Burden of Dreams (1982) review — the engrossing Fitzcarraldo backstory

The opening titles of Les Blank's behind-the-scenes documentary boast that it's 'starring' the director Werner Herzog. A documentary? Starring? And yet that's exactly what you get in this gruelling and engrossing Fitzcarraldo backstory.
The production is a litany of disasters. Jason Robards, the lead actor, exits with dysentery, followed by his co-star Mick Jagger. The Robards replacement Klaus Kinski is furious with the remote Peruvian location, hissing, 'You can't escape this f***ing stinking camp!' Bulldozers break down. Ships don't work. City sex workers are bizarrely bussed in for the male crew to neutralise the possibility of intimate, and thus culturally sensitive, relations with local indigenous women.
Throughout all this there's Herzog, captain of the ship (he remains on the film's steamship when it runs aground),

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Daily Mail​

6 hours ago

• Daily Mail​

Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos shrug off protestors to kick off lavish Venice wedding celebrations with scantily clad FOAM PARTY on $500M yacht

and her billionaire beau Jeff Bezos have shrugged off anti-capitalism protestors with a rowdy foam party on board a $500million superyacht to kick off their opulent wedding-week festivities. The couple and a host of celebrity friends will descend upon Venice this week ahead of the highly anticipated June 27 nuptials, greeted by anti-capitalist demonstrators vowing to 'block the canals' and prevent the wedding from going ahead. But the Amazon founder, 61, and his soon-to-be-wife, 55, didn't let the backlash get them down, stripping down to their swimsuits for a soapy foam party on Bezos' superyacht Koru on Sunday. Pictures obtained by of the lavish celebration show the loved-up couple covered in little more than soap suds as they relished in the summer sunshine. The couple partied off the island of Cres in Croatia in a final pitstop before arriving in Italy for their long-awaited wedding, more than two years after Bezos proposed on board the superyacht while it was docked near the Cannes Film Festival. While they spent most of the afternoon celebrating with friends, the soon-to-be-newlyweds managed to find pockets of intimate downtime, pictured with their arms wrapped around one another and beaming in the foam pit. Both Sanchez and Bezos were mindful of the UV rays, wearing hats and sunglasses, while the bride wore an ombre black and red string bikini and the groom wore blue and black swimming trunks. The rowdy party saw young guests diving off the back of the yacht into the water below, utilizing the stand up paddle boards on board and ferried to and from shore on smaller boats. Other guests took the opportunity to relax, basking in the sunlight on one of the many day beds available on the top floor of the yacht. According to an insider, a police boat briefly approached the vessel during the festivities, but quickly moved on. A 'Happy Birthday' sign was pictured hanging from the yacht, amid reports the festivities were to celebrate Lauren's son Evan's 19th birthday. A relaxed-looking Sanchez and Bezos are in Europe ahead of their nuptials, which are expected to be a week-long affair estimated to be costing roughly $15 to $20 million. Ahead of their arrival in Venice, i mpassioned signs reading 'No space for Bezos' and 'Veniceland: A playground fit for an oligarch' have been plastered across the region, hinting that residents want Bezos and Sanchez to take their multimillion-dollar wedding elsewhere. Demonstrators have also been plotting to clog up streets and canals to throw off the wedding's events and hinder the roughly 200 guests from getting around the city. Federica Toninello, who is helping to organize one of the coordinated protests, told the New York Times that she has 'moles' who are leaking details of the upcoming events. The group has received intel that one of the key events will take place at Misericordia. 'Bezos will never get to the Misericordia,' she told a crowd of about 300. 'We will line the streets with our bodies, block the canals with lifesavers, dinghies and our boats.' Among protestors' biggest gripes is that tourists flocking to Venice have contributed to soaring housing costs which make it near impossible for 'ordinary Venetians' to live in the region. And the Bezos-Sanchez wedding has coincided with peak season in Venice, meaning hotels of all budgets are nearing capacity with tens of thousands of visitors arriving daily. But the couple's wedding organizers, Lanza & Baucina Limited, earlier spoke out on their high-profile clients' behalf, hitting back at suggestions that the couple have not been respectful of the locals during the planning process. 'From the outset, instructions from our client and our own guiding principles were abundantly clear: the minimizing of any disruption to the city, the respect for its residents and institutions and the overwhelming employment of locals in the crafting of the events,' Lanza & Baucina Limited said in a statement to Page Six. 'Before the recent news of protests arose, we had worked for there to be minimal negative impact or disruption to the lives of Venetians and the city's visitors.' The company added that Bezos and Sanchez have donated funds to various Venice charities in the months leading up to the nuptials. Bezos and Sanchez have also gifted funds on behalf of their guests, according to the report. The high-end wedding planning company has worked with stars including George and Amal Clooney, and Salma Hayek and François-Henri Pinault. Mayor Luigi Brugnaro also advocated for Bezos and Sanchez, telling The Associated Press: 'We are very proud. 'I don't know if I will have time, or if he will, to meet and shake hands, but it's an honor that they chose Venice. Venice once again reveals itself to be a global stage.' The highly anticipated ceremony is just one of three formal events - all at different locations. It is believed that on June 26, there will be a gala at a private cloister along the iconic Lid, possibly at Chiostro della Madonna dell'Orto. And on June 28 there will be an extraordinary party at a church, one source claimed. The insider confirmed guests should be steadily arriving in the country over the next few days and will likely leave by June 29. The guest list is thought to have less than 200 people, with A-listers like Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom and even members of the Trump family thought to be invited The couple and a flock of celebrity friends will descend upon Venice this week ahead of the highly anticipated June 27 nuptials, greeted by anti-capitalist demonstrators vowing to 'block the canals' and prevent the wedding from going ahead A-listers Lady Gaga and Elton John are set to perform. 'Lauren wanted some big talent to sing for them and it just doesn't get any bigger than Gaga and Elton,' a source previously told 'It also helps that Gaga and Elton are good friends and were happy to do it together, which is cool. It will be like a mini vacation for the besties.' Around 60 of Venice's water taxis are reserved for the week, with some of the 400 gondolas on the island out of commission as well, according to the source.

Telegraph

14 hours ago

• Telegraph

The age of the distinguished, insightful travelogue is over – now it's all idiots abroad

Whether it's Joe Lycett knocking back Swedish firewater made of beaver glands in Channel 4's Travel Man: 48 Hours in...; Gino D'Acampo setting fire to his deodorant spray and skinny dipping ('look: free willy!') his way through Italy in ITV's Gordon, Gino and Fred: Road Trip; or Sue Perkins smirking while snacking on giant croissants and pan-fried crickets in Sue Perkins' Big Adventure: Paris to Istanbul (also Channel 4), you might have been struck by something about recent TV travel documentaries: namely, their lack of the je ne sais quoi that marked the heyday of travel-documentary oeuvre. The Seventies saw Alan Whicker hanging out with the Sultan of Brunei and the super-rich recluses of the South Pacific islands, all sardonic wit and (whatever the climate) his signature tailored suit. The Eighties and Nineties, of course, gave us the affable Michael Palin, bringing to life the architectural wonders of Timbuktu and the Tuareg caravan travellers of the Sahara Desert. In the 2010s we moseyed along the River Nile and the Trans-Siberian Railway from Russia to Mongolia and China with plummy national treasure Dame Joanna Lumley. Not a shot of snake's blood or gratuitous nude between them. Veteran American travel writer Rick Steves, 70, recently weighed in on the debate around the current crop of dumbed-down travel programming, noting that TV travel shows and YouTubers baiting clicks with 'grossout' foreign food and whizzing through world bucket lists are problematic for the destinations that are featured. Such programming, Steves argues, peddles the 'superficial aspects of travel and tourist traps' as it 'exaggerates a destination's potential dangers for comedic effect' ('don't drink the toilet water, guys – phnarr, phnarr!'). Seasoned travel head Noel Josephides, aged 77, chairman of tour operator Sunvil, also laments the loss of the golden days of linear television from the Seventies to Nineties, when travel shows were 'serious and their presenters were respected' by both the public and travel industry. 'I used to watch Michael Palin, Wish You Were Here…? on ITV, and the Holiday programme on BBC religiously, and if a destination was mentioned [Sunvil] could fill a whole season with bookings,' he recalls. These days, he notes, none of these things are true. 'Everything has been dumbed down and it's more about the presenter than the destination,' he complains. Former TV commissioner Gillian Crawley tells me that she believes 'celebs with no insight' should be removed from TV travel scheduling altogether, including actors such as Palin and Lumley and today's C-list crop. 'I used to wonder why I was sending someone from Corrie to Borneo to look at the orangutans because [the actor] was pretending to be an eco-warrior at the time,' she recalls. Instead, Crawley rates presenters with a depth of knowledge and a 'critical eye', such as Sir David Attenborough and Dame Mary Beard. 'Even Michael Portillo is better than some of the current crop,' she says of the politician turned rail presenter, 'as he at least does like trains.' She concludes: 'It doesn't matter whether someone is posh or not posh – they're just slebs with no special insight and they can pay for their own holidays.' However, Kylie Bawden, who has worked as a location arranger on shows including Ainsley's Caribbean Kitchen and Joe Lycett's Travel Man: 48hrs in Washington, DC disagrees with the idea that travel TV has been dumbed down. The more intimate onus of today's travel TV, she says, is as much down to social media and consumer demand as it is an erosion of standards. 'Viewers have access to celebrities via social media that was never possible in the Palin days,' she tells me. 'Today's audiences want something more light-hearted than before, but they also want to feel like there's a real possibility that they could replicate the experiences they are watching on TV. So, less crossing the Sahara desert in a camel caravan and more the best speakeasies in Washington or where to go to experience trad pub music in Ireland.' 'Parasociality', or the trend of viewers and listeners wanting to feel as if they are personal friends of the celebrities they follow, is – it seems – partly to blame. Bawden adds that destinations are often more than happy to roll the red carpet out for Lycett, Perkins et al with a view to the audience booking a holiday inspired by TV. 'Set-jetting [viewers travelling to destinations they have seen on TV] really drives bookings in the 2020s,' Bawden argues. Gavin Bate, director and mountain leader at tour company Adventure Alternative, corroborates this link between TV appearances and booking spikes: 'When the Comic Relief celebrity team climbed Kilimanjaro and the BBC aired the programme on a Sunday night, we got loads of Kilimanjaro bookings the following morning,' he explains. 'And any kind of wildlife programme, especially the Attenborough ones, will result in people booking more wildlife holidays – especially to see endangered species like the clouded leopard in Borneo.' James Willcox, founder of Untamed Borders, takes it a step further, believing that 'we are more likely these days to see bookings driven by the antics of travel YouTubers and Instagrammers than traditional travel documentaries'. One thing's for certain: the era of the patrician broadcaster showing viewers destinations they can never hope to reach has lost favour, and in its place we have the pally 'everyman' and 'everywoman' travelogue, with their smorgasbord of tick-list travel experiences. And yet, there are some antidotes to this phenomenon – in the gritty Channel 4 shows of ex-Army officer Levison Wood, for example, who slogs through inhospitable terrains from Siberia to the elephant migration routes of Burundi, and in Simon Reeve's various odysseys, in which he combines a diffident everyman approach (that appeals to the 2020s viewer) with thoughtful explorations of remote locations and communities. Wood is back with a show later in 2025 and Reeve is currently on BBC 2, exploring 'Arctic tundra, vast forests and stunning fjords in Scandinavia with Simon Reeve. 'I am very relieved Simon Reeves is back on with his Scandinavia series,' vlogger Emma Reed, who is based in Hampshire, tells me. 'Comedians on tour or hapless celeb father/son jaunts are becoming sooo tedious.' I'll raise a shot of snake's blood to that.

The Guardian

17 hours ago

• The Guardian

‘Have you heard of this BDSM trend?' What I learned recording thousands of hours of teens on their phones

