director you may remember from Grizzly Man or getting shot mid-Iritschitz.

Starting point is 00:02:14 interview and kind of shrugging it off with a, it is not significant. Um, very, the Mandalorian. Yeah, or, yes, I would like to see the baby. You might be familiar with him from the Mandalorian. Had a voice cameo in Rick and Morty one time. Better known for other work. I would like to see the baby meme.

Starting point is 00:02:32 That guy. Voice cameo in Rick and Morty. Yeah, that guy, Werner Herzog, the German existentialist director. Yeah, Werner Herzog. So, Klaus Kinski was for a while his muse, but in a way that they had, I think Herzog called Kinski a great pestilence. This is the film where in the course of making it, some of the cast offered in all earnest to have Kinski murdered, and Herzog had to turn them down.

Starting point is 00:03:01 Wow. I wanted the clip of him saying that, but I only had him saying it in German. Yeah, it's like, some of the native people were like, do you want us to kill Kinski for you? Like, you're arguing with him a lot. And he goes, no, for the love of God. me take care of him. They only wanted to kill him because of his actions on the set, right? Later, they only knew him for the, like, the course of filming the movie. Yeah, yeah, whereas the sort of rest of Klaus Kinski's life, I think we can sum up with, if we can put in here, the drop of

Starting point is 00:03:31 Curtis Slee was saying, later on, he was a pedophile. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, personally, a very, a very bad man, however, a great actor. And, and, And I think we're gonna have to talk about a lot of moral compromise in this movie, right? Because it was a nightmare to make. It's very much of the same tradition as Apocalypse Now, where a director sort of goes into the jungle and, you know, making a movie is often a very exploitative process. And in the course of making this very, you know, sort of grand artistic vision, you know, has to sort of, by I say, has to, chooses to brutalize and exploit a lot of.

Starting point is 00:04:14 lot of people in order to make the art. And if you think that there's an interesting sort of... And also the art is about that. That is what the movie is about. That's what I'm building to is, yeah, if you think that's a kind of interesting thing to explore, happily there's a film about that called, uh, Burden of Dreams, no, called Fitzcaraldo. Yeah. Yeah, it is...

Starting point is 00:04:33 Both worth watching. Yes. Is that Kinski alive? Dead. Dead. Dead. Yeah. Herzog still alive.

Starting point is 00:04:40 I like to separate the art from the artist and that's why we're going to be opening Fred Shearin. Yeah, absolutely. Everyone dropped out. There was so much they were leaving money on the ground. We are now. If you've been waiting for KJB live shows, I'm so happy to announce, we're going to be opening for Ed Sherrod for the rest of this tour.

Starting point is 00:04:57 We have a lot of nuance, not division tour. We have a lot of nuanced, thoughts, both sides. We think it's a complex issue. And really, we just want music to be a place where people can set politics aside, you know, those of them are still alive and have families who are still alive. music festival somewhere near a border maybe. Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald.

Starting point is 00:05:21 Fitzgerald. Fitts Carardo. Being someone who has watched zero Herzog films, but most of his documentaries, when this opened with shots of the jungle and blaring orchestral music, I was like, oh yeah. Yeah, I know what I'm here for. Yeah. That's my man. Because turns out Werner Herzog is a guy who has a thought, which is great.

Starting point is 00:05:38 We love when a director has one of those. Many of them don't. And the thought is, uh, you know, a thought is. every man for himself and God against all, right? To steal his own title, right? It's a, yeah. The sort of human condition is one of trying to master nature, right? And this contains some sort of like horrible forms.

Starting point is 00:05:56 We'll talk about if we ever do Aguirre wrath of God. But, you know, he's choosing his sort of canvas here for this as the Amazon, right? Peru in the early 1900s. Yeah, attributing this. Set during the rubber boom. Yeah. The land where God did not finish creation is the sort of. epigraph of this, which he attributes to local indigenous tribe.

Starting point is 00:06:19 And then we get a series of cuts from this sort of orchestral sound and the jungle to this enormous sort of wedding cake opera house in Manus in the Amazon. And I think this sequence is not subtle about how strange and imposition European colonialism is to have this sort of phenomenon of an opera. house. Yeah, at which all of the staff are members, are people of color. Yes. And they're doing like weird shit, like feeding a horse champagne.

