For this week's post, please choose one of the following films to watch: either Herzog's 1987 fiction film Cobra Verde (streaming free online here) or his 1998 non-fiction film Little Dieter Needs to Fly (streaming free online here). Both films are available for $2.99 at iTunes and Amazon, etc. as well.
Once you've watched the film of your choice, please let me know what you thought about it, especially in terms of how it does - or even more interestingly, does not - connect to the work and words of Herzog's we've been studying so far this semester.
Write whatever you'd like but please be sure to address the following questions within your response no matter what:
- Of the two films I offered here, why did you choose the one you did? Please explain.
- If you chose the fiction film Cobra Verde, please take a moment to detail any moments in that film that either were or seemed to be real or at least not fictional.
- And if you chose to watch Little Dieter Needs to Fly, please detail any moments here that either were or seemed to be not real or fictional.
Enjoy whichever film you choose to watch, please leave your comments here by no later than Wednesday at noon - and I look forward to seeing you and your final papers come Thursday morning!
Little Dieter Needs to Fly was honestly a refreshing Werner Herzog film. This film reminded me of his earlier film work with Land of Silence and Darkness simply by his use of stunning and powerful imagery and story telling. It theres one thing that I learned most in this course, that’s Werner Herzog is an astonishing story teller. In the opening scene you see Dieter walking into a tattoo parlor describing a life changing event. Somewhat like a religious experience with large doors and opening like heavens gates with angles slowly leaping towards him. This reminded me of when Werner Herzog had once said he his own events with a religious experience. I thought it was a unique way of putting his personal experiences in this film. When Dieter is describing why he wanted to fly you see this powerful imagery of bombs falling and exploding onto villages. I found such imagery to be so compelling that I was able to correlate it with the imagery in Land of Silence and Darkness. In that film, you see these hopeless, spiritually broken people trying to communicate with the world. We see the deaf and blind sitting in beds living day in and day out in total numbing silence and darkness. It gave me the same chilling sensation that we see in many Werner Herzog films. One classic Werner Herzog feature to his film productions is his music choices. In Little Dieter Needs to Fly you hear this soothing yet ominous music that really grabs this viewer and hooks them into Dieters reality. I found it oddly unique that Werner Herzog takes on the job to find these men of interesting stories and learn about their lives to show the world. Like we see in Stroszek, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Gods Angry Man. With Dieter I found his character to be more comedic than anything oddly enough. Mainly with his perceptions of doors when he was a prisoner of war back to being a free man. We walk into his home and he has tons of paintings of just open doors, I couldn’t help but laugh. If anything were to stay with my memory from watching this film, its when Dieter says “Oh I’m, not a hero, only the people who are dead are the heroes”. Hearing that from a man who has such an astonishing story to tell, will stay with me forever.
ReplyDeleteLittle Dieter was a movie that was so outlandish and bizarre that I believed nearly all of it. Nothing the Vietcong do surprises me (having known enough veterans not to doubt them) the only parts in the documentary that I doubted were the stories of Dieter in the jungle. As he repeatedly says, he was hallucinating the entire time so I feel like some of the things he saw and did were simply hallucinations. The leeches wrapping like a belt around him and some of the more grisley details seem a bit too outlandish but at the same time it is possible if unlikely. It was pretty easy to see that Dieter was a very wounded person, hiding his deep emotional scars behind the facade of enthusiasm and adventure. Herzog of course picks up on this and chooses to make his film because of it, and it is a very Herzogian documentary. it blends reality with the hallucinations Dieter experienced in such a way as to leave neither all that easy to distinguish but making the film the stronger for it.
ReplyDeleteJake Hughes
So I think I can speak for the rest of the class in saying I chose Little Dieter Needs To Fly for two reasons: Because I needed a break from Kinski and because it's significantly shorter than Cobra Verde. I'm a little disappointed in my choice though. Little Dieter is a weird documentary. It's a story we've all heard before, whether from first hand accounts or in the media so I don't understand why Herzog was drawn to this specific story. Dieter totally fits the type of character Herzog likes to deal with. A person who knows exactly what they are meant to do in life and they will pursue it even if it kills them. Dieter is a real life Fitzcarraldo. He loves to fly so he joins the air force and guess what? IT ALMOST KILLS HIM. And after the fact, he still only feels safe in an airplane. Sounds kinda similar to a man named Werner who loved making movies even though it almost killed him, yet he continues to do so.
ReplyDeleteThis documentary was weird because the story could've been told in Dieter's living room but Herzog dragged him all the way back to Vietnam to relive his experiences. If the point of the film was to get an emotional reaction from Dieter going back and retelling his story then I would agree with Herzog's approach. However, there's really only one moment where Dieter gets uncomfortable and it just seems mean. I thought the film was gonna show more about PTSD and include more troubled experiences in Dieter's life after he was rescued but he just relives the story. It reminded me a lot of The Act of Killing until it didn't. I also found it unnecessary to have Viet Cong with him while he recounted the stories. I thought maybe he would forgive them or something but they just stood in the background making him and myself feel very uncomfortable. Also, when he would recount his experiences with the Viet Cong, the soundtrack included very primal and honestly evil sounding music that I thought showed some bias. It was entertaining and I now see why Herzog made Rescue Dawn but like I said, I've heard this story before and I wasn't too pleased with the execution of this documentary compared to others of Herzog.
