Little Dieter
Sep. 18th, 2010 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaSo... I saw Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn a few weeks ago. It is the story of the German-born American pilot Dieter Dengler who was shot down in Laos during the opening volleys of the Vietnam war. He was one of the only POWs to escape from a prison camp and survive. This is significant as one of the challenges facing Dengler is the fact that it is unlikely that the gov't will trade for him as Laos is officially not part of the conflict and the presence of Americans in Laos is a violation of the terms of the conflict.
Rescue Dawn is a fairly straight-forward escape-film and had things in common with other famous escape films including: Escape from Alcatraz, The Great Escape, and The Grand Illusion. As Alcatraz is probably the only Eastwood film (directed by Don Siegel who also fathered Dirty Harry) I could ever watch with my father (who incidentally LOVES escape/survival narratives---he took me to see The Great Escape at the BPL when I was quite young---and might cite Robinson Crusoe as one of the few worth-while works of fiction to read) the question immediately emerged: "Could I watch this with my dad?" The answer is yes, but would I want to, and would he like it?
The movie is pretty gritty. Herzog does a lot with disorientation, never translating the non-English. There are all sorts of creative and interesting tortures. And there is the jungle itself, "The hut is not the prison," one of the characters observes, "the jungle is the prison." Indeed, as grueling as camp-life is, the jungle portion of the film is even harder, meaning we return to several common themes in Herzog's film, not only the difficulty of relationship between humans, but the hostile indifference of nature, and, of course, the jungle itself.
In fact, since I've seen so many Herzog films over the past few years it's impossible to watch Rescue Dawn without thinking, "Here we are in Herzog's jungle, again." Or "Oh, a raft traveling over rapids: where have I seen this before?" There is even a shot with a raft shooting out over a waterfall that reminded me of the moment in Aguirre where the canon goes tumbling down the mountainside. In short, while not a bad film, after having recently seen so many of Herzog's other projects Rescue Dawn seemed both derivative and slightly underwhelming.
But I decided to see his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly which he made in the late-90s prior to Rescue Dawn before passing judgment. I'm glad I did. I think it's the more interesting film with strange off-kilter details either not present, or not noticed in Rescue Dawn. But rather than providing background to Rescue Dawn, I felt the films functioned the other way. Seeing Rescue Dawn gives the viewer background for Little Dieter. Some of the same documentary footage is used in both films, but there are also strange, disorienting, 'what happened next' details in Little Dieter, the way someone endures beyond the initial experience: how an experience like what happened to Dieter Dengler would change a life.
There are also lots of things left out of Rescue Dawn, including more brutal forms of torture, which Dengler describes, but Herzog has the restraint not to show. (I'm reminded of his decision to leave the mauling footage out of Grizzly Man.) There is also reflection and a strange kind of mysticism. For example, one of the opening scenarios in Little Dieter is Dengler visiting an Ed Hardy tattoo parlor and using a proposed back piece to describe a vision he had on the verge of death: horses pouring from a doorway. The back piece shows a reaper riding on the back of what is probably the apocalypse. Dieter said, "It was like this, except with angels. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."
There is Dengler's stuffed pantry and the hundreds of pounds of staples he has stored beneath his house against the hunger he has experienced twice in his lifetime: first in post-war Germany, then as a POW. Dengler speaks of children peeling wallpaper off the walls of bombed houses which was then boiled to make a broth for the nutrients in the glue. I knew this and more, "They did the same thing to books," I thought. "The glue in the bindings was eaten. The pages burnt for fuel." Dengler says that he still remembers the day that sausage first appeared in a shop after the war: "No one could afford to buy it."
There's Dieter's story of how he came to be an pilot: he came face-to-face with an American pilot flying by his house in the war and decided he must fly: coming eventually to the US, the only country that had enough of an air program and an open enough immigration policy to allow him a shot at becoming a pilot. Even after everything he has been through, Dieter considers himself lucky: first to be allowed to fly, and second to be an American. Despite the experiences he had serving and suffering in a war he never wanted to fight, he still has a deep gratitude for the country that gave him wings. But Dieter is also thankful for the beatings he received as an apprentice to a tool-and-die maker: "They prepared me to endure the beatings at the hands of my captors." And he includes a kind of reverent kudos to the guards in Laos, which he credits for teaching him the skills he needed to survive in the jungle after he escapes the camp.
Little Dieter has interesting, detailed, descriptions of life in the jungle including a fascinating demonstration of how to start a fire in the jungle using only bamboo, and the way that the soldiers would carry these little metal braziers, dangling from chains, upon which they would cook their dinners, swinging them as they ran through the jungle so that the charcoal fire wouldn't go out. Dengler also speaks of the brutal justice of the Viet Cong: about a punishment exacted on a villager that stole the only personal item he was allowed to keep: his wedding ring.
