After the screening the director’s son, filmmaker Harrod Blank, will discuss the relationship between his father and Herzog and the two films they made together (via live Zoom from California).
Les Blank’s classic documentary on Werner Herzog’s constant challenges making Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungle.
Shooting miles from anywhere, disaster after disaster befell Herzog during the production of his ambitious South American tale of one man’s obsession with bringing opera to the Amazon. Like his protagonist (played by Klaus Kinski) Blank’s film grows into a fascinating record of an obsessed genius and his desperate battle to finish his work against all odds. Along the way Herzog tells us about border skirmishes, the threats of the jungle environment and potentially disastrous cast changes during filming (the loss of Jason Robards to illness and Mick Jagger to scheduling). Bad luck continues when a supply plane crashes and local Indians attack some of the workers. And at the centre of it all is the moving of a ship, on a pulley system over a hillside, that doesn’t want to budge. Herzog laments: 'One starts to question the profession itself … I should not make movies anymore, I should go to a lunatic asylum right away.'
No mere ‘making of’, Burden of Dreams is a standalone work, preferred by some to the finished Herzog film, with many of Blank’s (and his co-creator Maureen Gosling’s) characteristic touches, and is here presented in a stunning new restoration. The film will be preceeded by Blank’s wonderful Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe; Herzog’s fulfilment of a promise he made to a young Errol Morris that, should Morris actually make his long discussed film on pet cemeteries (Gates of Heaven), he would consume his own footwear.
Celebrating 75 Years of Contemporary Films. Bringing bold cinema that inspired generations of British audiences and filmmakers — a festival of screening events with special guests across London this September and October
