Descent into madness on a quest for opera in the Amazon jungle
The re-release of Burden of Dreams brings back searing memories of the mighty river
‘The birds don’t sing they just screech in pain’
The film director is staring crazy-eyed at the camera. He’s been in the jungle for almost two years chasing a fool’s dream, battling nature to make a masterpiece. He is not winning.
As his distinctive vowels wrap themselves around a deranged ornithological theory, sure enough he’s almost drowned out by the Screaming Piha.
The bird, rarely seen but often heard, will perform the piercing soundtrack of this film and its filming, its loud, shrill distinctive call driving actors and film goers to distraction even hatred.
If you’ve never heard the Screaming Piha listen here and imagine that cry on repeat day in, day out in the steaming jungle. There’s no escape from its taunt.
The director is Werner Herzog and he’s being recorded for the best documentary about the production of a film ever made.
Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams follows Herzog, his actors, crew and native Indians who come together to make one of his hallucinatory epics, Fitzcarraldo, deep in the Amazon jungle in 1982.
Fitzcarraldo tells the story (partially true) of an early 20th opera loving rubber baron who wants to build a musical theatre in the middle of the jungle so his favourite singers can perform for him.
But he can only do so by dragging a 300 ton steamboat, ladened with raw materials, across the jungle between two Amazonia tributaries.
German director Herzog decides that he will repeat the trick, hauling his own steamship over a huge hill between two rivers using native labour, rope and tackle and an old digger to inch the vessel through the waist-high tropical mud while he films.
There’s no CGI or AI here: it all actually happens
So what could possibly go wrong?
Thankfully for Blank just about everything.
The production team is accused of arms smuggling, the boat won’t move, the original star is flown out with amoebic dysentery, his replacement, Herzog’s frenemy and long time collaborator - the genuinely cracked Klaus Kinski - rants ferociously at the director about conditions morning, noon and night.
It’s the same behaviour that led to Herzog pulling a gun on Kinski in another brilliant movie they made together ten years earlier, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, probably my favourite film of all time.
Now the natives sidle up to Herzog and tell him they will kill Kinski for him. They’re not joking.
So no wonder then that Blank can hardly believe his luck as he captures Herzog, standing in the jungle, the Pihas in his head, letting rip at nature.
It is deliciously bonkers but showing the moment the burden of his dreams has become too heavy. The landscape will not be bent to his will.
‘If I believed in the devil I would say that he was right here,’ he says, deadpanning melodrama with that incredibly elongated German accent, ‘Nature here is vile and base. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and just rotting away.’
I went to see Burden of Dreams this week at my local arthouse cinema. It’s been remastered and re-released all over the UK. To say it’s worth seeing is an understatement.
In 1982 it also cemented something in me, a need to see this place for myself. From a young age a Boy’s Own fascination gripped me about the Amazon like no other place on earth.
Both Herzog’s jungle films had the mighty river as the heart of darkness for those who would colonise it. Their central characters paid the price for ignorance of its nature, moods, myths and dangers.
In 1989 I could hold out no longer and decided I must go to see this wonder for myself. I would, though, travel on friendlier terms, as a harmless backpacker.
Thirty six years ago planning for such a trip without the internet and instant information and advice at your fingertips was a case of buying the Rough Guide book, flicking through newspapers to see if there was anything to read about South America (there wasn’t) and paying for your Journey Latin America flight schedule.
I was largely unaware that Maoist guerrilla group the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) had half of Peru in its deadly grip nor that the economy was tanking. It seems scarcely believable today that I went so ill prepared.
The finale would be a trip down river from the Peruvian town of Iquitos to the Brazilian city of Manaus at the centre of Amazonia where, unlike Fitzcarraldo, rubber barons did actually build a magnificently ornate opera house in 1897.
The 12 day trip down the Amazon would be taken in two rickety river boats.
For the Peruvian leg of the 900 mile journey, the Santa Barbara, a tin can of a steamboat, left dock two days late ( i.e. reasonably on time in Latin America) while passengers sweltered within.
A sign announcing a capacity of 20 hammocks mocked us as 130 souls eventually swung in that fetid space.
The journey was a beautiful Herzogian hell.
The Santa Barbara caught fire on the first night, the wooden planks above my head glowing red as the crew splashed river water ineffectively. I made desperate glances toward the shore.
The Amazon is already about three miles wide at Iquitos and still has 2,300 miles to flow to its mouth.
On the Brazilian leg, the engines of a slightly larger vessel, the Avelina Seal, had the alarming habit of simply cutting out for what seemed like ages.
She would veer across the river, seven miles wide at this stage, while the mainly local passengers, obviously used to such technical hitches, continued playing their music and dancing on the top deck.
On one such occasion as a stunning sunset etched out sparkling silver ripples amid deep black water we waltzed silently towards the bank and a malevolent jag of trees as a man played Whiter Shade of Pale on his keyboard. Pink dolphins broke the surface all around us.
As I say a beautiful hell. It was for outsiders, as Herzog and Blank show us, nature at its most uncompromising, insane and surreal.
I arrived in Manaus utterly exhausted and semi delirious. ‘For all its supreme beauty the Amazon might as well be the Manchester Ship Canal for all I care’, was just one of the entries in my diary.
It didn’t quite soar to ‘fornication’ levels of rhetoric but you get the anguish.
Nevertheless in the years that have followed the Amazon and that trip have remained mythical and mystical in my mind. I retreat there when life gets grim or boring.
I won’t go back because it will break the spell.
So was I more successful than Fitcarraldo? After my hellish journey did I get to see my opera singers in the jungle?
After a first half decent sleep in two weeks I walked almost refreshed to the opera house.
A sign on the door told me the place had been closed for refurbishment for more than a year.
It would open in 1990 with a performance of Bizet’s Carmen starring Placido Domingo.