Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 206: Sun Jul 27

Burden of Dreams (Blank, 1982): Castle Cinema, 2pm


This 16mm presentation by those great people at Cine-Real film club is also being screened on Thursday July 24th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Les Blank’s 1982 documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The film suggests Herzog’s own documentaries about visionaries—The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner, La Soufriere—as Blank steps back to coolly observe Herzog’s grand, demented attempts to haul a steamship up an impossibly steep river bank. But Blank’s approach is less mystical than Herzog’s, and in the film’s more ironic, matter-of-fact moments, the German director can be seen busily manufacturing his own myth. The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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