Les Blank's most widely known work was his remarkable documentary Burden of Dreams (1982) in which he followed the hazardous and chaotic filming of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. Herzog's grandiose screwball epic tells of the attempt of an eccentric Irish rubber baron called Fitzgerald (Fitzcarraldo to the natives) to establish an opera house in the Peruvian jungle. For this purpose, he has to haul a massive steamboat over a mountain. "If I should abandon this film I should be a man without dreams … I live my life or end my life with the project," Herzog tells Blank's objective camera.
Blank's ethnological approach lets the viewer decide whether we should admire Herzog's tenacity and daring or see him as a deluded European confronting and disturbing tribal existence. In fact, one could argue that Burden of Dreams is more interesting and perceptive than the long haul of Fitzcarraldo.
"Burden of Dreams was nothing to do with the shooting of this strange movie," Herzog commented. "It was a justifiable perspective. For Les what the native Indians were cooking was much more important than what we were doing. He created his own little universe. If Burden of Dreams had just been the making of Fitzcarraldo then it would have been lousy. He had the talent to spot the significant moments."
A few years earlier, Blank made another singular documentary featuring Herzog. The 20-minute film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1979) came about when Herzog promised that if his friend Errol Morris finished his feature-length film on pet cemeteries, he would eat his shoes. Morris finished the film, forcing Herzog to keep his promise by boiling his leather desert boots for five hours in duck fat and stuffing them with garlic, then eating one of them onstage at a local theatre in Berkeley. "We have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television," proclaims Herzog in the film, concluding that we need "a new grammar of images". That was precisely what Blank himself achieved.