
There are only two documentaries about filmmaking that can be considered essential viewing. One is Hearts of Darkness, about the making of Apocalypse Now (currently unavailable for theatrical exhibition as it’s being restored). The other is Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, which was shot only a year or two later, and which chronicles the equally tumultuous struggle to make Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Both are portraits of the filmmaker as artist grappling with his hubris against overwhelming odds in the maw of the jungle.
War, pestilence, plane crashes and mutiny… all this and Herzog also had to contend with leading man Klaus Kinski, after the originally cast Jason Robards had to drop out mid-shoot on doctor’s orders. (Taking costar Mick Jagger with him.) Turns out pulling a steamboat over a mountain in the middle of the Amazon is no easy feat.
Blank created an enduring record of hubris, exploitation and unrelenting misadventure in the pursuit of artistic greatness.
Zachary Barnes, The Wall Street Journal
The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening.
Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Les Blank
Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Mick Jagger
USA
1982
In English, Spanish and German with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Producer
Les Blank
Editor
Maureen Gosling
Cinematography
Les Blank
Also Playing
The Encampments
When pro-Palestine protests took hold of Columbia last year, the filmmakers were there from the beginning. This documentary charts the mounting tensions between students and the administration, as the protests were picked up across North America.
Shepherds
Mathyas quits his marketing job in Montreal and goes to France with the romantic notion of becoming a shepherd. He's in for a rude awakening... Based on a true story, Deraspe's stirring film plays spiritual uplift off against some 3000 sheep and a donkey.
The Teacher
In this potent thriller, English teacher Basem witnesses the murder of a teenager by a Israeli settler. While the subsequent investigation rolls slowly towards a foregone conclusion, the teacher is caught up in a parallel kidnapping case...
Our Lady of the Nile
Veronica and Virginia are inseparable friends at an elite Catholic boarding school, Our Lady of the Nile, but what binds them together is the very thing that separates them forever. We are in Rwanda, 1973, and tribal tensions are simmering ominously.