Burden of Dreams

A documentary which begs the question, who was crazier, Werner Herzog or Fitzcarraldo, the character in his film? To be fair, I loved getting the behind the scenes look at the conditions the film was made under, and I also loved Herzog opining about art and his dreams, as that was pretty inspirational stuff. I also liked Fitzcarraldo, Herzog's finished film, giving it four stars. However, in seeing Les Blank's documentary, it's much harder to reconcile Herzog's maniacal approach, one that put the natives acting in the film in significant danger. Did he really need to haul that boat up a hill with a 40 degree angle instead of the recommended 20 to achieve his artistic vision, when an engineer told him it had a 70% chance of killing many more than five people? Did he really need to be in the absolute middle of the wilderness? No, of course not.

Director Les Blank did a reasonably good job at showing the risk in pulling the boat up the muddy hill, but he wasn't effective in asking the harder questions of Herzog. Herzog rationalizes the deaths from plane crashes to the remote location as something that could just as easily have happened to him, and Blank doesn't ask for a full accounting of the people who died in those incidents or others. Herzog rationalizes bringing in prostitutes into the camp as being "expected," rather than ensure his crew wouldn't go into town and not cause trouble with the local women. We only see one woman interviewed who affirms she does it out of necessity, not enjoyment, and no one else commenting about this arrangement. Herzog gives a rather revolting speech about nature being a fornication and an obscenity, a place where harmony doesn't exist, and we see no one else interviewed (like perhaps a native) who may have a differing view. We get a small glimpse about how some of the natives feel about the risk, with one pointing out that Herzog himself should be pushing the boat with them if they all have to, but Blank doesn't relay this to Herzog for his reaction. Heck, we somehow don't even see any of the significant animosity that took place with Klaus Kinski. The documentary is just a little too in love with Herzog to be great, as unique as it is.

I don't say all that to suggest Herzog was evil, it's just that there is so much adulation for how he fulfilled his artistic vision in an uncompromising way that I don't think it's balanced. I am happy that he secured native land rights for the Machiguengas people. I was impressed with his film, and the moments the documentary provided that showed his attention to detail (giving an actor direction) and perfectionism (waiting days to ensure a shot of the natives in their boats would be in the best light, near sunset). There are nuances and complexities here that are fascinating to think through. In the end, I suppose Les Blank was successful, because he made me ponder Herzog's problematic, colonial attitudes and his approach vs. His artistry.

Here's a remarkable phenomenon.

"Fitzcarraldo" is to my measure a special film, meaning that it evokes in me a profound and lasting response. Indeed, I have it on my list of films you really must see (if you take me seriously). Elsewhere, I have celebrated this filmmaker, and how the twists in his being seem to (at least in this period) have created work that matters.

This is a documentary on the making of that film. Its made by a good filmmaker himself. It tells the tale, an interesting story. And it features two segments of Herzog on the scene, speaking coherently and somewhat poetically of the disruption that is the jungle. Its disturbing in its own right.

So what's wrong? Something significant, I think. Watching this takes much of the richness, the lush smell, out of "Fitz."

It explains it. It flattens it. It surrounds it with a story that is clear and thus takes away the space it naturally has for us to surround it with our own story.

Not all great art works this way, but some apparently does: it designates holes that we readily fill with ourselves and stitch together with the story our life might have been, or might not have. The design of "Fitz" is such that it contrasts the real (meaning "natural") with the stylized (meaning "civilized"). It has a simple spine that we can read and ignore while we understand instead the invisible lace of inner lust, lonely desire.

We need the space that surrounds it. We need the madness, the jungle, the lack of containing story. Its what we fill in with the jumble of our own jungles.

Seeing this takes away the experience of "Fitz." Its not just another case of an encounter with a filmmaker being less rewarding than an encounter with his (her) film. Its a matter of story walls where there shouldn't be.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Such interest in Fitzcarraldo was sparked in my mind that I was compulsively forced to purchase the DVD version of it. It was fascinating, a near-masterpiece, I would say. And I desperately wished to see the documentary about its making, Burden of Dreams. Well, probably a year after I first saw Fitzcarraldo, I came home one night to find Burden of Dreams on the Sundance Channel (praise god for this station!). I had missed about 8 minutes, but, oh well, I sat down to watch the rest.

Unfortunately, it did not reveal much about Fitzcarraldo. I had read about the problems Herzog had during the filming, and this is basically what Burden's focus is. The documentary does not go deep enough, though. I would say about a quarter of it (its running length is just over 90 minutes) is made up of actual scenes from Fitzcarraldo with maybe a short paragraph to describe the setting and maybe some small bit of behind-the-scene narrative.

Another section of the film is made up of interviews with the cast and crew. This should have been the lifeblood of this documentary, but it was not. Herzog's own interviews were interesting, but it is more or less him complaining because things are not going his way (which he has a right to complain about, but it isn't all that interesting to watch). He has this very silly monologue where he complains about how the jungle symbolizes the death of the world, when really the only thing symbolizing death is his dying film. Very disappointing is the documentarians' inability to get interviews with the cast. I was seriously hoping for some of Klaus Kinski's patented insanity and also at least one interview with the great Claudia Cardinale. There was one tiny interview with Kinski where he complained about having cabin fever for being stuck in the cast camps for weeks at a time, completely justifiable, I would say, and there are no interviews with Cardinale (although she may have been interviewed before I started watching). It made me feel a little disappointed that no documentarians had been there to film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, where Kinski absolutely flipped out!

