Blank: Burden of Dreams (1982)

A realist in the most visionary sense, Werner Herzog has a peculiar ability to confound any distinction between fictional and documentary film-making. Even when his films tell stories, they feel equally interested in documenting his actors’ faces, bodies and environments, as well as the physical and mental exertions they bring to mastering their roles. As a result, Les Blank’s exploration of Fitzcarraldo doesn’t feel like a documentary about the film so much as a documentary that morphs almost imperceptibly out of the film. At times, it’s so loose and elastic that it feels more like a collection of out-takes, or even a documentary by Herzog himself, right down to the scattered, oddball montages of Peruvian flora and fauna, scored to his reveries and ruminations, that hold Blank’s camera to such rapt attention. What Blank does brings to the table is a slightly more critical and probing eye into Herzog’s directorial methods, especially his treatment of his indigenous actors, to the point where it often feels as if Burden of Dreams is trying to restore them with a documentary dignity more or less denied to them by Fitzcarraldo itself. As far as the two main spectacles are concerned – the ascent of Fitzcarraldo’s ship up the mountain and its destruction in the nearby rapids – it’s clear that Herzog was prepared to put many, many indigenous lives at risk to achieve his vision, despite clear warnings from a whole range of people about the dangers that he was likely to encounter. That makes those scenes even more suspenseful and breathtaking than in the actual film, just because you know how much is really at stake, but it also makes you wonder whether it was necessary for Herzog to relive the colonial enterprise so completely to recreate it in his film. And Herzog himself seems to realise that as well, as does Blank himself – the film ends at the moment of greatest crisis, with Herzog reflecting that he will always be burdened by Fitzcarraldo, no matter how it turns out. It’s not dissimilar, in some ways, from the ending of Hearts of Darkness, Eleanor Coppola’s documentary about Apocalypse Now, whose jungle melodrama must have been influenced by Burden of Dreams. But while Herzog may be just as determined as Francis Ford Coppola, his vision isn’t quite as monomaniacal and apocalyptic. Instead, it’s multiple, dispersed, able to spill over into Blank’s, which was released so close on Herzog’s heels that it’s almost as if Fitzcarraldo managed to sow the seeds of its own apology.