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IMDbPro

Burden of Dreams

  • 19821982
  • Not RatedNot Rated
  • 1h 35m
IMDb RATING
7.9/10
7.2K
YOUR RATING
Burden of Dreams (1982)
  • Documentary
A documentary following German auteur Werner Herzog as he deals with difficult actors, bad weather and getting a boat over a mountain, all in an effort to make his film Fitzcarraldo (1982).A documentary following German auteur Werner Herzog as he deals with difficult actors, bad weather and getting a boat over a mountain, all in an effort to make his film Fitzcarraldo (1982).A documentary following German auteur Werner Herzog as he deals with difficult actors, bad weather and getting a boat over a mountain, all in an effort to make his film Fitzcarraldo (1982).
IMDb RATING
7.9/10
7.2K
YOUR RATING
  • Director
    • Les Blank
  • Writer
    • Michael Goodwin(narration)
  • Stars
    • Werner Herzog
    • Klaus Kinski
    • Claudia Cardinale
Top credits
  • Director
    • Les Blank
  • Writer
    • Michael Goodwin(narration)
  • Stars
    • Werner Herzog
    • Klaus Kinski
    • Claudia Cardinale
  • See production, box office & company info
    • 26User reviews
    • 48Critic reviews
  • See production, box office & company info
  • See more at IMDbPro
    • Won 1 BAFTA Award
      • 4 wins & 1 nomination total

    Videos2

    Trailer
    Trailer 6:41
    Trailer
    Sneak Previews Season 4 Episode 34
    Video 29:15
    Sneak Previews Season 4 Episode 34

    Photos21

    Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Klaus Kinski in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Klaus Kinski in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Mick Jagger, Klaus Kinski, and Jason Robards in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Klaus Kinski in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams (1982)
    Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams (1982)

    Top cast

    Edit
    Werner Herzog
    Werner Herzog
    • Selfas Self
    Klaus Kinski
    Klaus Kinski
    • Fitzcarraldoas Fitzcarraldo…
    Claudia Cardinale
    Claudia Cardinale
    • Mollyas Molly…
    Jason Robards
    Jason Robards
    • Fitzcarraldoas Fitzcarraldo
    Mick Jagger
    Mick Jagger
    • Wilburas Wilbur
    Alfredo De Rio Tambo
    • Selfas Self
    • (as Alfredo de Rio Tambo)
    Ángela Reina
    • Selfas Self
    • (as Angela Reine)
    Carmen Correa
    • Selfas Self
    Elia De Rio Ene
    • Selfas Self
    • (as Elia de Rio Ene)
    David Pérez Espinosa
    • Selfas Self
    • (as David Perez Espinosa)
    Miguel Ángel Fuentes
    Miguel Ángel Fuentes
    • Selfas Self
    • (as Miguel Angel Fuentes)
    Mariano Gagnon
    • Selfas Self
    • (as Father Mariano Gagnon)
    Paul Hittscher
    • Selfas Self
    Huerequeque Enrique Bohorquez
    • Selfas Self
    • (as Huerequeque Bohoroquez)
    Evaristo Nunkuag Ikanan
    • Selfas Self
    José Lewgoy
    José Lewgoy
    • Selfas Self
    Laplace Martins
    • Selfas Self
    Thomas Mauch
    Thomas Mauch
    • Selfas Self
    • Director
      • Les Blank
    • Writer
      • Michael Goodwin(narration)
    • All cast & crew
    • See more cast details at IMDbPro

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    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      Throughout production, Les Blank and his small crew became exhausted and exasperated from the stress of the work. Blank said that he felt "unconnected" to the people around him. Keeping up with the antics of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski proved difficult for the reserved, introverted Blank. By the last week of production, he was so burnt out that he feared coming out of production "like some Viet Nam veterans, horribly calloused". He wrote in his journal, "I'm tired of it all and I couldn't care less if they move the stupid ship - or finish the fucking film".
    • Quotes

      Werner Herzog: [On the jungle] Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is - is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists has - has created in anger. It's the only land where - where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

    • Connections
      Featured in Sneak Previews: Firefox/A Week's Vacation/Burden of Dreams/Author! Author! (1982)

