Burden of Dreams

I'm getting really excited about seeing Grizzly Man at the cinema this week - Karen saw it in the videotech at Edinburgh and has been talking about it ever since. With this in mind I took out (in a rush) what I thought was Fitcarraldo this weekend - it turned out to be City of Dreams (the image of Herzog and the boat on the cover was evidently all I looked at in the film shop!) but in a funny sort of way this was almost better than seeing Fitzcarraldo.
Post-Bata-ville and Edinburgh Karen & I have both confessed to getting more out of DVD 'extras' than even actual documentaries. It seems once you've managed to make a film, the blind optimism you must have employed to acheive this disappears to be replaced by a deep felt admiration for anyone who can actually pull off making a film - never mind a feature film - shot over four years, in the Amazon jungle, using native people as most of the cast, and Klaus Kinski as the lead - as was Fitzcarraldo. This amazing and tortuous process is in turn documented in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams.

So if you can easily become obsessed with just the sort of details contained in DVD 'extras', you can loose yourself completely in Burden of Dreams, an entire documentary which on one level just unpicks the process of film making and the somewhat crazed vision of Herzog to re-create the original madness of his lead character based on Fitzgerald an Irishman with a passion to build an opera house in the Amazon. I won't go into detail here about all the set backs faced by Herzog and the ins and outs of the film (well documented in other reviews) but I wanted to mention this film and one other (Etre et avoir)as I can't stop thinking about them.


With both it's not so much the actual films but the film makers relationship to the 'cast' or 'subjects' or 'participants' that I've been thinking about. Actually you can't help but think about Herzog (who it seems I share a birthday with - watch out Karen that 4 year shoot could be on the horizon!) after seeing this, as he is such a bizarre and seductive character - not least because he has the most amazingly compelling voice - in each of the three languages you hear him speaking.
You can not help but be traumatised by his relationship to the people in the film though - to cut a long story short it reaches breaking point when the engineer who's trying to help them literally drag an enormous boat through the jungle quits for fear of loss of life, and Herzog just presses on regardless.

On the surface of it Nicolas Philibert's Etre et Avoir couldn't be less similar to Herzog's epic. Shot in a tiny French school with a small class of children and their charismatic teacher Georges Lopez this low key film's rise to box office success has become documentary legend. It is a lovely film (the quiet scene of two terrapins making their way slowly across the empty classroom carpet was my favorite and serves to show how far from the Amazon jungle we're talking!).

In the DVD extras for this, which I of course avidly consumed, Philibert talks of his method of making a film with rather than about a group of people. I felt some resonance with our own approach in this - but it seems, post block-buster-success, the school teacher did not. Apparently fed up with the huge income the film was generating due (it has to be said) in no small part to his 'performance', it seems he took the producers to court for a share of the profits.

Our own current project at Kentwell will be the first piece where we have made work with a group of people who haven't actively 'signed up' to take part in what we're doing. With all our other projects from Broadcast to Bata-ville we arrived at our group of pilgrims to passengers via an application process and in effect a mutual contract. I have always felt this was significant in the way that the projects developed. It is with some trepidation that we are moving away from this model for the first time with our next film.