BURDEN OF DREAMS REDUX: THE ACCLAIMED DOC ON WERNER HERZOG'S AMAZONIAN OVERREACH RETURNS

AN INTERVIEW WITH MAUREEN GOSLING, BOD'S EDITOR & SOUND RECORDIST

MAUREEN GOSLING – THE YAK INTERVIEW

Last year my US pal Noah Schaffer informed me there was a feature length doc out in the US called The 9 Lives Of Barbara Dane. As I’d long admired militant folkie Dane (and enjoyed her autobiography), I was interested. I sent an email to the film’s website enquiring as to how this might be possible, seeing I live in the UK.

I eventually got a reply from director Maureen Gosling - she told me she was then screening her film in Havana (Dane was a supporter of Castro and her son Pablo lived in Cuba) but, so far, had no UK screenings lined up. She kindly sent me a screener and, having watched (its a solid portrait of a singer who never backed down), I suggested she approach the couple who run Doc N Roll Film Festival (the annual UK music doc film festival - I wrote about D&R on the Yak last year).

Maureen did so and won 9 Lives a spot in the 2024 festival. We met at the screening although, by then, I’d conducted what turned out to be the last ever interview with Dane for The Guardian - this was run to preview the film’s screening and Barbara had chosen to end her life at the age of 97 days after we spoke as heart disease meant she could no longer breathe. Maureen was then invited on Cerys’ brilliant Radio 2 Blues show to talk about Babs and her film. Which meant Dane got more UK coverage in one week than she had across a musical life stretching back to the 1950s! That said, Barbara never wanted to be part of the mainstream music industry.

Maureen and I have stayed in contact since and she recently informed me that Burden Of Dreams, the 1982 doc she and Les Blanc made on Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo folly, was being reissued with an enhanced print and sound. I saw BOD as a teenager at the Capitol cinema in Balmoral (Auckland). Today it’s routinely accepted that Fitzcarraldo is an art house slice of Wagnerian bombast while Burden Of Dreams is a good film - one often held up as amongst the best docs on the turmoil making a movie can involve. It certainly deserves a fresh run in cinemas.

Watching BOD in 2026 ensures many things are different - for a start, back then Herzog was a cult director and much mythologised for eccentric behaviour. People likely thought he was “crazy” and BOD does suggest a director with megalomaniac pretensions - I mean, he’s making a movie in the Amazon and determined to drag this huge 320 ton wooden boat over a hill. Why? Seemingly some spurious “authenticity” thrill it gave Herzog, even though his film’s fiction. Watching BOD I wanted to slap some sense into him. Yet today Herzog is beloved - primarily as a documentary maker. He’s thoughtful, gracious, wise even.

Another change is that, today, the idea of the Great White Director going to the Amazon basin and insisting the indigenous people of the area labour on his ridiculous, dangerous folly wouldn’t last long. Back then, Herzog displayed a colonialist mentality and I think he’s lucky one of the Indians didn’t fire a poison dart into his pompous ass.

So BOD is a time piece, a film about a film that really never should have been made. BOD’s late director Les Blank made many fine films about American vernacular music and food and activities - his celebrations of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Cajun music and Mardi Gras Indians are vastly superior to the formulaic music docs that tend to get served up today - yet BOD remains his most successful film. Partly because Herzog remains a famous director and largely because more people will watch a doc about a chaotic film shoot than one on blues and Cajun musicians they have not heard of.

BODs reissue gave me the chance to interview Maureen Gosling - she started working with Blanc in the early 1970s, and as his editor and sometime sound recordist, helping him shape many of his finest films. And now she’s also a noted doc’ director. Respect to Maureen for sticking it out in a fierce, unforgiving industry.

45 years ago Maureen and Les Blank at work in the Amazon.

GC: Having just rewatched Burden Of Dreams for the first time in 40 years I think I can say, “well, that was quite an experience” – how exactly was it for you?

MG: That is a big question, for sure. Unforgettable, glad I did it, but I wouldn’t do it again! Les and I did a book, too, with our diaries, about the experience. The book came out a number of years after back in the ‘80s, so it didn’t get much exposure. I keep hoping we can do an e-book with it. The making of the making of.

- When you saw the new print of BODs how did you feel about the experience? And how do you feel about it as a documentary today?

I was involved a bit in the process, mainly giving feedback on colour and soundtrack nuances. The most exciting part for me was what the sound mixer did with the sound. Burden Of Dreams was the first film I prepared tracks for the sound mix and I barely knew what I was doing.

Mark Berger, the original sound mixer (Apocalypse Now, among other credits), saved our butt on the original film. Recently, Nick Bergh went back to the original ¼” tapes that I recorded, digitized them all, then re-cut all the sound, including finding better recordings of the music. He took it from a mono track, which is what you would have experienced watching it in 16mm (though we did do a stereo track when Criterion did their version of a restoration about 15 years ago) to 5.1 surround sound. He used only what I recorded, not supplementing it with outside sound fx.

I am thrilled to hear it the way Les and I would have only fantasised about. Combined with the pristine image, it looks and sounds fresh and new. As a film, I am proud of my 30-year-old self who edited it, the first film I edited from scratch. And I think it is a good film and one that couldn’t be made now.

A young Maureen not yet traumatised by Werner Herzog…

- You had worked as editor (and sometimes sound recordist) with Les Blank since 1972. How did you come to play the Sundance Kid to his Butch Cassidy?

I studied Social Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (graduating in 1972) and was in love with cinema. I never ever imagined I would or could be a filmmaker. It was not a profession that was common in those days or known very much, especially for women. Although I was going to all the New Wave European films – Godard, Fellini, Antonioni - I took only one film class. I happened to visit a friend’s film class and they were passing film magazines around. My eyes fell on an ad in the back: Anthropology Film Festival in Philadelphia. I wrote it down. My friend Mitch said he’d go with me. He bailed at the last minute. I went anyway, alone.

I felt like I learned more about people and culture in three days than I had in 2 years of reading about them. I saw Les’ films there – the only ones about the US, and full of music – and I found them unique and poetic. At a party the last night, I got my nerve up to talk with him – only for about 10 minutes and told him I’d send him reviews from the Ann Arbor Film Festival where his films were going to show. I did and we started a correspondence. About 9 months later, he said he needed an assistant after he and his film partner, his best friend and sound recordist, had a falling out.

When he said “come to California” I got on the plane -