"It's not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well and the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. It's as simple as that." To share a dream with an audience in a way that it becomes their dream has been the biggest challenge of filmmakers. Fitzcarraldo is one of Herzog's most ambitious films. But what fascinated me most about it was a documentary about the making of this insane project. "This hill is no joke at all." "Burden of Dreams" show
s Herzog's unstoppable will power to get this film finished. "If I abandoned this project I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that. I live my life, I end my life with this project." "I'm speaking to filmmakers or future filmmakers." Revered by many, others are uncomfortable with the extent Herzog's filmmaking is fetishized. "For example I do not use a storyboard; I think it's an instrument of the cowards." Herzog carries a persona of a deep, insightful, possibly insane
and dangerous artist. Herzog is a kind warrior, a warrior nonetheless, which means he will do what he must to make the film. For me personally, it's his documentary work I admire most. "Oh, he's a big bear." Surely there are bigger, more meaningful documentaries made by others, but it's Herzog's deliberate storytelling that fascinates me because he is interested in stylizing things to capture an authenticity that is beyond what's real. He's an artist first. Herzog: "The first creature we encount
ered tried to communicate something to us." So I want to take a look at what I can learn from him and apply to my own work. "That needle down there." Is this yours? "Is that yours?" Let him say what..." "This is what?" There's something so powerful about documentaries. More powerful than drama. "This is a bumblebee who expired as it was working at doing the pollen thing." Again and again, Herzog points out the unexpected miracles that happen to a documentary filmmaker. "The likes", and I quote,
"of which no studio directors with union crews can ever dream of." If you've seen "Grizzly Man" you probably remember this iconic scene. "This is Timothy's camera. During the fatal attack there was no time to remove the lens cap. Jewel Palovak allowed me to listen to the audio." He listens in as Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend get mauled by a bear. "I hear rain and I hear "Amie, get away, get away, go away." Instead of letting us hear the audio, the horror of this painful death was put into
the audience's mind. "You can turn it off." *turns it off* *Jewel starts crying* But it's really the placement of the scene in context with what led up to this moment and what follows that makes this, for me at least, emotionally one of the most terrifying scenes I've ever experienced in a film. "Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard's remains came in this large metal can. Inside this metal can was a plastic bag, one for Timothy and one for Amie." The sequence starts with the coroner expressing
what it was like to examine the remains. Herzog himself reports that he actually did an additional take on this interview and asked the coroner to focus in on how this would make him feel. "Just the visual input of seeing a detached human being before my eyes makes my heart race, makes the hair stand up on the back of my head. Particularly in combination with the contents of a tape, an audio tape that is the sound portion of a video tape." This interview really humanizes what could have been a v
ery dry medical assessment and gives us all the information we need about what's on the tape, so we understand and can later imagine what it must have sounded like. "Yet the tape is running so that we can hear the sounds of Amie screaming and the sounds of Timothy moaning, tells me that this event occurred very, very quickly, suddenly and unexpectedly. I clearly can hear her screaming "Stop and go away!" Maybe "run away", there's a lot of background noise. Timothy is moaning and I hear Amie beat
ing on the top of this bears' head with a frying pan." The interview continues for a while longer, describing in detail what he heard, and then finally cutting to the scene we already know, ending with Herzog advising her to destroy the tape. "Jewel, you must never listen to this." "I know, Werner, I'm never going to." "And you must never look at the photos that I've seen at the coroner's office." This is the only time that Herzog actually appears in the documentary, and we only really see his b
ack. Herzog probably even hesitated to go as far as showing the scene. He talked about how he really wanted to honor and protect the privacy and the dignity of this death, yet he wanted to bring us right to the edge of making us imagine what it must have been like at that moment. Ending this whole sequence with a scene of two bears fighting. It really emphasizes the violence and force that Timothy and Amie experienced. This moment is powerful in its own, but in context, this scene is about a sma
ller bear that is challenged and decides to fight back, thinking that he might win this. At the beginning, the bigger bear backs off, but then, with full uninhibited force... We now understand and feel how powerful these animals are "Well, here I am at the scene of the fight, it looks as if tractors tore into..." The scene ends with Timothy commenting on this fight himself. "There's fur everywhere and in the camera foreground, extruded waste in the middle of the fight so violent..." He's almost
making fun of the smaller bear for even daring to take on the challenge. "Mickey's now the closest bear to Saturn, back in like a horse..." The irony in that moment is obvious. "You underestimated Sergeant Brown. You went in for the head, he seemed to be rope-a-doping you like he wasn't that tough, and then once you banged into him... man, he turned out to be one heck of a rough bear." The small bear crossed the boundary and paid the price, just as Timothy does by choosing to live among these cr
eatures. "I kinda think he was over ten feet high, don't you?" Even though much of the footage was shot by Treadwell himself, it is Herzog who has become the storyteller in his place and he deliberately put these scenes in sequence in order for us to grasp this horrendous death. And the overall premise of the film: Nature is overwhelmingly indifferent to men. Whenever I look at Herzog's documentaries, I can't help but notice that they're a look at ourselves, our nature. When it comes to my own w
ork, I find Herzog's documentaries empowering. They inspire me to look for meaning beyond what's on screen. "I mean I was expecting to find a body part here." "If you walked down far enough down the streak I'm sure you'd find a dead body somewhere." This is what I believe Herzog refers to when he talks about ecstatic truth, and I quote: "It's mysterious and elusive and it can only be reached through fabrication and imagination and stylization." I hope you enjoyed this episode, I know many of you
want to see me actually edit more, and one of the next videos coming up is definitely going to be about how I cut this scene. I want to thank my Patreon subscribers for supporting this channel, for helping turn it sustainable. If you're interested to find out what Patreon is all about, click on the link in the video description, and hopefully I'll see you on the next video. Thanks for watching.
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