But perhaps the best part of Little Dieter, the bits that will stick with me, are Dengler's descriptions of how he coped after rescue. The way his friends would take him when he woke screaming and put him the cockpit of a plane, which is one of the only places he could sleep peacefully after his rescue. Of Dengler's dreams from captivity and after rescue. And of the closing shots: like one of Dieter's dreams: of a graveyard of grounded planes: acres of these flying machines parked in geometric patterns. I have heard about these places and always wanted to visit them. Herzog does a long tracking shot pulling away from Dieter until all you can see is rows and rows of the planes. This is Dieter's heaven. This is where we leave him.
Little Dieter also reminded me of two other films. The line drawn between the destructive air campaign in Germany and the events in Laos/Vietnam reminded me of Errol Morris' Fog of War, which is one of those films I feel every grown American who has any opinion about US foreign policy ought to see. And--- this one is a strange one that I mention almost every time That War wanders a little too closely to my psyche---Jacques Tourneur's Berlin Express, which was filmed IN Berlin just after the war, but before partition and features people from the four occupied quarters having to cooperate. The actual plot of the film is a little sluggish, and it's difficult to watch without a sense of heavy-propaganda, not to mention contemporary irony. But the reason you should see this film is two fold: 1. the on-location filming means you get to see what Berlin actually looked like after the war. This is important. So much of the contemporary portrayals of That War are quite glamorous and atrocities are often portrayed as being one-sided. All of Europe suffered. And we are all responsible for what happened. 2. The vision of peace offered at the end of the film, cheesy and overly-optimistic in the face of the partition contemporary audiences know is coming, took 40 years to realize. And it is important to recognize this, too. I think of Moses in the desert and what endures beyond what we are able to realize in our lifetimes.
Herzog is very interested in life in extremis. The strange thing about his films is not how they put the subject far from the viewer, but how it draws the viewer close to the subject. A recognition that on some level we are all, always, only a few steps from death or madness. That he can find beauty in this is his gift to the world. Herzog in the extras on Rescue Dawn describes Dengler's optimism, which he considers the defining characteristic that allowed him to survive. This struck me as a little bit of Herzogian irony: most of his films are about how 'irrational exuberance' is a kind of madness, often coming before a serious fall. Then, again, there is something heroic about this struggle, something holy about this madness, which is what he recognizes in his films over and over, again, whether they are tragedies or comedies. I think of the ecstatic ending of Fitzcarraldo where our main character, having lost everything after his impossible endeavor, comes steaming back up the river with an entire opera chorus on full blast. This is crazy. This is beautiful. And I suspect, despite his stated philosophy, that Herzog himself is a bit of an optimist: one of these madmen who refuses to recognize the impossible and endures beyond what most normal people would consider the limits of their failure of success. Without that, we would not have his films.
Rescue Dawn is a fairly straight-forward escape-film and had things in common with other famous escape films including: Escape from Alcatraz, The Great Escape, and The Grand Illusion. As Alcatraz is probably the only Eastwood film (directed by Don Siegel who also fathered Dirty Harry) I could ever watch with my father (who incidentally LOVES escape/survival narratives---he took me to see The Great Escape at the BPL when I was quite young---and might cite Robinson Crusoe as one of the few worth-while works of fiction to read) the question immediately emerged: "Could I watch this with my dad?" The answer is yes, but would I want to, and would he like it?
The movie is pretty gritty. Herzog does a lot with disorientation, never translating the non-English. There are all sorts of creative and interesting tortures. And there is the jungle itself, "The hut is not the prison," one of the characters observes, "the jungle is the prison." Indeed, as grueling as camp-life is, the jungle portion of the film is even harder, meaning we return to several common themes in Herzog's film, not only the difficulty of relationship between humans, but the hostile indifference of nature, and, of course, the jungle itself.
In fact, since I've seen so many Herzog films over the past few years it's impossible to watch Rescue Dawn without thinking, "Here we are in Herzog's jungle, again." Or "Oh, a raft traveling over rapids: where have I seen this before?" There is even a shot with a raft shooting out over a waterfall that reminded me of the moment in Aguirre where the canon goes tumbling down the mountainside. In short, while not a bad film, after having recently seen so many of Herzog's other projects Rescue Dawn seemed both derivative and slightly underwhelming.
But I decided to see his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly which he made in the late-90s prior to Rescue Dawn before passing judgment. I'm glad I did. I think it's the more interesting film with strange off-kilter details either not present, or not noticed in Rescue Dawn. But rather than providing background to Rescue Dawn, I felt the films functioned the other way. Seeing Rescue Dawn gives the viewer background for Little Dieter. Some of the same documentary footage is used in both films, but there are also strange, disorienting, 'what happened next' details in Little Dieter, the way someone endures beyond the initial experience: how an experience like what happened to Dieter Dengler would change a life.
