muvies

Re: Burns Fare Domed

A couple of things that nobody has mentioned yet about Burden of Dreams: First, Werner Herzog, while crazy as a coot, comes up with quite a few jaw-droppingly profound insights about the jungle, the needs of native peoples, western Europe, and, yes, occasionally cinema. Second, if you look at film as testimony to a particular stage in the history of our species, Les Blank's Burden of Dreams just happens to shed the light of complicated, unvarnished truth on the cusp we are straddling right now.

Right away, I have to say I am first to admit that I find his rants about "the central metaphor of Fitzcarraldo" pretty boring. It's not that I don't understand what he's getting at; I think I can follow his reasoning. I am slightly dismayed that he decided to shoot his philosophical wad at the corner of Irrelevant and Wrong, but it's like, OK, let's move on.

I also am very suspicious of the whole "I'm not doing this kind of stuff to push myself to the limit" trope he has been coming back to for 35 years, yet I think he is an important filmmaker who has contributed as much as any other to elevating the possibilities of cinema in transforming the lives of those who make it, of those who after seeing their first movie know that they will not rest till the day where they have a camera and start filming the world.

The Herzog of Burden of Dreams is handsome, sexy, strong, potent, courageous, passionate, committed, self-controlled, articulate, brazen, and untrammeled. A David facing the formless Goliath of life, the teeming, tearing, turbulent "harmony of overwhelming and collective murder." An unquestionably virile man who has a sense of heroism about himself that I don't think he can plausibly deny. It's part of what made him a leader in his art. People like Herzog don't become leaders on the strength of a pure heart. They don't become leaders, period. Among so many other great things, Burden of Dreams is also a riveting up-close portrait of a fascinating leader.

And he's always blabbing his head off. Total fucking chatterbox. That's not true, actually; I just wanted to put in some profanity. What is true is that he gets into these philosophical moods sometimes, like it's "Air Amazon". The same way he loves to explore things he has never seen, it seems he loves to explore thoughts he has never heard before. When he talks about the raid that the Machiguengue and Campos Indians who are working on Fitzcarraldo conduct against the Aguarunas, you can tell that he never came close to saying to himself, about people on one of his film shoots, "Hm, they are going off fully armed with the intention of killing other people if they are shown any kind of disrespect, and there's absolutely nothing I'm going to do about it. It's not like I can do much, anyway." Yet here he is, not shying away from these alien ways of thinking and their moral implications. That is an intense scene in many ways. For a few seconds, Herzog's fear is plain to see. Then, albeit after a cut, the curious blend of excitement and resignation that punctuates the movie takes hold again. It's a good thing I've been trying to wean myself from purple prose, or I'd be rhapsodizing about the parallels between the virgin forest and his virgin thoughts.

Herzog's lyricism hits an emotional apex when he explains that to his eyes these Indians are lions, and that he doesn't want to live in a world where there are no lions.