Starting point is 00:06:53 And like, listeners, I don't know if you've ever been to an opera or tried to go to an opera, as I once tried. They're kind of like slightly strange places. But like, yeah, opera, there's a lot of opera in this movie. My notes say opera occurs. And if you're into opera, that's cool. If you're not into opera, there are sequences of this movie that are just like, I would say, conservatively nine hours of uncut opera.

Starting point is 00:07:13 Much like opera itself, you know? Sometimes you'll watch an opera and you'll go, oh, there's more of this. It's really a kind of, you know, form of consonants, right? And vowels, vows mainly actually, just, whoa, there's a lot of that, you know. If you want the sort of cliff notes of this, I would say opera is a form of art about not just sort of big emotions, but also about sort of madness as this film is, right? And it's about sort of making those points of madness over a fairly long, period of time, you know, it's a melodramatic form, as is this. And we see a dude who is mad. We see a dude who's mad because we see a couple arriving at the opera.

Starting point is 00:07:54 This is Fitzcaraldo, our main guy, who looks like kind of Gary Bucie-ish. He's the Karskinski, kind of the shock of blonde hair, the slightly rubbery face. And he's with a very beautiful woman, yes. He's with a very beautiful woman named Molly. Yeah, Claudia Cardinala, who is looking incredible, very, very beautiful. Meanwhile, this is sort of like average straight couple in the sense that she looks incredibly beautiful. He is in the most fucked and stained white suit. We've talked about this before.

Starting point is 00:08:25 We talked about this with Siriana as well, of like wearing white, it sort of marks you out as like, oh, I don't have to do any manual labor, right? It's very, you know, class aspirational. It's very, you know, colonial in this case. I'm glad we hit that so early because he insists on wearing white for the whole movie, no matter how bad it gets. And it's very, very... Absolutely. And he's... He's rowing this canoe down the Amazon to get to the Opera House and is sort of rushing there.

Starting point is 00:08:53 And he's... They're late. They won't let them in as Opera House's don't. It happens. Yeah, they don't. He's rode them 1,200 miles. And, like, Molly even shows the guy at the door. When the guy's like, I'm sorry, you can't come in. Like, she shows and fits his hands and they're, like, bandaged and bloody.

Starting point is 00:09:09 Like, he's rode the whole way. They don't have tickets. And she's like, he doesn't have a ticket, but he has a right. Because he really wants to see this Italian tenor. Caruso. Rico Caruso, yeah. Two days and two nights I've been rowing to see Caruso once in my life, right? Listen to all of his podcasts.

Starting point is 00:09:29 I love his work. They're so good. I'm his best friend in real life. Yeah, he does. He does have exactly that kind of parisocial relationship we see, because when the sort of sympathetic usher is, is swayed by this argument, he lets them in to sort of like, you know, secretly stand at the back. And when Caruso does one of these sort of big operatic gestures, you see that Fitzcaraldo goes,

Starting point is 00:09:54 he was pointing at me. He pointed at me, yeah, and Lottie is like, he did, he did do that. This is a kind of madness. It's a kind of parasocial madness, but it's an enthusiasm for the form, you know? Yeah. He's already stated he's going to build an opera house. He says this to the guy on the way in. He's going to build an opera house in Akitos, which is his own Amazon city that he's, like, based in. And Caruso will be there at the opening night. I'm going to get that boy and take him to my city.

Starting point is 00:10:20 Yeah, absolutely. He's going to be in my opera house and I'm going to put on an opera in the jungle. That's what I want to do is I want to bring the art for me in. We're going to start talking and we're going to really, he's going to understand me on a level. Can we talk about the staging of the opera here as well? The opera here is Enani. I love this. Oh, my fucking God.

Starting point is 00:10:37 It's not historical. but it is very consciously artificially staged. It has all, it's very traditionally staged in the sense that you have your tenor and sort of like full costume and the rouge and everything. And you see that the soprano, Sarah Bernhardt here is, or it's meant to be Sarah Bernhardt, is being played by seemingly a man in drag and lip-syncing. Yeah. I mean, I don't know anything about opera, so I looked at this and my takeaway was, that is an opera. Mm-hmm. This is an opera that is really hammering you on the point that opera is surreal and false.

