Burden of Dreams

From what I heard about the troubled production of “Fitzcarraldo”, this documentary doesn’t cover even half of it, which seems incredulous, as it covers such a large amount of crazy stories of film-making brave-to-a-fault that it can make your head spin and go dizzy. This is a necessary companion movie to Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” and may even convince its viewers that somehow the insane story of how this epic movie was made is even more interesting and improbable than the plot of the movie itself. Still, it is a very old-fashioned documentary, as I feel it, with a seemingly omniscient narrator that is so rare in the current movies of this genre. So, though I quite enjoyed “Burden of Dreams”, I cannot but feel that there is even more material here. Maybe someone should make a non-documentary movie about how “Fitzcarraldo” was made? That would certainly be a stranger-than-fiction film I would want to watch!

Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo was a film about, among other things, the will of the human spirit. Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, is about, ironically enough, the will of the human spirit. The central story thread of Herzog's film is the main character's obsession with physically carrying a large steamboat over land to an adjacent river. The documentary focuses primarily on Herzog's actual attempt to film a cast of hundreds actually transporting the boat over a mountain pass. It's all pretty riveting stuff, but one can't help but think that Herzog himself was responsible for the majority of the misfortunes experienced while making the original movie, his own ego being the cause of his grief. While it's unfortunate that more time wasn't spent with his infamously prickly star Klaus Kinski, it remains a fascinating examination of artistic passion and the madness that often comes with creativity.

Not very impressed. In fact, maybe I've just seen too many Herzog movies & watched the supplemental material. Whatever the cause I didn't learn anything new about Herzog.

It was an astounding film and this documentary shows just how ludicrous a directorial effort this was. How Herzog persevered and achieved this picture is beyond me. Can't have been many films as difficult to pull off as this.

The conclussion of the documentary (as twisted as one of Herzog's movies) is that Herzog is as crazy as Fitzcarraldo and tried the same thing.

The story of the making of Fitzcarraldo is fascinating and even more bonkers that Fitzcarraldo.

"i don't see the jungle so much as erotic. i see it more full of obscenity. it's just -- nature here is vile and base. i wouldn't see anything erotical here. it's just fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. of course, there is a lot of misery. but it's the same misery that is all around us. the trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. i don't think they sing. they just screech in pain." also: "without dreams, we would be cows in a field, and i don't want to live like that."

An entertaining, if not very affecting portrayal of the making of a difficult movie, Burden Of Dreams doesn't come close to the depth and intensity of Hearts Of Darkness. Werner Herzog, an acclaimed director and screenwriter, isn't pushed anywhere close to the edge of madness, being mostly irked about the increasingly difficult situation, and we get only 1 instance of Klaus Kinski raising his voice, never losing his famously volatile temper. It's not that I wanted any of this, I just expected it. Herzog never once appears noticeably angry, acting professional and courteous for the most part. It's interesting to see some of the filmmaking process, and how the cast and crew managed to avoid some tricky situations, including having to relocate the entire camp to escape increasingly hostile local tribes. Some of the best parts are just us watching the extras or main cast trying to do their stuff while various factors prevent them from doing so, but it never achieves anything on a visceral level. It's mildly diverting at best, and offers us a few glimpses into Herzog's mind, but not a whole lot more.

Sometimes films have such a tumultuous production, the productions themselves become legendary. 2001, The Exorcist, Jaws, and the first Star Wars movie all come to mind. Fitzcarraldo is in that same league and this is the attempt to document it as it happens. Herzog has such a way of having his films have a dream or quirky feel to them, and either by design or not, this documentary takes that on. Though now a days it is probably most famous online for the memes it has sparked. But maybe that is just another burden of a man's dreams.

Marginally more interesting and less frustrating than the film it documents