Part of Weekend Classics
For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, FITZCARRALDO, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this production, made more perilous by Herzog’s determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of indigenous Peruvians to pull a full-size, 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless directors. New 4K Restoration
Programmers Note: You can catch BURDEN OF DREAMS and FITZCARRALDO back-to-back on Tue, Sep 3.
“One of the most remarkable documentaries ever made about the making of a movie. There are at least two reasons for that. One is that the movie being made, Werner Herzog's FITZCARRALDO involved some of the most torturous and dangerous on-location shooting experiences in film history. The other is that the documentary is by Les Blank, himself a brilliant filmmaker, who is unafraid to ask difficult questions and portray Herzog, warts and all… An extraordinary portrait of Herzog trapped in the middle of one of his wildest dreams.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times “The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening.” —Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader “There's never been anything quite like it, but then there has never been any filmmaker quite like Mr. Herzog.” —Vincent Canby, New York Times (Sep 26, 1982)