Never fear, though. There is one very good part of this film: it serves as an ethnographic document for the Indians of South America. Herzog rightly claims that their parts in Fitzcarraldo itself were not sufficiently ethnographic, since they were just doing what he was asking of them. But in the documentary, we see the Indians making masato, an alcoholic drink made of yucca and saliva, we see them playing games such as arrow catching, we even see an attack from a different tribe that believes that the Indians who are working on the film have come to attack them. All of this is extremely interesting. 7/10

Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo was one of the most daunting tasks to put on in cinema history. This documentary follows the making of that film and all of the troubles Herzog went through. Fitzcarraldo is a sight to behold and going back now I would probably have much more of an appreciation for it. This film follows Herzog through his passion to tell this story and the incredible almost unfathomable lengths he had to go through. I thought the film could have been a little more well rounded covering more parts of the production more closely, but it still shows the grand scale of the film, and that is what I wanted to see.

Werner Herzog, the filmmaker behind Fitzcarraldo that the director Les Blank is documenting (in part) with his Burden of Dreams, says that he has no interest in making a documentary about the Natives that are all around throughout the filming, who are apart of the cast as extras and also do labor. I wonder if Blank had intended to make his documentary with them as well, but here we have Burden of Dreams going between states of mind, of one mind-set being one of the most troubled and ambitious auteur projects of the past half century in film, and another mind-set being the people. In a sense, that line Dr. Lecter quotes from Marcus Aurelius in Silence of the Lambs comes to mind- what is it's nature? In this case, the 'nature' is of not just one specific thing but a few: what is the nature of the jungle (or rather the nature of nature), the nature of a tribe of people who could see this film crew and this director with his insatiable visions as something quite alien, and vice-versa at times, and the nature of film-making in general, particularly a film that by the dictations of the script and the wills of its director demand to go for the impossible. It's almost no wonder at one point that Herzog says, "I shouldn't make films anymore, I should be in a lunatic asylum."

While not everything that could go wrong on a film goes wrong on Fitzcarraldo- the making of it I mean, not the film, of which I've yet to actually see myself- but it comes close. Along with Hearts of Darkness and Lost in La Mancha, Blank's film ranks as a contender for showing the most chaotic film production imaginable, but perhaps outdoes the others with Blank's purer skills as a documentarian. One might almost hope at times that Blank might editorialize, but there's none of that here. The narration as well just gives the facts as if reading out of a film magazine. And what's extraordinary though is that you don't need to see Fitzcarraldo to understand what the film's about through this one. The story is, as Herzog describes, about opera in the jungle, and how an obsessed opera fan (played by Klaus Kinski) decides to lug his ship over a mountain so he can build an opera in the jungle. Soon, however, Blank shows that this very act becomes an even more daunting task/metaphor than Herzog might have intended, but never do we see him decide to just give up. "I live my life or I end my life with this picture," Herzog says.

It would be one thing if Blank just looked at the film-making process from start to finish with Fitzcarraldo, and I imagine Blank probably had enough footage to make for an even longer film just covering the odds & ends of filming. But we as the viewer soon come to realize that to make Fitzcarraldo requires an understanding of the people behind it, not just the main man behind it, but of the tribe. It's interesting to note that the natives Herzog uses the first time around show one side of the 'nature' of what comes in filming in foreign territory: they attack the film crew, forcing Herzog to find a new location. This first major set-back is only covered briefly early on in the film, but it fascinated me how Herzog still remained undeterred, even though it ended up taking him another year to settle on the final locations. Then Blank turns his camera on the natives lending their support (for more money than they usually get with the usual labor they work for), and it's done sometimes with the same care of getting great glimpses of the culture, of what habits and customs are with them (like the alcohol/fruit that's a given for them), and how the tensions start to rise as the film backs up. Blank's camera is terrifically poised in these moments, and he ends up also getting a fine comparison between the film crew itself. Only Kinski, who I would think would be the only person more of interest, is usually left out, which is disappointing.

But the real excitement is seeing the daily struggles of filming, and how the boat-over-the-mountain metaphor becomes apart of this struggle, be it something small like getting a rubber-skewer right (which is very funny), or in getting that toughest of shots at the "magic hour" of the dusk. And the problems keep mounting, until what we see is a filmmaker almost too reckless for his own good, yet perhaps for his own sanity as well. I can't imagine what might have happened to Werner Herzog had he not taken that final shot, or if he had, like Coppola to an extent with Apocalypse Now, sort of succumbed to the jungle's dangers like a Conrad character. What we end up seeing of Herzog is perhaps a man under the duress and total stress of film-making- or total control, who can say- but even when he's at his bleakest statements, it's never boring or pretentious to hear what Herzog has to say about the jungle or the people or to see how he directs. And around Herzog, and that giant boat, and the natives and the jungle, Blank creates the kind of behind-the-scenes documentary unique, where psychology and anthropology get brilliant put into the context of 'filming dreams', as it were.