Burden of Dreams review – on-location account of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is a gruelling delight

A rerelease of the documentary about the German film-maker’s operatic adventure in the Peruvian jungle is a compelling portrait of an artist obsessedIn 1982, film-maker Les Blank released this sombre, thoughtful, quietly awestruck documentary account of Werner Herzog’s crazy sisyphean struggle in a remote and dangerous Peruvian jungle location, making his extraordinary drama Fitzcarraldo, which came out the same year. Fitzcarraldo was Herzog’s own bizarre and brilliant story idea, crazily amplifying and exaggerating a case from real life.Early 20th-century opera enthusiast Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, played with straw-hair and mad blue eyes by Klaus Kinski, goes into the rubber trade to make enough money to realise his dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian port town of Iquito; he works out that the steamship needed to transport materials can only be brought into the required stretch of water by dragging it across land between two tributaries. This is a crazy, magnificent and operatic obsession, more grandiose than anything that could be presented on stage, for which he will need Indigenous peoples as slave labour to haul the ship. By playing these tribes his Caruso records on an old gramophone player, he persuades them he is a white god who must be obeyed. Continue reading...

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Michael McStay death: Coronation Street and Doctor Who actor dies aged 92

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