Search - Burden of Dreams [Special Edition] [Criterion Collection] on DVD

Content Advisory: Questionable for Children, Adult Language Movie Release: 1982 DVD Release: 05/10/2005 Format: DVD - Pan and Scan - Closed Captioned Edition: Restored/Remastered,Special Collection Audio Tracks: English, German, Spanish Subtitles: English SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 35 mins Studio: Criterion Members Wishing: 28 Genres: Film, TV & Radio, Biography, Film & Television History

Documentarian Les Blank, who filmed Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, trained his cameras on Herzog again, as the eccentric German filmmaker made his epic, Fitzcarraldo, in the Amazon rainforest of Peru. Herzog's production is in trouble right from the start. He begins filming with Jason Robards playing the title role, and Mick Jagger playing Fitzcarraldo's sidekick, Wilbur. With 40 percent of the film shot, Robards becomes ill and goes back to the states, where his doctor will not let him return. Because of the delay, Jagger, with album and tour commitments, is forced to quit the production. Thinking no one can fill the rock star's shoes, Herzog jettisons Jagger's role. He eventually casts his frequent collaborator Klaus Kinski as Fitzcarraldo and begins shooting again. Violent tribal disputes and unpredictable weather hinder the shoot, but the biggest obstacle is Herzog's own quixotic and dangerous determination to film one antique boat smashing down the Amazonian rapids, and the dragging of an identical boat over a mountain from one river to another. Blank interviews members of the cast and crew, including the impoverished Indian extras, and captures the troubles of the seemingly cursed production, but his interviews with Herzog are the focal point of the film. "If I abandon this project," Herzog explains at one point, "I would be a man without dreams, and I never want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project." Herzog later made his own documentary about Kinski, My Best Fiend, which adds to the lore of this infamously difficult shoot. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Werner Herzog
Klaus Kinski

Thanks to the current DVD boom, nearly every second-rate exercise in genre hackwork that opens in more than ten theaters merits a documentary on how the movie was made. But in 1982, Les Blank's Burden of Dreams was unusual not only as a feature film that chronicled the making of another feature film, but in the way it dealt with how an artist can be both driven and enslaved by his obsessions as it told a tale very much like that of the film it documented, Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo...and arguably made its points with greater clarity and insight than Herzog managed. The Criterion Collection has given Burden of Dreams a well-deserved release on DVD, and this edition firmly enhances the film's considerable strengths. Burden of Dreams has been given a high-definition transfer to disc in its original full-frame aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and Blank's camerawork looks simply radiant on this disc, capturing the forbidding beauty of the Amazon with impressive effect. The audio has been mastered in Dolby Digital Mono, and the sound is impressively clear and resonant for field recordings nearly a quarter-century old. The film's narration is in English, with the participants speaking in English, German, Spanish, and several tribal dialects; the optional and easily readable English subtitles thankfully make sense of it all. A number of relevant bonus features have been included, including a commentary track featuring Blank, his editor and sound recordist Maureen Gosling, and Herzog (who points out that he's commenting on a film that was at least in part a commentary on his film). Also on board is a new on-camera interview with Herzog as he discusses both Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams, a pair of deleted scenes, the film's original trailer, a gallery of stills taken during the shoot, and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, a very entertaining short by Blank in which Herzog makes good on a promise to filmmaker Errol Morris by -- you guessed it -- eating his shoe. Finally, a 80-page book included with this release reprints journals kept by Blank and Gosling during the chaotic Fitzcarraldo shoot. Burden of Dreams is essential viewing for anyone interested in the challenges of filmmaking and the outer edges of the creative process, and Criterion's DVD edition is the ideal place to investigate it. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide