Das boot: "Burden of Dreams"

This viewer happens to admire Werner Herzog's 1982 film Fitzcarraldo very much - in my book, it ranks alongside Apocalypse Now in the pantheon of turn-of-the-Eighties grand follies, a prime example of how-slash-why-on-earth-did-they-do-that? cinema. Yet arguably you could watch Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's making-of doc from the same year, and have an altogether more satisfying experience: you get a sense of the story Fitzcarraldo told, a relatively candid glimpse at how it was achieved, and a bonus layer of critical commentary on top of the action. Blank's was, indeed, the film that Pauline Kael used as a stick to attack Herzog's megalomania, with some reason. Early on, Blank films Herzog admitting that he has comprehensively trashed the true story on which his film was based: the real Barry Fitzgerald, we learn, had his ship dismantled and reassembled rather than attempting to haul the whole vessel up and over a hill, as Herzog does. The latter set about this Herculean labour, then, not because he needed to, rather because he could, because he had the resources at his disposal to make a notionally improbable act a physical possibility. 

Nothing here would have done much to downplay Herzog's then-growing rep as a wayward thrillseeker: at one point, Blank catches the director spreadeagled over the prow of a speedboat, attempting to pluck animals from the river with his bare hands, as if making a picture in the middle of the Amazon using extras from warring indigenous tribes wasn't enough in itself to worry the insurance men. It's as if Herzog learnt nothing from his own Aguirre, Wrath of God - or that he felt he had to go at least one better than Coppola's vision of a boat moored in a tree. (We might now view the competing new waves of the 1970s as the work of male creatives finding ever more extravagant ways to compare penises.) On the positive side, Blank's film stands as a lesson, albeit an extreme one, in the flexibility and tenacity required to overcome substantial logistical obstacles and bring an extraordinary project to fruition. (Thankfully, Burden of Dreams has so far avoided the sorry fate of being screened at corporate teambuilding weekends, though it may still be fit for that purpose.) 

For cinephiles and other lovers of lost causes, Burden offers a tantalising peek at Herzog's first shot at filming this story, with Jason Robards as Fitz, and a miscast Mick Jagger as his Sancho Panza; after Robards retires hurt, the lead role is filled by Klaus Kinski, who appears thoroughly unhappy to be here, in as much as Kinski ever appeared happy to be anywhere. Blank is far more inquisitive about the tribespeople propping up this project than Herzog is on camera, and here you can see why Kael felt Herzog saw these natives as a means to an end, a way of physically dragging the movie from A to B. (She conflates the director with those other white Europeans who colonised the planet by seizing upon the locals as a source of cheap, disposable labour.) It is true that Herzog comes over as coy indeed when asked about shipping in sex workers for cast and crew, and it's clear he had sections of the Amazon basin bulldozed to get the shots he wanted; as Fitzcarraldo gets bigger and riskier than first intended, Blank's doc becomes a record of what happens when a filmmaker refuses to set limits on his imagination, or to apply the usual checks and balances of conscience.

The burden of the title is Herzog's, then, and it's felt to some degree. As the boat bogs further into the mud, the more Blank's camera captures the true perversity of this spectacle - and the more Herzog (who earns a "starring" credit, somewhat justified, in the opening titles) feels compelled to explain himself and his methods. Whippet-thin and moustachioed - often observed shirtless in tiny football shorts, looking for all the world as though he should be feeding Karl-Heinz Rummenigge from midfield rather than making movies in the back of beyond - he displays the patience of a saint when faced with Kinski, a dissenting turkey, and the non-professionals holding up this ship of dreamers and fools, though even he starts to seem chastened by the effort, confessing "sometimes I wish I could sit in an E-Zee chair with a cup of tea". It's one of those docs that must have encouraged countless film students to pick up a camera, in part by implication: if this dude could pull that movie out of that jungle, your low-budget two-hander set entirely in a branch of Subway will be a breeze. But - as Kael was entirely right to point out - there's just no way it has to be this complicated.

Burden of Dreams returns to selected cinemas from Friday.