By William Blick.
Les’ combination of integrating nature and the indigenous people and the story of the burden of Werner’s dream, all these elements make for a really compelling story, and in such a sensitive and poetic way.”
–Harrod Blank
Harrod Blank, Nick Bergh, and Anthony Matt discuss the new remaster of Les Blank’s documentary, on the making of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo
In 1982, Roger Ebert proclaimed: “Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams is one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made about the making of a movie.” Recently, having had the opportunity to see the new 4K restoration on the big screen at New York’s Film Forum, one can easily see why the documentary is a seminal classic. Les Blank’s son, film director Harrod Blank has carried on his father’s legacy with his collaborators including Nick Bergh and Matt Anthony, with whom I have had the opportunity to meet in person and conduct an interview on Zoom.
Burden of Dreams doesn’t need to be seen; it needs to be experienced. The film details the making of one of the most audacious efforts to create art in the history of filmmaking. Les Blank captures the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a story of the obsessed man, Fitzcarraldo, played by Herzog’s best “fiend”, Klaus Kinski, who attempts to build an opera house in the jungle. If that weren’t surreal enough, Les Blank documents Herzog’s exploits in the jungle as he attempts to haul a huge ship over a mud-soaked mountain using local help to complete this task. The conditions were unbearable, the odds were insurmountable, and the results are undeniably jaw-dropping.
Harrod Blank is known mostly for his work in making and documenting art cars, including Oh My God! and the Camera Van and films Wild Wheels and Automorphosis. Since 2005, he has been building an art car museum and environment, Art Car World, on the border of Mexico in Douglas Arizona. His film work continues with exploring a 30-year epic project on the Burning Man festival, on which his father Les Blank was a cinematographer. After his father’s death in 2013, Harrod has been running the non-profit Les Blank Films to continue his father’s legacy. He has remastered 7 of his films including the latest, Burden of Dreams, and is finishing his last film, You Can’t Squeeze the Blood out of a Turnip featuring folk artist Butch Anthony.
Nicholas Bergh has been working in the field of sound preservation and restoration for nearly 30 years. In 2003, he started Endpoint Audio Labs in order to focus on improving the quality of sound transfers before restoration. Endpoint has become known for both unique transfer technologies as well as using historical research to inform transfer decisions, and has been chosen to preserve some of the most precious studio and public archive sound elements. Projects range from hundreds of tent-pole film titles like Sound of Music (1964) and Titanic (1997) to hundreds of unique field-recorded elements such as ethnographic wax cylinders and lacquer discs. Endpoint also provides sound supervision and sound mixing to modern film documentaries that are using historical material.
Anthony Matt started his career in New York at Vidipax in 1995 working part time while attending the School of Visual Arts. He then worked at Post Logic Studios NY as restoration artist, online editor and managing director. He is currently the V.P. Technical Operations at Prime Focus Technologies in LA. He has worked on diverse range of projects from preservation, data migration, MAM implementations, film re-mastering, 8K stereoscopic Oculus mastering, post production and production. He had the pleasure to work with Electronic Arts Intermix, Children’s Television Workshop, Coca Cola, David Bowie, The Criterion Collection, HBO, IFC Films, A&E, iTV productions, Meta, Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, Sony Picture Entertainment and Les Blank Films. Anthony is also a part time documentary filmmaker, stereoscopic photographer and amateur volcanologist.
I agree with Roger Ebert who said Burden of Dreams is one of the most remarkable films on the filmmaking process, and others who claim it to be one of the best documentaries ever. Why do you think this documentary was so groundbreaking?
Harrod Blank (HB): I think because Werner Herzog really did give Les pretty good access. To be honest, he let him do whatever he wanted to do. He let him film the entire process. Les’ combination of integrating nature and the indigenous people and the story of the burden of Werner’s dream, all these elements make for a really compelling story, and in such a sensitive and poetic way. I am not sure any else could have made this movie besides Les and then with Maureen (Gosling) editing-Pacho Lane with interpreting and he did the second camera. Michael Goodwin was very integral in doing the writing-and he prompted the questions that got all that great jungle monologue from Werner. Also, the narrator and the narration from Candace Laughlin. It just fits really well. It is a beautiful composition of all these people coming together in the prime of their lives, by the way.
What was your impression of Werner Herzog? I think he was known as this enfant terrible or maverick director.
HB: Werner was a larger-than-life character. In person, I haven’t had a lot of experience with him. The relationship between Werner and Les was pretty deep on an artistic level. They were comrades. Together in person, they are both pretty quiet. I grew up watching him and his films and I admired him as an artist.
In a sense, the three of us are not only honoring the legacy of Les Blank, but we are honoring the legacy Werner Herzog as well.
The next question is for Nick and Anthony. What were some of the hardest challenges that you have had to face in this restoration?