Reactions to Lauren Greenfield's documentary series Social Studies tend to fall into two categories. Young people think it is validating; adults think it's a horror show. After all, the screen of a teenager's smartphone is a shiny black hole to which access is rarely granted. 'Our kids are right there,' as Greenfield puts it, 'and yet we don't really know what's going on in their lives.' Her five-part series, which tracks the online and offline lives of a group of teenagers and young adults – the first generation of social media natives – is being tipped for an Emmy. Under the noses of their parents, she captures teenagers climbing out of bedroom windows to spend the night with boyfriends, posting sexually explicit images, tracking their longest-ever fast (91 hours) and living out their experiences of rape, cyberbullying, whitewashing, the tyranny of Caucasian beauty standards and suicidal ideation. She makes adolescence look like the wild west. 'I really tried to go into this as a social experiment,' says Greenfield, speaking on a video call from the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, which is hosting a Social Studies photographic exhibition until July. Initially she conducted more than 200 mini-interviews in high schools in LA, and then whittled these down to a cohort of about 25, who let her shoot them at home, at school, at parties, and in discussion groups over the course of the 2021-22 high school year. Crucially, they agreed to screen record, thereby sharing their online lives with Greenfield in real time. The result is a frenetic, immersive collage of a documentary, in which screens are overlaid on in-person lives. It is sometimes hard to keep pace, and hard to know where to look – but that is the point. Greenfield started out in anthropology; her first commission was for National Geographic, photographing Maya people in Mexico. Her mother, Patricia Marks Greenfield, a psychologist, was the writer. But after the project was dropped, she turned her gaze closer to home, to LA, where she grew up. Since her first monograph, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, her work has focused on consumerism, extreme wealth, addiction and youth culture. The idea for Social Studies partly came from observing her youngest son Gabriel's phone habits. He was 14 when she started filming the series. 'We had constant battles about screen time.' Arguments? 'Yes,' she says. 'I never could control his access or see the content on his phone. He was super private about his phone, which is probably why I was so obsessed with getting into phones and really seeing what was in there.' Alongside about 1,000 hours of documentary footage, Greenfield also captured 2,000 hours of screen-recorded content. Her son 'helped to figure out the tech'. He was a year younger than most of the young people featured – and filming was personally confronting for Greenfield as a parent. Not least when she ran into him at a party she was filming. Making Social Studies has triggered her own evolution as a parent. 'I was blaming my son for his screen time,' she says. 'And I ended up feeling that's like blaming an opium addict for their addiction. Social media is made to be addictive – purposefully, for maximum engagement, and without any concern for the consequences.' Social Studies 'brought me together with my teenager', she says. Greenfield has previously said that she went into her 2002 monograph Girl Culture with an open mind 'and came out a feminist'. (She later directed the #LikeAGirl Super Bowl commercial.) Was the experience of filming Social Studies transformative too? Did she come out an activist? 'I definitely came out thinking that we were giving a very unsafe environment to our young people and we needed to do something about it,' she says. 'I did come out of it wanting to spread the word, raise awareness. It's about collective action.' She hadn't planned to include parents, which is interesting because those who do feature come off pretty badly. 'All of the parents?' she asks me. All except Vito, who lovingly supports his children through transition and alternative education. But others come across as missing in action or nonplussed. A mother, whose daughter films thirst traps in her bedroom, says: 'I really don't want to look at Sydney's TikTok.' A father stops his daughter using the app – by paying her $50 a day. 'But they really represent all of us,' Greenfield says. 'And not in a way where we can point a finger at them, but in a way where hopefully we are urged to reflect on ourselves. I mean, I didn't know a lot of the questions to ask my own kids until I did this project.' When working on the project, she would go home and ask her sons – the eldest was 20 and already at college – 'Have you heard of this BDSM trend?' For all the devastating revelations, there is humour here, too, as when one female participant says: 'We don't judge each other for [foot pics] but we also don't feel super-empowered.' It is hard to tell if the teenagers are incredibly worldly or incredibly naive. 'You start a TikTok to be in that TV show, movie-type life where everything comes easy for you,' says 17-year-old Keshawn, who soon after becomes a father. The shadow of Kim Kardashian looms large. Fittingly, her career tracks the arc of Greenfield's own, since Greenfield shot a then unknown 12-year-old Kardashian for Fast Forward. In Social Studies, to nods of agreement, one girl announces: 'I would release a sex tape if it made me viral.' Into the vacuum of adult regulation young people step, such as 20-year-old vigilante Anthony, who collects evidence from victims of assault and outs the perpetrators on social media. As he says, wisely and dispassionately: 'I'm part of cancel culture. It kind of works. It kind of doesn't work.' Greenfield implicates herself in the dynamic of absent adults. She asks the teenagers questions such as 'Who here has been sent a dick pic? Who has gone viral?' (Pretty much everyone.) Dressed in unobtrusive navy, she is a peripheral presence, and the only adult hearing, receiving, capturing revelation after revelation. She initially thought about casting a therapist or teacher but 'I realised it had to be me.' Though, she says: 'I don't like being in an authoritarian role at all.' Indeed, her presence sometimes feels like an absence, as when Sofia recounts her experience of being raped. Anthony helped her to gather evidence, but she hadn't felt heard and validated by adults. In the most moving scene, Sydney reaches out and hooks Sofia's fingers with her own. I wonder how Greenfield felt hearing a young woman share her experience of rape. Her attentive silence, while Sofia weeps, is notable. 