Les Blank

(On Cable TV, February 2022) Ask any knowledgeable cinephile which films had the most difficult, tortured, accursed production and I guarantee that Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is going to be on the list. After all, simply watching the film is cause for amazement, as its characters drag a boat over an Amazonian mountain and the film clearly shows how it was done for real. How do you get to that point where it’s a good idea? How do you execute such a thing? Fortunately, there’s Burden of Dreams to tell us all about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and it turns out that the boat-over-a-mountain thing is a rather minor and straightforward episode in a hellish production. If it was just about the logistics of dragging a boat over a steep hill, Herzog could laugh about it—but the production simply looked cursed at times. The original stars, Jason Robarts and Mick Jagger, were replaced early in production when Robarts suffered severe medical problems and Jagger had to go on tour. Undaunted, Herzog went to Klaus Kinsi (further adding to his problems) and ended up in the middle of a small-scale war between two tribes. Weather problems exacerbated a shot that went on and on, eventually stopping for several months until conditions on the ground became better. Throughout the ordeal, Herzog sounds like a mad philosopher king, increasingly expounding on philosophical tangents inspired by his experience. The analog period feel of early-1980s filmmaking creates a distinct atmosphere, and director Les Blank does his best to assemble the location footage, historical material and interviews create a narrative, even if it’s not smooth all the way through. It’s good that Burden of Dreams exists, though, because this is the kind of troubled production that would seem too unbelievable if there wasn’t at least some shred of evidence to suggest that it all really happened.