BURDEN OF DREAMS

(1982) Director: Les Blank

DVD
NETFLIX

SUMMARY:

An extraordinary feature-length documentary about the messianic German director Werner Herzog struggling against desperate odds in the Amazon basin to make his epic feature, Fitzcarraldo. Burden of Dreams was honored with a British Academy Award for Best Documentary of 1982, and many critics consider it Blank's most awesome film. - lesblank.com

VIDEO: SCENE FROM BURDEN OF DREAMS


REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, CREDITS:

• Video interview with director Les Blank from independentfilm.com
• "Les Blank's "Burden of Dreams" is one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made about the making of a movie." Roger Ebert review
• "If Les Blank's jaw-dropping documentary Burden Of Dreams hadn't been first out of the box, its title might have applied to several subsequent making-of films, most notably 1991's Hearts Of Darkness (about Francis Ford Coppola's famously troubled production of Apocalypse Now) and 2002's Lost In La Mancha (about Terry Gilliam's aborted Don Quixote project)." AV Club review
• GreenCine interview with Les Blank
  

NOTES:

• Fitzcarraldo was shot on location deep within the rain forests of South America, one thousand miles from civilization. When the first version of the film was half-finished, its star, Jason Robards, was rushed back to New York with amoebic dysentery and forbidden by his doctors to return to the location. Herzog replaced Robards with Klaus Kinski (star of his "Aguirre, the Wrath of God"), but meanwhile, co-star Mick Jagger left the production because of a commitment to a concert tour. Then the Kinski version of "Fitzcarraldo" was caught in the middle of a border war between tribes of Indians. The whole production was moved twelve hundred miles, to a new location where the mishaps included plane crashes, disease, and attacks by unfriendly Indians. And all of those hardships were on top of the incredible task Herzog set himself to film: He wanted to show his obsessed hero using teams of Indians to pull an entire steamship up a hillside using only block and tackle.
  
• Stanley Kauffmann, in the New Republic, argued that, for Herzog, the purpose of film is to risk death, and each of his films is in some way a challenge hurled at the odds. Herzog has made films on the slopes of active volcanoes, has filmed in the jungle and in the middle of the Sahara, and has made films about characters who live at the edges of human achievement. - rogerebert.com