    User reviews26

    Review
    Top review
    10/10
    a hybrid documentary of an incredible, relentlessly reckless story of film-making, and of a little anthropology too
    Werner Herzog, the filmmaker behind Fitzcarraldo that the director Les Blank is documenting (in part) with his Burden of Dreams, says that he has no interest in making a documentary about the Natives that are all around throughout the filming, who are apart of the cast as extras and also do labor. I wonder if Blank had intended to make his documentary with them as well, but here we have Burden of Dreams going between states of mind, of one mind-set being one of the most troubled and ambitious auteur projects of the past half century in film, and another mind-set being the people. In a sense, that line Dr. Lecter quotes from Marcus Aurelius in Silence of the Lambs comes to mind- what is it's nature? In this case, the 'nature' is of not just one specific thing but a few: what is the nature of the jungle (or rather the nature of nature), the nature of a tribe of people who could see this film crew and this director with his insatiable visions as something quite alien, and vice-versa at times, and the nature of film-making in general, particularly a film that by the dictations of the script and the wills of its director demand to go for the impossible. It's almost no wonder at one point that Herzog says, "I shouldn't make films anymore, I should be in a lunatic asylum."

    While not everything that could go wrong on a film goes wrong on Fitzcarraldo- the making of it I mean, not the film, of which I've yet to actually see myself- but it comes close. Along with Hearts of Darkness and Lost in La Mancha, Blank's film ranks as a contender for showing the most chaotic film production imaginable, but perhaps outdoes the others with Blank's purer skills as a documentarian. One might almost hope at times that Blank might editorialize, but there's none of that here. The narration as well just gives the facts as if reading out of a film magazine. And what's extraordinary though is that you don't need to see Fitzcarraldo to understand what the film's about through this one. The story is, as Herzog describes, about opera in the jungle, and how an obsessed opera fan (played by Klaus Kinski) decides to lug his ship over a mountain so he can build an opera in the jungle. Soon, however, Blank shows that this very act becomes an even more daunting task/metaphor than Herzog might have intended, but never do we see him decide to just give up. "I live my life or I end my life with this picture," Herzog says.

    It would be one thing if Blank just looked at the film-making process from start to finish with Fitzcarraldo, and I imagine Blank probably had enough footage to make for an even longer film just covering the odds & ends of filming. But we as the viewer soon come to realize that to make Fitzcarraldo requires an understanding of the people behind it, not just the main man behind it, but of the tribe. It's interesting to note that the natives Herzog uses the first time around show one side of the 'nature' of what comes in filming in foreign territory: they attack the film crew, forcing Herzog to find a new location. This first major set-back is only covered briefly early on in the film, but it fascinated me how Herzog still remained undeterred, even though it ended up taking him another year to settle on the final locations. Then Blank turns his camera on the natives lending their support (for more money than they usually get with the usual labor they work for), and it's done sometimes with the same care of getting great glimpses of the culture, of what habits and customs are with them (like the alcohol/fruit that's a given for them), and how the tensions start to rise as the film backs up. Blank's camera is terrifically poised in these moments, and he ends up also getting a fine comparison between the film crew itself. Only Kinski, who I would think would be the only person more of interest, is usually left out, which is disappointing.

    But the real excitement is seeing the daily struggles of filming, and how the boat-over-the-mountain metaphor becomes apart of this struggle, be it something small like getting a rubber-skewer right (which is very funny), or in getting that toughest of shots at the "magic hour" of the dusk. And the problems keep mounting, until what we see is a filmmaker almost too reckless for his own good, yet perhaps for his own sanity as well. I can't imagine what might have happened to Werner Herzog had he not taken that final shot, or if he had, like Coppola to an extent with Apocalypse Now, sort of succumbed to the jungle's dangers like a Conrad character. What we end up seeing of Herzog is perhaps a man under the duress and total stress of film-making- or total control, who can say- but even when he's at his bleakest statements, it's never boring or pretentious to hear what Herzog has to say about the jungle or the people or to see how he directs. And around Herzog, and that giant boat, and the natives and the jungle, Blank creates the kind of behind-the-scenes documentary unique, where psychology and anthropology get brilliant put into the context of 'filming dreams', as it were.
    helpful•20
    2
    • Quinoa1984
    • Dec 16, 2006

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • September 24, 1982 (Sweden)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Languages
      • Spanish
      • English
      • German
    • Also known as
      • Die Last der Träume
    • Filming locations
      • Amazon Rainforest, Brazil
    • Production companies
      • Independent Documentary Fund
      • The National Endowment for the Arts
      • Ford Foundation
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Technical specs

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    • Runtime
      1 hour 35 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.33 : 1

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