Starting point is 00:11:23 It's a very artificial thing, and it's, you know, deceptive as well. It's sort of, it's also, this is sort of the big city to him. He's, you know, rode for two days and two nights to get here. And despite the fact that they have Caruso, this is more than a little embarrassing to have your soprano be, as a guy says in the next scene, you know, sort of an actress who can't sing and who is having to be covered like in singing in the rain. Yeah, there's a bunch of shots from offstage where you're seeing the singer who's doing the singing in the foreground of it, which I really like.

Starting point is 00:11:59 It's ridiculous, right? Yeah. And it's trivial and it's odd, right? And I think the invocation of drag here is very conscious, and I really, really like it as well. I don't... The Phantom of that Opera House, he's not even going to... It's not even bothering. It's like a dog in a mask, you know?

Starting point is 00:12:19 It's just a shit to hear, phantom. Mm-hmm. Every opera house has a phantom. It's just the amount of effort they put in. Yeah. I mean, if you think about something like pantomime, right? That's a sort of like... I try not to, but go on.

Starting point is 00:12:33 It's comic opera, right? taking the... You try being a Phantom of the pantomime. It doesn't work. He's behind you. Phantomime? Alright. But no, pantomime is like a sort of, it's almost like it's a parody...

Starting point is 00:12:48 Fathor the pantomime would be so fucking funny. All right, okay. Copyright, Killed his own, yeah. We'll do that later. That's right, it's an Edinburgh, fringe show. That's gonna do so fucking well. A pantomime is a parody of an opera, right? It takes the sort of aspect of a comic opera and it's sort of exactly, it's sort of exactly

Starting point is 00:13:05 exaggerates them a little bit. And we're really sort of leaning on this is, you know, opera is this sort of like aspirational rarefied European classical form of art that is not being done convincingly here, right? I think that's why it's important to talk about the like dark-skinned ushers as well as to a contemporary European audience who is staging this. This is, you know, it's ridiculous, right? Okay, that's good context. I'm glad you told us that because I was just an opera.

Starting point is 00:13:35 They go to see Mr. Opera, the boss of the King Opera. Yeah. And he's just like, what's up, Fitzgeraldo? It's an interesting name. And he's like, yo, my whole deal is I love opera. I want to build an opera house in the jungle and have Caruso sing there. Molly's like, yes, I'm right or die. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:53 He's Mr. Opera, she says, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And Mr. Opera's like, people don't want to go to the stinky jungle. And he's just like, we have a dream. And he's like, I'm leaving the movie now. Yeah, there's a kind of self-referral. awareness here where he talks about Manaus, which is booming. It's one of the wealthiest cities in the world, he says, because of this rubber boom,

Starting point is 00:14:12 right? Because of harvesting rubber from the Amazon. But the sort of wealthier people in Manouse, they send their laundry to Lisbon, right? Because the water of the Amazon is thought to be impure, right? There's still this racism that, you know, sort of infects them, where it's like, no, this is very, very aspirational, but it's aspiring to be like Europe. we know that it's not, right? And this doesn't cut any ice, so to speak, with Fitzcarraldo. Hey.

Starting point is 00:14:44 Yeah, that's the other thing, is Mr. Mr. Opera knows who Fitzcaraldo is, right? The name is because his real name is Fitzgerald, but nobody can pronounce it. So in Spanish, it gets, you know, Hispanicized. You do end up a little bit with Klaus Skinski playing an Irish guy. I don't know. My daddy was Irish.

Starting point is 00:15:04 I just don't think that's true, brother. Does that match up at all with the idea of, you know, sort of Caruso not convincingly playing a sort of Renaissance nobleman or, you know, is this a thing about artifice? Maybe. That's opera. That's an opera. Okay, you know of a drill. That's as much as I can let you listen to.

Starting point is 00:15:22 If you want to hear the rest of this beautiful episode of Kill James Bond, you're going to have to head on over to our Patreon. That's patreon.com slash kill James Bond, all one word, and sign up today for as little as five pounds a month to get access to this episode. and every bonus episode we've ever done, which is like five years worth of episodes at this point. It's pretty good for a fiver. Tap in. I'll see you there.

Kill James Bond! - S4E47.5 Fitzcarraldo

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