IN 2004 HERZOG PUBLISHED NOTES HE KEPT during the preproduction and filming of Fitzcarraldo between 1979 and 1982. Entitled Conquest of the Useless (Die Eroberung des Nutzlosen), the book is emphatically not a production diary, but instead an impressionistic collection of fragments. In an entry dated July 29, 1980 (one quite representative of the collection's style), he describes entering Belém do Pará with the costume designer Gisela Storch: “Into town with Gisela; because there is no sense of history, only a panting, sweating present, there is no hope of finding any historical costumes here.” The director stylizes South America as an eternal sameness whose people do not know, or at least do not live within, their history the way Europeans do. Herzog was not in South America to learn about the indigenous people or their home, however, but rather to use images of those people and the jungle to tell a story about Western dreams and desires.

Like Friedrich Nietzsche in the Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), Herzog peregrinates mentally through landscapes that do not offer hopeful alternatives to being trapped in the musty archives of the past but serve instead as projections against which we see our past-entrapped selves more clearly. As a collection, Conquest of the Useless echoes a romantic rethinking of an aesthetic structure that resonates in Nietzsche's relocation of the past into a living present: that of the arabesque. The transformation of the arabesque in the fine arts from a depiction of intertwined leafy and floral forms into what Winfried Menninghaus calls a “hybrid … that is neither simply image nor ornament, but oscillates between the modes of ornament and imagery” is a change crucial to romantic aesthetic philosophy. The seemingly chaotic, winding forms of the arabesque (whether in architecture, literature, or painting) along with the aforementioned oscillation between ornamentation and image, and between framing and what is being framed, call the reliability of representation into question.

For Friedrich Schlegel, the arabesque was the response to the experience of living in a post-metaphysical world: the arabesque does not attempt to control what is ineluctably contingent, nor does it impose a new authority on a world that has definitively lost faith.