Imagine that you're a film editor and a German director walks into your office and pitches this idea: "We're going to go into the middle of the Amazon, find a giant mountain straddling two rivers, blow it up and move a large boat across." Seriously.
In Werner Herzog's 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo, one can watch roughly 1000 Amazon tribesmen move an actual steamboat over a mountain, a feat accomplished with no special effects. Herzog directs the story of an Irishman, played by the extremely talented and probably insane Klaus Kinski, determined to amass a great fortune so as to build an opera house in the jungle town of Iquitos, Peru. (Fun fact: Today Iquitos is the largest city in the world inaccessible by road.) After a failed attempt to build a railroad across the Andes, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, known to the Peruvians as Fitzcarraldo, buys a plot of land on which he intends to start a rubber plantation. The remainder of the film follows his journey exploring his land, finally culminating in his moving the ship across a mountain.
While the movie may sound like more of a novelty than one of the greatest films ever made, it easily falls into the latter category. The heart of the story is the powerful tale of a single man's sheer determination to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Even without the most memorable scene in the movie, Fitzcarraldo would still easily be a masterpiece. Kinski perfectly captures the character's determination bordering on sheer madness, and the film's cinematography makes a strong impression with stunning shots of the rainforest.
Although Herzog has said this film made him "conquistador of the useless," it earned him the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and further solidified his place as one of the titans of the film industry.
