Weekly Shard from The Fractured Mirror: Burden of Dreams (1982)

The alpha and the omega of the Cult of Werner Herzog.

Werner Herzog was already an accomplished filmmaker when he famously went mad filming 1982’s Fitzcarraldo. But Burden of Dreams, director Les Blank’s documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, represents the birth of Herzog as one of film’s most colorful characters. A gloriously verbose monologue, Herzog delivers about the essence of life in the jungle being “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder,” solidifying Herzog’s standing as cinema’s preeminent poet of despair. When Blank’s cameras started following him, Herzog was already an artist of worldwide renown; Burden of Dreams turned him into a personality.

Burden of Dreams chronicles, with great beauty and horror, the German filmmaker’s herculean attempts to make a movie about a Western music lover’s impossible quest to bring culture to the jungle by constructing an opera house in the wilds of South America.

Jason Robards signed on to play the lead character, and Mick Jagger, his sidekick. Then Robards got desperately sick; Jagger had to leave to fulfill the demands of being a rock star, and, for good measure, indigenous people burned down the film’s set in 1979.

A saner soul might take that as a sign from the universe to abandon the project, but no one has ever accused Herzog of being sane. So he doubled down with Klaus Kinski, his leading man of choice and the bane of his existence, and set about realizing his ambitions in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

While making the film, Herzog essentially became Fitzcarraldo. Like Francis Ford Coppola with Apocalypse Now, he went upriver in pursuit of a form of greatness only possible through madness.

In Burden of Dreams, Herzog is so intense and severe that it becomes uproarious. The camera loves him, and he loves the camera nearly as much as he hates it. Burden of Dreams is an unforgettable and profoundly moving tribute to a man who wouldn’t stop chasing his impossible dreams, even in the face of death, destruction, and failure.

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