Werner Herzog’s 1982 epic Fitzcarraldo is, by any metric, a landmark of world cinema. Its story– about an eccentric dreamer’s quixotic quest to pull a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon rainforest and build an opera house in the jungle– remains one of the movies’ most potent metaphors for the frustrations and triumphs of artistic passion. The film is an essential plank in the legends of both its director (who won the award for Best Director at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival) and its star, the mercurial Klaus Kinski. Its lush cinematography and locations are among the most breathtaking of the 1980s. And, in a very real way, it is only half a movie.
This is because, when we talk about Fitzcarraldo, we rarely talk exclusively about the film itself. The legend of Fitzcarraldo is inextricable from the circumstances of its famously troubled production. Herzog and his crew found themselves embroiled in local conflicts between indigenous tribes and the Peruvian government, forcing them to shut down and move locations multiple times. Original leading man Jason Robards contracted dysentery and had to withdraw from the film, leaving Herzog little choice but to cast his frequent collaborator/frenemy Kinski. Most famously, in order to realize the sequences in which his mad hero pulls a steamship through the mountains, Herzog insisted his crew actually pull a steamship through the mountains, resulting in multiple injuries and unimaginable stress. In essence, Herzog made Fitzcarraldo twice: as a movie, and, simultaneously, as a work of performance art.
Fortunately, this second Fitzcarraldo also exists as a film. In addition to Kinski and his sprawling cast and crew, Herzog was accompanied by fellow documentarian Les Blank, who documented the proceedings with a crew of his own. Blank’s resulting film, Burden of Dreams, which screens in a brand new 4K restoration at the Coolidge this week, is a classic in its own right, and one of the great movies ever made about the making– and unmaking– of movies.
It’s clear that the production of Fitzcarraldo was already on shaky ground by the time Blank and his crew arrived in the jungle; Robards is long gone at the start of the film, though we do get to see some snippets of the footage he shot before his departure (even more intriguingly, we get to see footage of Mick Jagger, who was initially cast as Fitzcarraldo’s sidekick; when Jagger was unable to return for reshoots due to touring obligations, Herzog wrote out his character entirely rather than recast). Even before dragging the ship aground– one of three ships, we find out, all of which end up beached in one way or another– Herzog is clearly overwhelmed, recounting the shoot’s political woes in his trademark Teutonic drawl. It can be difficult with Herzog to differentiate actual despair and frustration from his base level of existentialism, but even so it’s hard not to see him as a man nearing his breaking point– before pushing onward to find new, more punishing breaking points.
Yet while the reputation of Burden of Dreams suggests a wild, one-thing-after-another thrill ride, the actual film is far more lyrical. Though Herzog insists that he has no interest in making an ethnographic film, Blank seems just as interested in capturing moments of downtime among the largely indigenous crew, lingering on details like a child paddling around in a plastic tub or a seemingly out-of-place Saturday Night Fever t-shirt. The production of Fitzcarraldo ultimately spanned more than five years, and while it’s not clear how many of the local hands were present for that entire time, it’s completely reasonable that a sort of culture would take root within the shoot. By capturing these relatively mundane moments, Blank impresses upon us just how endless the making of Fitzcarraldo must have seemed.
Of course, we likely wouldn’t remember Burden of Dreams if it was devoid of the pure insanity of the shoot. Though we only see flashes of Kinski’s well-documented madness (for more of that, check out My Best Fiend, Herzog’s 1999 documentary about the pair’s fraught working relationship), the film’s most famous sequences involve that damn boat. Blank frames Herzog’s multiple attempts to hoist the enormous ship up the mountain as something between a military operation and a science experiment– with the added twist that there was, of course, no guarantee that the endeavor was even remotely possible. The sequences in which the boat inches up the hill– and slides back down– are as riveting and breathtaking as anything in Fitzcarraldo itself. Blank leans into the blurred lines between fantasy and reality in a heartstopping moment in which a worker appears to have been crushed underneath the boat’s girth, only to get up and reveal that he was in fact performing in a scene for the movie. One gets the impression that, by this point, the distinction for the crew was moot.
Perhaps even more than Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams has entered the cultural lexicon as shorthand for artistic hubris; in 2022, it was hysterically parodied in a two-part episode of TV’s Documentary Now!, with Alexander Skarsgård and August Diehl sending up Herzog and Kinski’s respective eccentricities. Like so many classics, however, the actual film is far more complex than the version that lives in the public imagination. Both Burden and Fitzcarraldo (which also screens at the Coolidge throughout the week) are about dreamers pushing themselves to their physical limits in order to achieve their artistic vision, and both are at times almost excruciating to watch. Yet, against all odds, both films exist, and have stood the test of time. Fitzcarraldo may not have brought Caruso to the jungle, but Herzog somehow managed to bring Fitzcarraldo back from it.
Burden of Dreams
1982
dir. Les Blank
95 min.
New 4K restoration opens Friday, 8/9 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre – https://coolidge.org/films/burden-dreams-4k-restoration for showtimes and ticket info
