Burden of Dreams

In the oppressive jungles of the Amazon, Les Blank’s documentary follows the tumultuous production of Fitzcarraldo which charts the travails of the film’s director Werner Herzog whose own obsessive behavior, which is worsened by heated disputes with his star Klaus Kinski, major technical problems, overages, and clashes with the natives, begins to mirror that of his own protagonist.

When asked why he shirks studio settings in favor of dangerous location shoots, Herzog often speaks to the magic of place and how it is enhanced on film. While I believe this to be true of Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, and many of his other works, it somehow fails to be realized here on Blank’s highly touted doc and may even take away from some of the mystery Herzog’s masterpiece. It also fails to capture the sensation achieved by Hearts of Darkness, the likewise jungle based Apocalypse now documentary to which it is often compared. Still a lot of good stuff here including film footage featuring Jason Robards and Mick Jagger (they both exited the picture after a short stint) and Herzog’s bombastic, humorous addresses to the camera.

*** out of ****

Fitzcarraldo

An entrepreneur (Klaus Kinski) with wild dreams of bringing opera to the jungle, searches the Andes for already depleted supplies of rubber during the early 20th Century boom. When it is reported that untapped acres of the plant exist on an navigable river, a river which is separated from the main waterway by only a few hundred meters at one point, the off-kiltered businessman hires scores of natives, devises a lever and pulley system, and determines to pull his ship over hill from one stream to the other. Notoriously filmed on location and unsimulated, Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo is a mesmerizing and arresting vision of madness with wide-eyed Kinski in one of his best collaborations with the director.

**** out of ****

Aguirre: The Wrath of God

Having always been fed up by routinary and a rampant lack of imagination in the movies, Werner Herzog has spent his directing career fashioning daring and fascinating films, which push the limits of viewer expectations.  In "Aguirre: The Wrath of God",  one of his early masterworks, Herzog brought his camera and crew to the unpredictable wilderness of the Amazon, and crafted a dreamlike film about Spanish Conquistadors on the road to El Dorado and a tale of madness run wild. When conditions become too arduous for General Pizarro's crew, he sends a scouting party of forty men to find El Dorado, or at least a resting place where they can seek nourishment. A lieutenant is chosen to lead the expedition, but is soon undermined and overthrown by the mad, power hungry second in command Aguirre (Klaus Kinski). Kinski is a powder keg  seemingly barely able to contain his madness, and ready to boil over at any minute. The film, with its haunting visuals and hypnotic score, is an excellent early work from Herzog, and a warm up of sorts to "Fitzcarraldo", another masterpiece featuring Kinski, again telling a story of hysteria set in the unforgiving terrains of South America.

My Best Fiend

Werner Herzog looks back on his temptestuous friendship and professional relationship with Klaus Kinski, the maniacal actor with whom the director shared a boarding house as a youth and went on to star in some of his best work (Aguirre the Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo), while recounting having to weather (and often encouraging) Kinski's fierce tirades and abuses before his premature death in 1991. My Best Fiend is the kind of documentary that probably sounded better in its initial conception rather than its end result. Though containing some hysterical and outrageous stories and footage, where Herzog's megalomania is just as much on display as Kinski's, this is the kind of work that plays better as part of movie lore than as a documented record.

** 1/2 out of ****