There are also lots of things left out of Rescue Dawn, including more brutal forms of torture, which Dengler describes, but Herzog has the restraint not to show. (I'm reminded of his decision to leave the mauling footage out of Grizzly Man.) There is also reflection and a strange kind of mysticism. For example, one of the opening scenarios in Little Dieter is Dengler visiting an Ed Hardy tattoo parlor and using a proposed back piece to describe a vision he had on the verge of death: horses pouring from a doorway. The back piece shows a reaper riding on the back of what is probably the apocalypse. Dieter said, "It was like this, except with angels. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."
There is Dengler's stuffed pantry and the hundreds of pounds of staples he has stored beneath his house against the hunger he has experienced twice in his lifetime: first in post-war Germany, then as a POW. Dengler speaks of children peeling wallpaper off the walls of bombed houses which was then boiled to make a broth for the nutrients in the glue. I knew this and more, "They did the same thing to books," I thought. "The glue in the bindings was eaten. The pages burnt for fuel." Dengler says that he still remembers the day that sausage first appeared in a shop after the war: "No one could afford to buy it."
There's Dieter's story of how he came to be an pilot: he came face-to-face with an American pilot flying by his house in the war and decided he must fly: coming eventually to the US, the only country that had enough of an air program and an open enough immigration policy to allow him a shot at becoming a pilot. Even after everything he has been through, Dieter considers himself lucky: first to be allowed to fly, and second to be an American. Despite the experiences he had serving and suffering in a war he never wanted to fight, he still has a deep gratitude for the country that gave him wings. But Dieter is also thankful for the beatings he received as an apprentice to a tool-and-die maker: "They prepared me to endure the beatings at the hands of my captors." And he includes a kind of reverent kudos to the guards in Laos, which he credits for teaching him the skills he needed to survive in the jungle after he escapes the camp.
Little Dieter has interesting, detailed, descriptions of life in the jungle including a fascinating demonstration of how to start a fire in the jungle using only bamboo, and the way that the soldiers would carry these little metal braziers, dangling from chains, upon which they would cook their dinners, swinging them as they ran through the jungle so that the charcoal fire wouldn't go out. Dengler also speaks of the brutal justice of the Viet Cong: about a punishment exacted on a villager that stole the only personal item he was allowed to keep: his wedding ring.
But perhaps the best part of Little Dieter, the bits that will stick with me, are Dengler's descriptions of how he coped after rescue. The way his friends would take him when he woke screaming and put him the cockpit of a plane, which is one of the only places he could sleep peacefully after his rescue. Of Dengler's dreams from captivity and after rescue. And of the closing shots: like one of Dieter's dreams: of a graveyard of grounded planes: acres of these flying machines parked in geometric patterns. I have heard about these places and always wanted to visit them. Herzog does a long tracking shot pulling away from Dieter until all you can see is rows and rows of the planes. This is Dieter's heaven. This is where we leave him.
Little Dieter also reminded me of two other films. The line drawn between the destructive air campaign in Germany and the events in Laos/Vietnam reminded me of Errol Morris' Fog of War, which is one of those films I feel every grown American who has any opinion about US foreign policy ought to see. And--- this one is a strange one that I mention almost every time That War wanders a little too closely to my psyche---Jacques Tourneur's Berlin Express, which was filmed IN Berlin just after the war, but before partition and features people from the four occupied quarters having to cooperate. The actual plot of the film is a little sluggish, and it's difficult to watch without a sense of heavy-propaganda, not to mention contemporary irony. But the reason you should see this film is two fold: 1. the on-location filming means you get to see what Berlin actually looked like after the war. This is important. So much of the contemporary portrayals of That War are quite glamorous and atrocities are often portrayed as being one-sided. All of Europe suffered. And we are all responsible for what happened. 2. The vision of peace offered at the end of the film, cheesy and overly-optimistic in the face of the partition contemporary audiences know is coming, took 40 years to realize. And it is important to recognize this, too. I think of Moses in the desert and what endures beyond what we are able to realize in our lifetimes.
Herzog is very interested in life in extremis. The strange thing about his films is not how they put the subject far from the viewer, but how it draws the viewer close to the subject. A recognition that on some level we are all, always, only a few steps from death or madness. That he can find beauty in this is his gift to the world. Herzog in the extras on Rescue Dawn describes Dengler's optimism, which he considers the defining characteristic that allowed him to survive. This struck me as a little bit of Herzogian irony: most of his films are about how 'irrational exuberance' is a kind of madness, often coming before a serious fall. Then, again, there is something heroic about this struggle, something holy about this madness, which is what he recognizes in his films over and over, again, whether they are tragedies or comedies. I think of the ecstatic ending of Fitzcarraldo where our main character, having lost everything after his impossible endeavor, comes steaming back up the river with an entire opera chorus on full blast. This is crazy. This is beautiful. And I suspect, despite his stated philosophy, that Herzog himself is a bit of an optimist: one of these madmen who refuses to recognize the impossible and endures beyond what most normal people would consider the limits of their failure of success. Without that, we would not have his films.
