BURDEN OF DREAMS (Les Blank, 1982) Rating: NNNN
Rating: NNNN
It’s very rare for a making-of documentary to be a more successful artistic statement than the film it’s about, but Les Blank’s Burden Of Dreams, which follows Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski as they drag a boat through the South American jungles to make Fitzcarraldo, manages that feat.
Both films are portraits of obsession, but Blank’s discovers a greater truth – that Herzog is even more nuts than we thought he was. Like Hearts Of Darkness, George Hickenlooper’s film on the making of Apocalypse Now, Burden is the story of a film production that becomes a rolling snowball of disaster, enhanced by the fact that the Kinski-Herzog relationship was one of the great love/hate artistic partnerships in movie history.
Oddly, the Goethe Institut screening pairs the film with Herzog’s adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck rather than Fitzcarraldo. (Kinowelt Hall, February 19)
