Burden Of Dreams

Just as Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse followed the madness that was Apocalypse Now Redux, so documentarian Les Blank aims to do the same for Werner Herzog's turbulent production of Fitzcarraldo. And in following the making of the film, about a man who turns his quest to bring opera to the Amazon Jungle into a somewhat unhealthy obsession, so Blank draws curious parallels with the director's own determination to see his project to the screen.

It's not easy, though - original stars Jason Robards and Mick Jagger both pull out midway through the shoot, before weather woes, bad on-set feeling, and a war between Peru and Ecuador all conspire against the production. With three quarters of the film in the can, Herzog is forced to abandon the footage he has shot and start again from scratch, this time with his volatile creative partner/nemesis 'crazy' Klaus Kinski in the starring role.

Herzog's own reputation is for never taking the easy path if an impossibly treacherous one is available, and never was that more evident than in Fitzcarraldo. The director was determined that the film's central, Sysyphian metaphor - dragging a steamboat over a mountain - be done for real, 500 miles from the nearest village in the Amazon Jungle, with a supporting cast of hundreds of local South American Indians. Only under these circumstances, says Herzog, would the performances and the footage achieve the level of authenticity the film required.

Authenticity is one thing the film has in spades, as well as mud, chaos, conflict and a Brazilian engineer who walks away from the project, afraid lives will be lost if his plans are not followed to the letter. Herzog himself is candid about his hopes and fears for the operation, but if there's an abscence it's Kinski, who only appears in a couple of interview sequences, and reveals a horror of drinking the local Indians' alcoholic brew - a concoction fermented from their own saliva.

What does emerge is Herzog's remarkable, dogmatic attitude towards the chaos. You can't help thinking that a lesser director might have given up in the face of such challenges, and the fact he sees the film through to completion is a testament to his own visionary ambition.