'Don't I say, 'Are you OK?' and she says 'Yeah, I'm OK'?' she asks. Greenfield does ask 'OK?', but as check-ins go, it's pretty minimal. Given that she's a parent, did it feel hard not to step into the space of the circle? 'I mean, I think that felt very natural. If I could have avoided being in it altogether, I would have,' she says. So she didn't go home burdened by the emotional weight of the stories she had documented? 'It's an interesting question.' She pauses. 'I really love doing this work. It is so hard to get access and gain trust. When I'm hearing the stories, I'm so … fulfilled. My frustration is often if I can't tell the story. When I can actually tell it, I'm so happy. A lot of the young people participated because they wanted to tell a story. And they got to tell that story.' Greenfield has also documented her own addiction to work. At one point in 2018's Generation Wealth, her 16-year-old son Noah tells her she's a workaholic and a 10-year-old Gabriel holds up a piece of paper to the ever-present camera that says: 'You have a problem.' In Social Studies, there is a sense in which Greenfield is present as a person who intimately knows, and was herself a childhood victim of, the addictive comparison culture she documents. In Girl Culture, she writes about her experience, aged six, of looking in the mirror and 'realising that I was unimaginably ugly, and crying hysterically. I understood the pain and shame of not measuring up as a girl.' Maybe this girl, too, is in the circle in Social Studies. 'That was also when my parents were splitting up,' she says. 'So I think that was … maybe my origin trauma.' She would have found social media very hard as a teen. 'I was super insecure as a teenager about my body, about fashion, about fitting in. And I was really looking to other kids. So I zeroed in on this [in Social Studies]. I think the 24/7 comparison culture is not just the end of innocence but the end of joy. You're never happy with yourself.' 'What keeps me honest in my work is really coming from things that have affected me,' Greenfield says. Honesty is her medium – but not for too long on the subject of herself. When I ask about her arguments with her son, she says: 'I feel it's a trap to blame the parents. Really, the tech companies could make this completely different if they wanted to. These [apps] are made by humans, engineered to do exactly what they're doing. They know so well what kids love, what will addict kids, they even know brain science, which I think used to be unethical – to use brain science in the creation of products for young people. We know from the TikTok research that was leaked that [the app] is addictive in less than 35 minutes. 'And I was really struck when I saw last year the Jim Henson movie, Idea Man,' she says. 'The founder of Sesame Street – Joan Ganz Cooney – is talking about how they brought together artists who knew what kids loved – like Henson and the Muppet people – with educators who knew what kids needed to learn, and knew what was good for kids. And I was so moved by that,' she says. 'It almost makes me want to cry.' Given her unflinching calm in the most emotional documentary scenes, I am surprised to see that her eyes are pink and she looks as if she really might cry. 'Because it's another time. When people cared about what young people were getting.' A few weeks ago, she went to Sacramento with some of Social Studies' protagonists, to talk to senators. She has taken the series into schools. 'I do feel [making Social Studies] has activated me,' she says. She mentions how the Australian government has banned social media for under-16s, and Common Sense Media's campaign for health warnings on platforms. As Sydney points out in the series, once governments knew the dangers of smoking, they applied warnings. 'In the US, it is unlikely that [regulation] will be done by government or tech, but there is a critical mass of parents and educators who are getting concerned,' Greenfield says. In the final episode of Social Studies, the group reflects on the experience of taking part. For many, holding a conversation without a phone – they had to leave them in a different room – was a rare liberation. 'We all need to delete social media!' someone says – to the biggest round of applause. But the handclaps falter under existential questioning: 'How do you get off social media without people forgetting that you exist?' 'That really resonated with me,' Greenfield says. 'They are showing us there's a problem. They're giving us a roadmap for how to solve it. But they can't solve it on their own.' So what's the roadmap? 'We've given our communication to companies that not only don't have our best interests in mind and are just thinking about their own profit but maybe have a political agenda. And that is terrifying. We need an independent form of communication where our information is not being marketed, sold.' Some kind of public platform, like a public utility? 'Exactly. It's a radical move to just say, 'I'll be off of [social media].' As a person in the world, I can't be off of it, either.' A public-service communication platform sounds like a pipe dream. Is it possible? 'I feel like my job is to let people know what's going on. I'm not a tech entrepreneur so I don't know if it's possible,' she says. But she is too invested to leave it there. 'I do think it's possible, actually,' she adds. 'I absolutely think it is possible.' Social Studies is streaming on Disney+