Last year, while recommending the documentary Lost in La Mancha--which is currently streaming on NETFLIX INSTANT and is a ton of fun so go watch it--I claimed that LiLM was my second-favorite documentary about film-making.
Today, I'm recommending my all-time favorite: Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's spectacular documentary on the insanity surrounding Werner Herzog's efforts to make Fitzcarraldo.
Like LiLM, "Making Of" is an entirely insufficient way to describe this film. In fact, I consider it a significantly more engaging, more thought-provoking, more extraordinary work than the one whose creation it documents. Mostly because Werner Herzog is its subject, and he's far more fascinating to me than anything that appears in Fitzcarraldo.
HULU is streaming it for Qualifiedly-Free (which means it's got commercials) as part of this week's festival, "Too Dang Hot". I don't know how long it'll be streaming, though, so get it while it's...wait for it...hot!
Oh, and I'm actually embedding it directly. So that's cool, right?
Les Blank documents acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog's ambitious and troubled production of Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man's attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle
Hulu is also streaming a cool little piece called Dreams and Burdens for Legit-Free (aka "commercial-free"), in which Herzog "revisits the territories of his exhilarating Fitzcarraldo and, by extension, Les Blank's unparalleled making-of documentary Burden of Dreams." I suspect it's part of The Criterion Collection's efforts to add value to their release of Burden of Dreams. Unnecessary, but I'm certainly not going to complain. Oh, and here it is.