Nick Bergh (NB): This is a fairly unique restoration as far as the sound goes. I think a lot of people understand picture workflow restoration well as far as working from a negative. As far as the sound side, the elements are a lot more numerous and a lot more complicated in way. So I think a lot of people kind of misunderstand what goes on in sound restoration these days. So this is a unique experience. Typical restoration these days on the picture side will use the negative. This is almost never done with sound. What is used is a print, which is many generations away from the source. So on this restoration we were able to go back to the original Nagra tapes that were recorded in Peru. There were a number of technical issues in the post-production part of the film such as distortion and noise in the original postproduction process. So now there are many digital tools to repair that stuff, but even though you can repair it, it makes the sound worse.
This kind of restoration takes time and patience. It’s kind of meditative. When you work on it you get maybe 1000 or 500 frames a day. We tried to get the film in three months for screening in Paris. We screened it with only 70% done and the audience loved it.”
–Anthony Matt
The best sounding restoration is typically the one with least amount of digital processing. So by going back to original sources, we can get the sound not by fixing it digitally but by getting the ones that didn’t have it yet.
The final restored soundtrack exhibits nearly contemporary mix sound quality, yet only relying on the incredible fidelity of the original Nagra tapes recorded in Peru and original source music chosen. Although unique, it simply matches the approach standard for image restoration in films today and will hopefully encourage others to peruse higher quality in other independent film restorations.
Anthony Matt (AM): We’ve been doing this work remotely. It’s worked out. But it is challenging. We are trying to do these films at a very high level. These films are so special to me and Les Blank was my favorite filmmaker. Before I met Harrod, I saw this film and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe when I was 19 and I was just blown away. They are unique films and well photographed. When Harrod’s father became sick with cancer, I made a promise to him that I would restore these movies so they can be seen 100s of years from now. That’s our goal: to do this film at the highest possible level so it can be saved for all of us.
The challenge is working at a really high resolution. We scanned this film at 6K and no one did that, but we did! I’ve been really deeply involved in image processing and restoration for my whole career, and I’ve worked on many classic films such as The Seven Samurai and many other Hollywood titles. We wanted to apply that to these films. So it took two years, in my spare time, scanning this film. One of the things that was really interesting was where there was a scene in the film where Werner gets really angry and he’s fed up with the jungle, and it’s the most quotable moment in the film. There is a lot of dirt and mud on the actual film and the film begins to physically fall apart. Maureen said not to fix it because it was like that was where he’s so angry that the film was falling apart through rage.
WB: In that scene, Herzog exclaims that “the birds don’t sing they shriek in pain.” It is almost humorous. Do you think Les and Maureen anticipated the audience’s reaction in that way. How do you folks feel about the humor in the film?
HB: I’m not that sure it was all that self-conscious and self-aware to be honest. Michael Goodwin the writer is the one who prompted those responses. That came from a canoe trip that Michael took with Herzog and got those kinds of answers. And when Michael began asking these questions at this time, it brought it all back up. The questions prompted a reaction in Herzog, so he knew he was striking a chord with Werner.
You have to realize that they were in the jungle for six months and much of the time was idle and that is why Klaus Kinski was going nuts!
AM: This kind of restoration takes time and patience. It’s kind of meditative. When you work on it you get maybe 1000 or 500 frames a day. We tried to get the film in three months for screening in Paris. We screened it with only 70% done and the audience loved it. They were blown away. It was almost like a before and after of a restoration.
In my opinion, the really unique thing is what Nick did. To completely remix a documentary.
How many cities have you shown the new restoration of the film?
HB: We did four cities and the number is growing. We are showing it in L.A. in September. This will be the first time it will be shown at its best.
Have you all worked together on other film projects?
AM: Yes, this is our seventh film together. But this is the first time Nick fixed the sound mix in this manner. We didn’t go back to the Nagra tapes for other films.
Can you talk about your own films, Harrod?
HB: Heading to Burning Man. I’ve been filming it every year for 30 years and editing that. Les filmed that for 15 years before his death. What Les could really do is film what really mattered in a time and place. He would just zoom into it and capture it. His Burning Man shots are as significant as his Burden of Dreams nature shots. He’s that detailed with his camera work. It his curiosity that is driving his camera work. He had a lot of diverse interests. He filmed women. He really did like women. But he also filmed the jewelry, the fire, the forest. We are just starting to edit that and I have over 1000 hours of footage. It’s going to be a 5 part series.
We are also finishing Les’ last film which is called, You Can’t Squeeze Blood Out of A Turnip which is about a folk artist from Alabama named Butch Anthony. We are almost done. We have to work on postproduction. Our idea is to follow the Burden of Dreams with Les’ last movie.
WB: I think we covered a lot and it was a pleasure to discuss this film.
HB: I have watched this movie too many times. (Laughs) So many people worked on this film. There are all kinds of tweaks that have been done with this film. We are really simplifying the process here.
William Blick is a film and literary/crime fiction critic; a librarian; and an academic scholar. His work has been featured in Senses of Cinema, Film Threat, Cineaction, and CinemaRetro, and he is a frequent contributor to Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of Noircon. His crime fiction has been featured in Close to the Bone, Pulp Metal Magazine, Out of the Gutter, and others. He is an Assistant Professor/Librarian for the City University of New York.