Werner Herzog is one of cinema’s greatest directors. His films are strange and wonderful. They are imbued with a sense of time and place, and they always have his stamp on them. He’s a passionate artist, and that passion often takes him to extremes. Also, he probably belongs in a lunatic asylum.
Buy Burden of Dreams Criterion CollectionOne of the best examples of his mad genius comes from Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s documentary about Herzog making his film Fitzcarraldo. The shoot took over four years and was beset by an incredible amount of problems. Any other director would have called it a day after half the things Herzog and his crew endured, but he turned disaster into an incredible film.
Fitzcarraldo tells the story of a European man who decides to build an opera house in a small village in Peru. In order to secure the funds, he launches an expedition to lay claim to an isolated patch of Amazonian jungle on which he can build a rubber plantation. To do this, he’ll need to prove he can move a steamship over a small mountain from one river to another.
Herzog, being Herzog, decided that special effects wouldn’t do for this film. It simply wouldn’t be right to build a set in a studio. His film had to be shot on location. He found one spot that was perfect for filming, but disastrous in other ways. Local tribes were in the midst of a dispute with the government over land rights. Fearing this group of white Europeans, rumors quickly spread that the film crew were vampiric cannibals, even going so far as passing around photos of the Holocaust indicating that Herzog was a Nazi.
They then moved the shoot some 1,000 miles into the jungle, far from any sort of civilization. He originally cast Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo and Mick Jagger as his dim-witted sidekick. After several months of battling bad weather and other disasters, they had nearly half the film in the can. Then Robards became deathly ill with dysentery and was sent home to recover. His doctors refused to release him back to the jungle. Soon after, Mick Jagger bowed out over conflicts with his Rolling Stones touring schedule.
Herzog hired Klaus Kinski to replace Robards and ditched the Jagger character altogether. More bad weather, fires, and plane crashes caused more problems. Herzog hired local indigenous people as extras and laborers, paying them twice what they’d normally earn in a day but still significantly less than what he’d pay for the same work elsewhere. At some point, a warring village floated down the river and shot arrows into several of the indigenous workers. They, in turn, send several of their men upstream to retaliate. Herzog laments this violence but feels there is nothing he can do about it.
Throughout Burden of Dreams, we see Herzog trying to leave as small a mark as possible on the indigenous cultures. He sets up two separate camps – one for his European crew and another for the indigenous people. Not, he says, out of any form of racism, but because he’s afraid that the Europeans will inevitably change the indigenous cultures, and not for the better.
Delay after delay means the crew and laborers are stuck in this camp hundreds of miles from nowhere. When boredom overcomes them, tensions rise. A Catholic priest of all people recommends they bring in some prostitutes to keep the men from hurting each other.
But always there is that boat. And that hill. The real Fitzcarraldo, of whom this film is very loosely based, did move a boat over a small mountain. But his boat was much smaller than the one Herzog brought in for the film and he broke it down into sections. Herzog was having none of that. He wanted to move a large ship over the mountain with ropes and pulleys. Massive amounts of workers hacked away at the jungle forest. A large bulldozer was put to work but often broke down (new parts took weeks to come in from the nearest metropolitan area and were often the wrong size or the wrong part). A lack of rain causes the river to subside, making it even harder to move the ship onto the mountain.
An engineer demands that Herzog cut the mountain down to give it less of an incline, but Herzog refuses. The engineer walks off the set when Herzog ignores his indications that dozens of people could die if he continues with his plan. Herzog ignores the man, putting who knows how many workers in danger.
Les Blank’s camera is always the observer. Periodically, we’ll hear his voice asking questions, and there is a small bit of voice-over narration, but mostly we see what happened out there in the jungle. It is an extraordinary document about an absolutely horrifying shoot. Herzog comes off as a mad genius, one who put his own life and the lives of others on the line in order to make his film, to realize his dreams. It is up to the viewer to decide if it was worth it.
If one of a million different things had gone slightly differently, if people had actually died due to Herzog’s neglect, my own answer would be different. But watching this and then watching Fitzcarraldo, I can only stand back and be amazed by the sheer beauty and artistry that came from much hardship and suffering.
The Criterion Collection presents Burden of Dreams with a new 4K digital restoration. As it was originally shot on 16mm film, you shouldn’t come in expecting it to look magnificent in UHD. The transfer preserves the grain while still making it look sharp and clear. Blank intercuts the madness of the shoot with beautiful scenes of nature, and those come out spectacularly.
Extras include
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised by filmmaker Harrod Blank, director Les Blank’s son, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Alternate uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary featuring Les Blank, editor and sound recordist Maureen Gosling, and
- Interview with Herzog
- Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), a short film by Blank
- Deleted scenes
- Behind-the-scenes photos taken by Gosling
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Paul Arthur and a book of excerpts from Blank’s and Gosling’s production journals
- Cover illustration by Richard May; design by Martin Ogolter
Towards the end of Blank’s journal, he writes, “I’m tired of it all and could care less if they move the stupid ship – or finish the fucking film.” Clearly, the making of both films was difficult for everyone. But I’m so glad they exist, and that we now have the opportunity to watch this incredible documentary in pristine quality.
