While I did find documentarian Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams an interesting documentary in the way that it was shot and the way that it showed the viewers the contrasting lives of the cast and crew of Burden of Dreams and the Amazonian extras, I found the way in which Werner Herzog behaved and conducted himself, interacting with those he had hired, to be totally ridiculous, to an extent that it distracted from the intrigue of the actual documentary aspect of the film. I think that sounds kind of weird, but as we were watching the film, the only thing I could focus on was how absurd all of Werner Herzog’s demands were, from him demanding the humongous antique boat to be ‘sailed’ down the river (at points that obviously could not hold it), to the same humongous antique boat to be hauled over a mountain from one river to a river on the other side. At the point in the documentary when they are trying to haul (and I wish I had a better word for it here than ‘haul’) the boat over the mountain, they have set up this completely elaborate pulley and rope system, and there are so many people—Werner Herzog not included—attempting to pull this boat up this massive mountain, and obviously it’s not working. But they keep on going. Herzog says, “I never want to live like [a man without a dream]. I live my life or I end my life with this project.” And that may seem great to him, but what struck me as not so romantic was that it wasn’t just him living or ending his life with this project, it was everyone he had involved in it as well.
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