BURDEN OF DREAMS

BURDEN OF DREAMS (1982/2024, 95 min. Directed by Les Blank with Maureen Gosling English, Spanish & German with English subtitles). New 4K restoration! YOUR GENERAL ADMISSION TICKET INCLUDES FREE ENTRY TO OUR SCREENING OF FITZCARRALDO, 8pm, Sunday, September 22nd.

Burden of Dreams captures the spirit of extreme filmmaking by focusing it's lens on legendary director Werner Herzog’s filming of his most ambitious film Fitzcarraldo. For nearly five years, Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most difficult films of his career, Fitzcarraldo, the meta-story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this production, made more perilous by Herzog’s determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of indigenous Peruvians to pull a full-size, 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless directors. Blank’s interviews with Herzog, bring context and backstory to his personalized style of “ethnographic filmmaking,” which values Peru’s native, Campa, Machiguenga, and Aguaruna people and their Old World culture as much as it does Herzog’s perilous enterprise. Blank’s appreciation for the jungle comes through in his uninflected photography of insects, birds, and even the feet and faces of his Peruvian subjects - as frequently set against the classical music that Herzog used in Fitzcarraldo.

Herzog was energized by the story of Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald, an aspiring Peruvian rubber baron who forced hundreds of Amazonian natives to disassemble a steamboat and portage its pieces over an isthmus in the Madre de Dios Mountains. Once on the other side, the boat was reassembled so that Fitzcarraldo could transport the rubber down the Ucayali River to be sold.

For his self-penned narrative, Herzog made his leading character an Irishman in love with opera — specifically with the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, for whom Fitzcarraldo aspires to build an opera house in the Iquitos jungle, where he plans for Caruso to perform someday. During the filming, Herzog’s leading actor Jason Robards came down with amoebic dysentery and was forced to abandon the film after 40% of it was completed. Robards’s co-star Mick Jagger followed suit due to scheduling constraints. Herzog called in his reliably tempestuous muse Klaus Kinski to fill the role of Fitzcarraldo and scrapped Jagger’s sidekick character.

Although Blank only visited Herzog’s remote shoot twice — for several weeks at a time — he and his editor/sound technician Maureen Gosling capture the full range of Herzog’s tribulations. Violent conflicts between hostile natives and the jungle’s chaos present Herzog and his multicultural skeleton crew with exotic challenges. For all of the attacks that Herzog endured from tribal factions, critics, and Mother Nature herself, the imperturbable director proves himself as much a man of the people as an uncompromising filmmaker.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM:

"Burden of Dreams should be ranked with the finest of films about great artists." - Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune

"An extraordinary portrait of Herzog trapped in the middle of one of his wildest dreams…Les Blank is a brilliant filmmaker who is unafraid to ask difficult questions and portray Werner Herzog, warts and all." -Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"An extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless directors". -Santa Fe New Mexican 

"Blank created an enduring record of hubris, exploitation and unrelenting misadventure in the pursuit of artistic greatness"- The Wall Street Journal 

 "Extraordinary…one of the most exquisitely detailed, dramatically compelling films ever made about the creative process". -Boston Globe