There’s the tiny black employee of Fitz’s, who has guarded his railroad property from Indians, not knowing it’s another project he has returned on. His odd but endearing behavior seems real precisely because only an oddball would defend another man’s property without pay for months on end.
There is the black umbrella that floats toward the boat as a seeming warning from the local Indians. There is the celebration by the Indians after the boat has made it over the mountain, where native women squirt their breast milk into bowls to be drunk.
Then, at film’s end, there is a close moment between Fitz and Captain Paul. Yet, Fitz whispers it into the Captain’s ear, so the viewer never knows what is said. Having seen the more recent Lost In Translation, where what was whispered between that film’s two lead characters was taken as a ‘stroke of genius’ by tyro director Sofia Coppola, it does not surprise me that she stole that idea from Herzog. In this film, since it is a greater film, and the two characters have gone through far more, the gesture is even more powerful and moving.
The very fact that a moment like that goes uncommented upon by all the major critics of the film, then and now, yet when it appears in a film like Coppola’s is lauded without surcease, shows how far much more a film like Fitzcarraldo has to offer than a rather light piece of fluff like Lost In Translation. This is because such moments are in surfeit in Fitzcarraldo, whereas they are the centerpieces of Hollywood tripe. But, as Captain Paul mentions to Fitz, there are two kinds of silences — the good and the bad. Oddly, the lack of praise for such a great moment is one of the good silences. Enjoy the gilt.
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