Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Flight – the defiance of gravity by humans using various technologies – has always been an ambiguous motif in Werner Herzog’s cinema. It can be an emblem of the pure soul, freed from the mundane humiliations, spiritual violence and dehumanising repetitions of life on the ground. Fini Straubinger remembers the faces of ski-jumpers she used to watch before she became deaf and blind, and is shown enjoying her first trip on an airplane in Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (Land of Silence and Darkness, 1971) (1). Woodcarver Walter Steiner, tied down by sporting bureaucracy and his own pedantry, soars on skis to a “great ecstasy” that Herzog equates with his own cinema, and its search for “elevated”, “ecstatic truth” (Die Grosse Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner [The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner], 1974) (2). Flight, again like Herzog’s cinema, can take us to sights beyond our blinkered daily lives, such as the helicopter that brings back shots of oil wells burning in Kuwait after the first Gulf War (Lektionen in Finsternis [Lessons of Darkness], 1992). But flight can also be synonymous with death, disability and destruction. Stroszek, disillusioned with America, commits suicide on a ski-lift (Stroszek, 1977). Fini becomes deaf and blind after a childhood fall from a staircase. Flight facilitates neo-colonialism, whether in its “benevolent” form – the provision of medical aid to East Africa (Die fliegenden Ärzte von Ostafrika [The Flying Doctors of East Africa], 1969) – or at its most destructive, as fighter planes glide past the Vietnamese villages, emptying bombs (3).

One of these bombers was Dieter Dengler, the lovable hero of one of Herzog’s best-loved films Flucht aus Laos (Little Dieter Needs to Fly, 1997). Or he would have been if his plane hadn’t been shot down over Laos 40 minutes into his maiden mission in 1965. The first of the film’s many ironies is that despite a title suitable for a children’s book about an obsession with flight, and a subject who spends his adult life in airplanes, it narrates a story of being grounded, of an adventure where Dengler is captured, tortured and escapes the Viet Cong, on foot. In any case, flight in Little Dieter is not a source of simple ecstasy. The film ends with a visionary sequence at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, with Dengler walking through a graveyard of obsolete aircraft (the final shot taken, naturally, from the air!). Dengler’s desire to fly has its dark source in watching English bombers blow up his Black Forest village during World War II. Flight may be a release of the soul, but it can also lead to its brutalising: Dengler admits that, as a pilot, he never considered the effect of US bombing raids on the “abstract grid” below (4), but recovered his empathy and humanity when he himself was a prisoner in the villages his colleagues were cheerfully attacking.

Little Dieter has been criticised for not making a direct statement against the war (5). Such sloganeering has never been Herzog’s style; he prefers ironies and ambivalences even if they led some short-sighted critics to read fascist or even neo-Nazi tendencies into his work (6). Nevertheless, despite the recurring negative images of the military in Herzog (7), his representation of Vietnam in Little Dieter seems problematic. Dengler’s heroic narrative of escape and survival depends on opposing the civilised German-American with the wild jungle, and characterising the Viet Cong as sadistic torturers, and Vietnamese villagers as venal. This is hardly an advance on The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) and its like. Dengler re-enacts his capture and torture with extras taken from the film’s location (Thailand, on the Mekong river); they remain silent, literally given no right of reply to Dengler’s endless “rapping” (8). In one scene, where Dengler re-enacts the theft of his engagement ring, and the Viet Cong’s punishment of the thief by chopping off his finger, he has to reassure the wincing extra that “It’s just a movie” in a scene that reeks of well-meaning paternalism.  More tendentious is Dengler’s comparison of his fate – as a combatant of an invading army, the most powerful in the world, laying waste to a sovereign nation and its guerrilla defenders – to that of his anti-Nazi grandfather in 1930s Germany.

Herzog clearly likes, admires and identifies with Dengler (9). In an interview with Paul Cronin he explained how Dengler’s 2001 death left a “great void” in his life, and elsewhere revealed his plans for a fictional version of his story (10) – realised as Rescue Dawn (2006) some years later. But such identification does not mean that Dengler is simply a Herzog substitute, or that Little Dieter treats this stranger-in-a-strange-land uncritically. Though the film is motored by Dengler’s talk, his story is actually mediated throughout the documentary, whose true subject – as so often with Herzog – is not so much Dengler’s adventure as its documentation. Dengler actually recounts his tale at least twice: first in the 1966 press conference following his rescue, and then in the interviews and (often absurd) re-constructions of Little Dieter (11). This latter testimony is “contaminated” by Herzog’s familiar “documentary” strategy of fabricating scenes and statements (12). When Dengler threatens to ramble interminably, Herzog’s voiceover intervenes to get to the point.

Further representations of Dengler’s story (13) include home movie footage of his plane leaving its carrier before being shot down; photographs of an emaciated Dengler taken soon after his rescue; the military and papal honours he subsequently received; and drawings by Juan Santiago of conditions in the Vietnamese prison complex (14). “Official” archive footage of World War II, postwar Germany and Vietnam are balanced by Dengler’s surrealist paintings that condense his experience. These are all different ways of telling and interpreting the same story, and, for Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, weaken the claims of Dengler’s oral history to univocal truth. In common with many Herzog films, Little Dieter breaks down male confidence and prowess (15).

A final undermining is the number of versions in which Little Dieter Needs to Fly has been released. The film was originally commissioned as part of a German television series, Voyages to Hell. Shot in both German and English, the 80-minute (16:9) cut shown theatrically was reduced by over a third when Little Dieter was screened on German and British television (in the Academy ratio). The 2001 Anchor Bay DVD appends a three-minute postscript showing footage of Dengler’s military funeral. The powerful shock of this footage, however – its stark proof that the man we have been watching brim full of life is now dead – confirms that while Herzog the artist-historian may have had misgivings about the issues raised by Dengler’s narrative, Herzog the man was deeply fond of Little Dieter, a fondness most audiences are likely to share.

Flucht aus Laos/Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997 Germany/Britain/France 80 mins)

Prod Co: Werner Herzog Filmproduktion/ZDF/Arte/BBC/Media Ventures Prod: Lucki Stipetic Dir, Scr: Werner Herzog Phot: Peter Zeitlinger Ed: Joe Bini, Glen Scantlebury, Rainer Standke