True Films 3.0 - Kevin Kelly

Burden of Dreams
Occasionally the movie about making the movie is the better movie.
Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams is the better movie which documents the
filming of Werner Herzog’s fictional movie Fitzcarraldo. Herzog imagines
that his film hero, Fitzcarraldo, employs a small army of native tribesmen
to haul a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon, from one river to
another. For reasons clear only to himself, Herzog decides this superhuman
scene must not be done with special effects. Burden of Dreams
records Herzog’s 4-year obsession in trying to film native American
tribesmen hauling an immense steamship over a mountain pass in the
deep Amazon jungle. He becomes Fitzcarraldo, or maybe Captain Ahab.
Herzog’s blind determination whips him from one disaster to the next,
making this journey both astonishing and incredibly mesmerizing. Like
Hearts of Darkness (p.77), this is a peek into how a movie can drive one
insane.
By Les Blank
1992, 95 min.
Available from Amazon
Rent from Netflix
Fitzcarraldo in the film (left) and Herzog the director (right). The steamboat gets stuck
in the mud midway up the mountain slope and is abandoned for a while (below).
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