Burden of Dreams

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