I watched Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo, as well as its companion making-of documentary, Burden of Dreams. During the film, it occurred to me that I could assign a decent summary to it, using only three words:

engineering for opera.

Fitzcarraldo is an extraordinary film, made under extraordinary circumstances. It was completed at the very end of the period in Western filmmaking when it was still possible to make a film that was comparable to a good, literary novel, before the form lost its innocence with such developments as the action film or the romantic comedy, and before there were such people as Todd Solondz, Alan Ball, Wes Anderson, or Jared and Jerusha Hess. As enthusiastic as I am [or was] of such postmodern films [post-film films?] as Fight Club or Happiness [I was fanatical about Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums], I believe that it is due as much to their existence as to The Terminator and Weekend at Bernie's that we will never see another film such as Das Boot or Il Conformista.

I thought that Burden of Dreams had some technical and structural problems: neither the narrator or the narrative were tremendously authoritative, and I thought the filmmaker should have focused less on some non-essential details and more on larger struggles the crew faced in making Fitzcarraldo: a plane crash was mentioned only in passing during an interview segment with Herzog, and the final descent of the boat was completely glossed-over. That being said, I thought it was fascinating to see the parallels between Burden of Dreams and Fitzcarraldo: how often are a film plot and a documentary about the making of that film so remarkably similar? [Such an occurrence is, of course, due mostly to Herzog's tremendous ambition.] Both the crew of the Molly Aida and the crew of the film traveled into the Peruvian jungle to undertake an impossible enterprise. Both crews, on arriving, had to enlist the help of local native peoples. And most of all, both crews had to risk their lives to drag a gigantic boat over a mountain.

I'm sure it's been mentioned one thousand times by both critics and viewers alike, since the film's release, but I also found some connections between Fitzcarraldo and Apocalypse Now. Both efforts involved a maverick filmmaker, in the late 70s or early 80s, going into the jungle to create, against terrific odds, a film about a boat going up a river. Both films are accompanied by a documentary nearly as fascinating as the film itself [Apocalypse Now had Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse]. And in both cases, the filmmaker came back out of the jungle, having triumphed over terrible difficulties, to deliver a masterpiece.