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Fitzcarraldo's Search for Aguirre: Music and Text in the Amazonian Films of Werner Herzog

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Holly Rogers
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Abstract

This article explores the filmic relationship between music, text and image through an intertextual reading of Herzog's two Amazonian films, Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. When Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo encounter each other in the rainforest, 300 years apart, a complicated interplay of history and legend, truth and fiction, is initiated. Awash with magical occurrence, the forest has its own endlessly repeating soundtrack (written by Popul Vuh). The ability of both explorers to defend themselves from the forest depends on their relationship to this music: Aguirre, the earlier explorer, is deaf to the circular sound and attempts to overlay it with a written account of their journey. Fitzcarraldo, on the other hand, enters the forest equipped with a gramophone that plays Verdi arias; he comes with his own soundtrack. Comparison between the two journeys exposes the conventional uses of text/speech and music/song in film, to reveal music as the predominant driving force behind filmic narrative.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 129 , Issue 1 , 2004 , pp. 77 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2004

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References

I am most grateful to Roger Parker for his help and patience with this article, and to Ian Cross for his invaluable comments and advice. Thanks also to John and Polly for introducing me to Herzog's films, and to Dom for watching them all (many times) with me.Google Scholar

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33 Acousmêtre forms a linchpin of Chion's theories of sound in film: it refers to a voice in theatre or cinema that is ‘off-stage’, whose audibility does not depend on seeing. In his earlier writings, descriptions seem clear-cut: if the source of the sound is not visible, then the sound is an acousmêtre, although the source must have ‘one foot’ in the image. An acousmêtre typically moves from an acousmatic to a normal state, or vice versa: thus a sound is acousmaticized or de-acous-maticized. However, in later writing (such as the ‘Epilogue’ to The Voice in Cinema) Chion admits that he had overgeneralized. What happens when a character speaks with back turned, offering a heard voice without moving lips? Chion explores the acousmêtre at length in ‘Part I: The Magic and the Power of the Acousmêtre’, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, 1999), 17–57. Speaking about disembodied sound in her article ‘Debussy's Phantom Sounds’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 10 (1998), 67–96, Carolyn Abbate suggests that acousmatic sound creates a sense of mystery that resists being caught up in interpretation: she also uses the example of God's authority, which is predicated on the presence of his voice in the absence of his body.Google Scholar

34 There has been much discussion concerning recorded sound in film. Balázs contends that ‘what we hear from the screen is not an image of the sound but the sound itself, which the sound camera has recorded and reproduced again… . There is no difference in dimension and reality between the original sound and the recorded and reproduced sound, as there is between real objects and their photographic images.’ Opposing this argument, Rick Altman, Alan Williams and Thomas Levin maintain that recorded sound's fidelity to the original is an illusion: if recorded sounds were reproduced in a different acoustic space – not in a street but inside a theatre – it would constitute a different sound. Williams contends that every sound, whether original or reproduced, is unique since it is ‘spatio-temporally specific': every sound is historical in that every sonic event is inseparable from the time and space in which that event is made. Quoted in Jeongwon Joe, ‘The Cinematic Body in the Operatic Theatre: Philip Glass's La belle et la bête’, Between Opera and Cinema, ed. Joe and Theresa, 59–73.Google Scholar

35 Freud has discussed the effect of a figure meeting itself: the person is apt to take an instant dislike to the image as it seems like a ghost and conjures up the spectre of his/her own death. See Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’, Art and Literature: Jensen's Gradiva, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey and Albert Dickson, The Penguin Freud Library, 14 (Harmondsworth, 1985), 334–76.Google Scholar

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37 As Abbate points out, it is often only in moments of narration (often the aria) that a particular character can become aware that they are singing: whilst Fitzcarraldo changes the semantic function of music, creating pure music from song, he maintains the self-awareness of its original dramatic setting. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991).Google Scholar

38 See, for example, Warhol's Sleep and Kiss, in which images have no subjectivity or psychological depth.Google Scholar

39 Fitzcarraldo was filmed in English and dubbed into German. Although the dialogue appears more realistic in the English version, Herzog prefers the German-dubbed version.Google Scholar

40 See Abbate, Unsung Voices. Peter Conrad, speaking about the operatic voice, contends that ‘one of the bequests of film to opera is its demonstration that song is soliloquy, not overt statement: that the voice is consciousness – or the yearning subconscious – overheard’. Conrad elaborates on the soliloquy through a discussion of the love duet in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's film Madame Butterfly (1974), in which the characters occupy two different locations. A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera (St Paul, 1996), 273.Google Scholar

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