When talking about Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the conversation invariably turns to what Herzog could possibly have been thinking dragging an actual steamship up the side of an actual South American mountain. I think that after severely limiting himself to produce austere tributes to personal heroes F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu) and Georg Büchner (Woyzeck), Herzog went a little mad; what issues forth in Fitzcarraldo is not only full of the fury of creation, but also laced with stagnation and clot. It's a good thirty-minutes too long, yet I'd wager that any thirty minutes elided from the final product would be missed--the conundrum presented by an artist in need of a sharper pair of scissors who was nevertheless working at near the peak of his powers here. Like the plantation sequence cut from then restored to Apocalypse Now, the crimes of Fitzcarraldo, such as they are, remain indelible--some would say essential--bits of film history. And once that boat starts making its way up that mountain, there are possibly no more arresting images in the history of cinema.

The man Klaus Kinski plays is named Fitzgerald (called "Fitzcarraldo" by the men working with him), an Irishman in Iquitos on the Amazon River who decides that it would be grand to ford a steamship from one branch of the river to the next so that he might build an opera house deep in the jungle, where he will invite the great Enrico Caruso to sing on opening night. It's a ridiculous skylark, a visionary's dream that the real-life Fitzgerald tried to see through by dismantling the ship before its land-crossing. He failed. So Herzog, of course, demanded that a ship, whole, be dragged up a narrow mountain pass with a series of levers, pulleys, and blocks--upping the stakes in a way that's only describable with words like "insane" and "arrogant." ("Reckless," even.) A feeling of doom pervades Fitzcarraldo, but it's not the mundane variety of foreboding. Rather, it's the kind of doom reserved for mythology and Greek tragedy: stories of men emboldened by mad visions attempting to break through the thin cartilage separating a man from the gods beating inside his chest. No other actor besides Kinski could convince of the furnace required to stoke hundreds of labourers on their fools' errand, and no other director besides Herzog could wring so much poetry from an umbrella rescued from a rain-swollen river, the absolute silence greeting a peoples' first encounter with a piece of ice, or a phonograph playing Caruso as it's carried to its ruin on the deck of a broken ship.

Available individually as well as within Anchor Bay's Herzog/Kinski box set, Fitzcarraldo comes to DVD in a stunning 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. Colours are lush while stopping short of saturated--the transfer preserves the kind of filmic vérité that enhances Herzog's dance along the line between fiction and documentary. Shot in English (but cryptically dubbed in German for its North American release), the film receives sterling DD 5.1 remixes in both English and German; I found either option to sound relatively faultless (the English track is brassier with more background hiss, though it's not distracting), although my preference, still, for Herzog in his native German biases me towards the dub even knowing it's a dub. Most importantly, every tortured scream of the flat-bottomed boat as it's lugged across an alien landscape is reproduced in the booming magnificence of digital fidelity. Along with a scrubbed trailer, a lengthy stills gallery, and Anchor Bay's excellent talent bios, find an excellent commentary featuring Herzog, Norman Hill, and producer Lucki Stipetic that goes from particulars like the minutia of lighting to more global concerns like the logistics of pulling the boat and how Herzog imagined the movement of the boat as a vision sprung full flower from opera and fever dream. Every time Herzog says "a steamboat moving up a mountain, it's not possible," I get a little thrill--because, Blow-up like, there it is.-Walter Chaw

1.85:1 (16x9); German DD 5.1, English DD 5.1; English subtitles; DVD-9; 157 minutes; Anchor Bay

A hallucinogenic western about a human stain that still seems like a bad dream, Cobra Verde doesn't exactly impresses with its realism--but as a tale told almost completely as an allegory, it contributes images of slavery that boast palpable weight, starting with the titular bandit's entrance. As Cobra Verde, Klaus Kinski opens the film in a field of bones, looking through red-rimmed eyes at a mission-style ranch whose blanched white clay walls themselves suggest the shell of a great beast left to cook in the Brazilian wasteland. After murdering his boss at a mud-caked gold mine, he's taken on at a sugarcane plantation and promptly impregnates its manager's three mouthy daughters. ("I am Cobra Verde, the bandit. I do what I do.") And yet his actions appear to have a motivating factor, observing as he does the master of the house molesting his servants upon coarsely declaring it odd that a day has gone by in which he hasn't knocked-up another of his slaves. Cobra Verde haunts the next sequence as well, hovering on the outside of a meeting of plantation owners during which they plot to send the bandit to West Africa, where he's sure to meet his doom at the hands of the slavers there.

Cobra Verde isn't a narrative so much as it's a series of illustrations of how civilized commerce is always derived/often indistinguishable from killing and fucking--and how the trading of human flesh is at its heart as intrinsic to the human experience as the will to power. The bandit becomes the avatar of a historical id, thus explaining, if reason does not, how he survives his first encounters with the African slavers and, later, how he whips an army of women into a frenzy as they prepare to overthrow their masters. A shot down a dark well crammed with humanity is a deep well in many ways, amplified by Cobra Verde's recognition that the people below represent his own future murderers. Kinski is mesmerizing under the best, most normalized circumstances; asked here to be a projection of lawlessness, he exudes a sense of the demonic that evokes the best bits of Milton--it's the finest adaptation of Joseph Conrad not based on Conrad. And because Cobra Verde was the last of five collaborations between Herzog and Kinski, the film gains an extra level of melancholy: when Kinski finds himself tossed by the surf after a few impotent tries at launching his escape craft into the water, we are witness to ground zero of the end of one of the most fruitful relationships in film history. Cobra Verde is a morally ambiguous, expressionistic masterpiece trip-wired with the ebbs and flows of "fact" as it pertains to the historical record of atrocity.

Available on DVD individually or as part of Anchor Bay's Herzog/Kinski box set, Cobra Verde's 1.77:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation is just stunning, its colours desaturated in the fashion of the mid-'70s (as opposed to the mid-'80s, when the film was shot). The only quibble I have is that there is some evidence of banding in early nighttime sequences. It's an amazing transfer of an amazing film, all told, one married to a fine German DD 5.1 remix that takes full advantage of the African coastal settings in its three-dimensional ambience. A trailer with a trio of viewing options (German, German w/subtitles, English dub) as well as Anchor Bay's exceptional Talent Bios share space on the dual-layered disc with a commentary by Herzog and Anchor Bay's Norman Hill. Therein, Herzog relates the oft-told tales of Kinski's worse-than-usual temperament on set, like the story of how Kinski wrapped his fist around a rock and came uncomfortably close to burying it in Herzog's skull. Herzog is a lively, brilliant commentator, and though there's an unusual amount of silence this time around, there's still enough here (such as the admission that parts of it--including a cameo by a badly-crippled man struggling along a beach--are almost impossible for him to watch now) to merit the listen.-Walter Chaw

1.77:1 (16x9); German DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround; English subtitles; DVD-9; 110 minutes; Anchor Bay