In 1979, filmmaker Werner Herzog flies to the jungles of the Amazon to shoot a film about a turn-of-the-century rubber baron, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, who strives to bring Caruso’s operas to the Peruvian city of Iquitos. As Herzog is adamant the film—Fitzcarraldo (finally released in 1982)—should not rely on special effects, the baron and the filmmaker have the same titanic task ahead of them: to transport a 320-tonne steamship over a hill and gain access to a neighboring river system. Another filmmaker, the American Les Blank, has been recruited to capture the tribulations surrounding and informing this technical feat. Blank’s 1982 documentary Burden of Dreams, newly restored and re-released by Janus Films, does much more than merely observe the resurrection of Sisyphus in the modern day. It also charts, and subsequently punctures, a man’s attempts to swaddle himself in the ill-fitting garments of that myth, to ennoble his self-inflicted suffering to the history books and pave over crime with punishment.
Werner Herzog
Mia Stewart’s upcoming 15-plus-years-in-the-making documentary, Searching for Onoda, deflates the heroic myth of Japanese holdout soldier Hiroo Onoda and tells the other side of the story. Both Arthur Harari’s 2021 Cannes-premiering narrative feature, 'Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle,' and Werner Herzog's debut 2022 novel, 'The Twilight World,' perpetuate the old myth.
Over the span of a few weeks, Werner Herzog will have had three films released. There is the world premiere of a feature film at Cannes, Family
In 2010, a charismatic, Minnesota-based Iraq War veteran named David Crowley began work on his debut film project, a paranoid action film about a
Legendary director Werner Herzog is recognized worldwide as one of the most imaginative and adventurous storytellers working in fiction and nonfiction
Werner Herzog: Interviews Edited by Eric Ames from the Conversations with Filmmakers Series, edited by Gerald Peary Published by University Press of
To school myself in documentary filmmaking after a career in journalism, I gave myself a daily assignment, which I held to faithfully for nearly two
Werner Herzog knows when he's found the right subject for a film. But don't ask him to explain; he just knows, that's all. And he instantly knew he
'Cave of Forgotten Dreams' opens April 29 through IFC Films.
Join Cinefamily April 1-3, April 8 for The Ecstatic Truths of Werner Herzog: Documentaries, 1971-1992