Customer Reviews

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

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Herzog is a masterful film director and his films are based on his own, rich, screenplays. This extremely dedicated artist is also a wonderful writer. I could not put this book down. Herzog captures the intensity of the jungle and the personalities of the actors as they fray in the humidity and heat. He captures the raw opportunism of almost all the locals, hoping to cash in on a real "Hollywood film crew", who instead encounter a film maker who is a crazy genius, filled with visions. Intellectual entertainment.

I'm not even a huge fan of Herzog but this book is amazing. I have been reading it while in my first semester in grad school, especially when I need to read something beautiful. Herzog's descriptions are so lush and illustrative, both the lovely and terrible. This is a book I will return to again and again. Poetry for those who don't like poetry.

Conquest of the Useless is Werner Herzog's journal while he was in the Amazon, planning and filming Fitzcarraldo. If you are a fan of Fitzcarraldo, this book, along with Les Blank's documentary on the filming (Burden of Dreams), give a real feel for Herzog's experience of the Amazon and the challenges in making the movie. He doesn't dwell very much on the best-known aspect of the story, his determination to haul a steamboat uphill and downhill from one tributary of the Amazon to another. This was very much Herzog's determination -- in the historical events that Fitzcarraldo is based on, the ship was disassembled and moved, not pulled over intact.

What he does dwell on is the Amazon itself. Herzog seems to enjoy love-hate relationships -- his relationship with the Amazon is much like his relationship with Klaus Kinski. At times he is repelled and rants against the jungle:

"The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. The voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid, immobile anger hovers over everything."

"Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air. The jungle revels in debauched lewdness."

Kinski appears, with his own rants, irrational behavior, just plain annoying, irritating behavior. He keeps insisting to Herzog that the jungle is erotic:

". . . Kinski amorously leaned his cheek against a tree trunk and then began to copulate with the tree. He thinks this is immensely erotic: the child of nature and the wild jungle. . . . . To me it was not erotic at all. I spat, only obscene."

Mick Jagger and Jason Robards also appear -- they were cast in Herzog's first attempt to film the movie, cut short by Robards' illness. Jagger comes off pretty well, seeming to enjoy the craziness of the whole thing. There are scenes of Robards and Jagger in Blanks' documentary, with Jagger playing Fitzcarraldo's assistant, Wilber. Claudia Cardinale also comes off very well, a kind of calming, graceful influence on everyone around her, even Kinski. Her character in the movie does the same.

If you aren't a fan of Fitzcarraldo, I don't think the book would really stand by itself. So watch the movie. Then read the book. Then watch Les Blanks' Burden of Dreams.

Herzog is a unique geniuse who produced this unique work. These are almost hallucinatory notes reflecting his thoughts as he made Fitzcarraldo. Dreams enter into rich descriptions. Some sections may make little sense but the book as a whole reveals how his force of will and vision created the movie. For anyone interested in the making of movies, a creative mind under very difficult circumstances, or the life in a jungle or on a movie shot in location, this book is a must.

This is a fascinating, startingly moving diary. It brings eloquence and artistry to a usually mundane form. I wonder how much Herzog edited these entries, if at all, and if he was thinking of publishing them as he wrote them. I'd love to think they were just his daily scribbles, used to keep himself sane under his burden of dreams. However, if they were contrived to a certain degree all the more power to him for his writerly skill.

Great fun to watch the movie again as you read along with his tribulations. Was especially moved by his tendency to describe things as though they were happening in some somnolent state in a country that only existed in his dreams and then how he would effortlessly switch to telling us what he had for lunch.

An audio recording of Herzog himself reading these diaries would be priceless. I'd imagine the absurdity would be operatic.

Any fan of Herzog will love this book and need to get a copy ASAP.

You've seen Fitzcarraldo, you've seen Burden of Dreams, but you still need to learn about the inner turmoil of the mad genius who pulled a steamship over a mountain at the cost of everything, including his soul (temporarily) and sanity (possibly not temporarily).

The poetry-prose and dreamlike surrealism of the diary entries are wondrously and seamlessly intertwined with harsh logistical reality and intimate specifics so lucid that it defies imagination. Herzog is a true writer, a true observer, and really understands the human condition on so many levels.

It's all here in his diaries, and the master is at peak performance, even when he's clearly losing it completely (sometimes, those are not only the best and most entertaining parts, but also the most lucid moments of his recollections and articulation; it's as though he's fueled by failure and enflamed by chaos).

That all said, the diaries do become rather laborious to read at parts, and by the end, it's hard not to start skimming. The same traumas and tragi-comic moments tend to arise over and over again, and as fun as it is to hear about first-person accounts of dealing with Klaus Kinski (whose own autobiography is perhaps one of the best books ever written) and the like... you begin to wish Conquest of the Useless was about 100 pages lighter.

Nevertheless, good bathroom material to be sure, and a fine book to skip around in when you've got the time between other books, Herzog's Fitz diary makes for a truly indelible and singular product, one that any film enthusiast and struggling artist is sure to enjoy... at least in part.

Must say it again: the writing itself is surprisingly superb.

[...]

An incredible companion to Fitzcarraldo & Burden of Dreams as well as a penetrating look into the mad genius mind of Werner Herzog.

If you're in the LA area you can go to Book Soup and get a signed copy, Werner will be there August 1st at 5pm and you can get it signed in person.
[...]

Being as big of a fan of Herzog as I am, I was surprised to be surprised by how incredible this book is. I expected to be impressed by the information contained within, but not by the eloquence of the prose, which, to be honest, ranks among some of the greats of literature. Herzog is a gifted writer (and a gifted human being in general). I would recommend this book not only to Herzog admirers, but to anyone who loves great literature.

Werner Herzog is a compelling diarist and if you are an artist on the outs ( your muse, the landlord ) then you will be inspired.

Much as I love Herzog's films I did not expect his observations made while making even a movie as outrageous as Fitzcarraldo to be all THAT interesting. Perhaps I feared the opposite, that they would be too interesting - the weird factor infusing his ruminations with a delirium that would irritate me. As it turns out, the way Herzog documents what he sees and experiences is pitch perfect, avoiding a self-indulgence that generally pervades these things. He cannot avoid himself, his idiosyncrasies and imagination, nor can he ignore the bizarre circumstances. But I never feel that Herzog is demonstrating what a unique genius observes and how it expresses itself. His fodder is inherently fantastic and he has the sense to keep it simple. His notes are engrossing, visual, and yes, at times magically real but everything is somehow grounded. I should have known Herzog's exquisite sense of things would enable him to express the outrageous and fantastic without sacrificing, how Gauguin put it, "The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful..." Herzog's objective observations of suffering at times added a painful edge to the book. Not that the observations are devoid of compassion, but and good, melodrama is avoided. I fear I'd have been driven mad by all those pleading eyes and desperate creatures: live chickens tied by their legs, dangling off the back of a motorcycle, being choked by dust as their heads bounce on the road; dogs tied up, stranded, thirsty, starving and covered in sores; helpless children - the relentless Amazon. Conquest Of The Useless is one of the most engrossing books I've ever read. For some reason I kept caring.