Recensioni di Metacritic

Burden of Dreams gives us an extraordinary portrait of Herzog trapped in the middle of one of his wildest dreams.

Herzog’s death-defying endeavor (executed with the help of an indigenous Indian tribe, not special effects) is the basis for Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s lyric chronicle of the film’s four-year evolution.

Just as Hearts Of Darkness is as compelling an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel as Apocalypse Now, Blank's Burden Of Dreams follows a maniacal Werner Herzog as he one-ups his blinkered hero in Fitzcarraldo, the tall-tale biography of a rubber magnate who builds an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

One of the most candid, most fascinating portraits ever made of a motion picture director at work.

More than just being about the making of FITZCARRALDO, the film is an incisive character study about a visionary filmmaker who seems to be oblivious to the fact that the making of his film is becoming as difficult and foolhardy as Fitzcarraldo's own struggles.

Films about film-making are usually deeply self-conscious, and sometimes deceiving. But there is one at least that succeeds in surpassing the movie whose making it describes.

The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening.

Burden of Dreams is most fascinating, however, when it zeroes in on Herzog himself. [28 Oct 1982, p.18]

Blank's special brand of ethnographic film documentary finds a curiously appropriate subject in that weirdest of all capsule cultures: the on-location film crew.

It's obvious that Blank has been forced into many organizational shortcuts in an effort to stitch the random footage together.