I chose “Little Dieter Needed to Fly” because I enjoy Herzog’s documentaries more than his narratives (so far), and because honestly, it was 45 minutes shorter and I am trying to get to all of my other finals. The film opened with a quote, which immediately made me think “Well, this is a Herzog film, so I should probably look up whether or not that quote is even true”. This time, it is. My immediate observation was that Dieter enjoyed the attention and possibly even the thrill that he got from re-telling these stories. I wondered if his OCD with opening and closing doors was real, as well as the obsession with all of the paintings of doorways in his house. Although if it were fake, I don’t know if Herzog would spend that much money of the budget designing a house with these decorations. I wondered how this man even afforded such an enormous house, and with such grand design and decoration and collections of relics and art. I wondered if his mother really would cook the wallpapers they collected from bombed out buildings in post-war Germany, or whether he really did hear the voices of his friends as he drove, and I don’t know if Dieter uttering the lines “Little Dieter needed to fly” were the reason for the film’s title, or whether they were placed into his mouth to make sense of the namesake. I will say this though, for a split second after he utters these lines, he looks directly into the lens of the camera with a facial expression that I personally interpret as “Is that a cut? Did I do that right?"
ReplyDeleteMost importantly, this did not feel like a Herzog film to me, because of the excessive reenactments and staging. While I am fine with Herzog’s usual ad-libs of fiction in his documentaries in his search for “ecstatic truth”, I do not like the reenactments. They remind me too much of talk shows like Maury in which they terribly dramatize and stage the original event, and it really does take away front he authenticity of the film. For example, a moment that drove me crazy was the black and white footage of people looking into a store window at sausages as Herzog narrates a story about Dieter’s childhood in Germany. Why did Herzog narrate only this moment, while Dieter told the rest, and why would I believe that I was watching actual footage of a child version of Dieter looking in a store window in post-war Germany when he just mentioned that he was eating wallpaper for dinner; where would this camera have come from?
Dieter throughout the film sat in an air force plane, worked in a factory that made church bells, and stood around in villages with shirtless vietnamese men around him holding guns. These are not things that he does on an every day basis, so I am not sure why Herzog wanted to return to those locations. I did understand a bit about why Herzog wanted to place him back into the jungle environment, because Dieter has been constantly retelling these same stories for decades since his rescue, and I can only assume that over time they have grown stale and rehearsed. By placing him back in this environment and asking him to reenact the same conditions that he was in, Herzog begins to make him uncomfortable again, and therefore ignite that ecstatic truth. This entire portion of the film reminds me of the documentary “The Act of Killing” in the manners of how they reenact the events.
While I am not a fan of this documentary, because it honestly bored me and I am not interested in Dieter as a character (he comes off as too humble and righteous, I need a flawed character) I do love the fact that Herzog then made a fiction film off of the same story, “Rescue Dawn”. I think its amazing that he explored two sides of the same coin, and of course he had to work with Dieter before determining how to honor his story in a narrative form. Even though I do not think that this documentary is very Herzogian, this last fact alone definitely is.
Werner Herzog proves himself to be a brilliant documentarian once again with Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Similar to Land of Silence and Darkness, this film gives the viewer an immense appreciation for those things we take for granted. Those things could be as simple as the ability to open and close a door, or possess a healthy amount of food.
ReplyDeleteFor Dieter, these things we take for granted are most important in his life. Much like Herzog, Dieter is a man with strong will and appreciation. Not once throughout the film does Dieter raise his voice or appear outwardly upset even though the traumatic experiences he describes would put a lesser man in the ground. He speaks very plainly about a story of significance—a story that deserves to be heard. Herzog has an unparalleled talent for finding wonderful human beings with such epic tales.
During scenes when Dieter is speaking about his torture, it is easy to recall his line earlier in the film: “Only dead people are heroes.” What does this say? It shows that Dieter is a man so far ahead in his knowledge and experience that he refuses the worldly accolades in pursuit of something greater. He knows death well, and is perfectly at ease with his place in life.
Dieter compares the images of death to that of jellyfish drifting calmly through the water. It is strange to consider death itself when these images are juxtaposed with worldly horror (like the bombing sequences). There is something truly surreal that encompasses the entire film. Herzog shows his mastery of the dreamworld (which he, ironically, does not have himself) by diving into Dieter’s nightmares—a field of broken airplanes. Only when the film ends do we have Dieter’s salvation: a shot that places him at the center of miles and miles of airplanes.
The one thing that will stay with me from this film, though, is Dieter’s face. I felt like I could befriend this man right now. He is strong, passionate and loyal. As he dwells silently on the horrors of the past, our minds fill with terrible pictures. The loss of Dwayne is one. Dieter was there while his friend screamed and was silenced. Dieter was alone while he was pursued by a bear. This bear meant Dieter’s death, and when the bear leaves even death will not have him. He becomes a man between two spaces, trapped in the limbo of worlds. It is impossible to forget Dieter’s reenactment of being tied up and hurried through the woods. This world is a painful and contemplative place. Herzog has tackled another beast.
Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a film I've seen before once or twice, as well as Rescue Dawn. I've always thought that Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a decent documentary, a fine piece of work, but nothing truly special. This opinion, I believe, was due largely in part to my ignorance at just how special of an artist Werner Herzog is, how naively and colorfully he views the world.
ReplyDeleteI believe that Werner Herzog made this film because he saw something of himself in Dieter Dengler, an unstoppable drive in his spirit, a bulletproof resolve not just to survive, but to realize the dreams that make this life worth surviving in the first place. Dieter is certainly damaged internally from his ordeals, but he does his best to convince us that these scars barely give him pause. He does not look at an airplane and see a machine that caused him six months of unimaginable torture, the loss of a dear friend, and a lifetime of internal anguish. He looks at an airplane and sees the freedom he saw as a boy, and his passion is undeterred by his miseries.
On the subject of things in this film that are "real" or "not real", I feel that this class and likely the majority of those privileged enough to see this man's work do not fully understand what the purpose of an ecstatic truth is. The story is real, but the details are just that. Details. Werner Herzog has the gift of feeling things with a raw soul, not through the jaded lens that downplays emotion and rationalizes. I believe that he sees the ecstatic truth as his method by which he will bring the audience to feel what he is feeling, so that his dreams may adequately be interpreted by his audiences. He's not telling us a story about survival, he's sharing with us the experience of Dieter Dengler's unstoppable spirit. Were his feet ever swollen into nothing more than giant white stumps? Did he really have a belt of leeches around his waist? Did he really eat wallpaper as a child? Did he really live on the streets and in cars for years? Who. Gives. A shit. Dieter Dengler grew up in postwar Germany with nothing. He left his home and came to America with no assurance that he wouldn't just starve there. He lived in America for years, doing whatever he had to to get by, and he did all of this just so he could fly a plane. He got shot down and came closer to death than most ever will, survived, and he continued to fly planes. He crashed four more times and continues to fly planes. He lived a life so tremendous, overcame hardships so horrendous, that the average viewer simply cannot comprehend what they hear. These ecstatic truths, true or false, are the bridge between the viewer and the experience being presented. It is a means by which we are able to understand, as best we can. So maybe the things I listed do seem a little too large for life. But wouldn't it be amazing if all of it were true?
I chose to watch Little Dieter Needs to Fly only because it was shorter than Cobra Verde. That was the sole purpose why I chose this film, which I know is not the best reason. I thought that this film was a little unnecessary to make, especially by Herzog. I do understand that Herzog is attracted to people like Dieter, but going beyond that point, I don’t really see why Herzog felt like he NEEDED to make this film. With most of his other films we’ve seen in class, there has been a sense of urgency to his work; a sense that he needed the world to see what he has captured and created. With this film, I felt that this aspect was lacking tremendously. I also was disappointed with this film because this was the first time I ever truly felt uncomfortable while watching something of Herzog’s. I’m not talking about the mind-opening distress that leaves viewers with something new. I’m talking about actual discomfort that left me doubting Herzog for doing this. The most uncomfortable part for me was when Herzog showed Dieter retelling his stories while the Viet Cong, the men who killed thousands of Americans and allies like himself, were right there beside him. The best part was that they didn’t even say anything.
ReplyDeleteI would have to say the only parts that seemed fictional were the stories themselves. The belt of leeches around him, the insanely swollen feet to the point they were indistinguishable, etc. However, I didn’t take these stories too literally. My grandpa was a Lieutenant in Vietnam and has told me stories of leeches and other horrific things he had to go through while fighting over there. While listening to my grandpa and Dieter talk about their stories, I have taken away one thing: that they were in hell. So if they say they emerged from lakes and streams with enough leeches to wrap all the way around their waist, then I believe it, because the other things they had to go through while fighting over there were just as hellish.
Overall, this film was just average for me. The people Herzog chooses to make films about or with are always fascinating characters, but that shouldn’t, in my opinion, be the only focus of film for a mature, experienced filmmaker such as Herzog himself. Again, I did not feel the urgency in this film, and I believe that’s what turned me off the most.
I'm a little disappointed nobody so far has watched Cobra Verde, as from my research it seems like a fascinating movie, one I will get to eventually. I watched "Dieter" merely because it downloaded first.
ReplyDeleteI was pleased to finally see some of Herzog's later work, as it puts into perspective everything that came before it. It's interesting to see the thematic questions and statements that pervade through his work, even into "Dieter."
The entire film was scripted, and you can tell from the narration that Herzog is trying to summarize and encapsulate Dieter's story and personality, for it wouldn't be entertaining to hear him drone on for an hour. The re-enactment in Vietnam was a brilliant move, one that makes you understand what Dieter was going through far more than if he sat on a couch and told you. I have no problem with Dieter feeling uncomfortable, as he signed up for this. I know many people with PTSD and while it is not something to be taken lightly, I think this moment of pain that Dieter feels makes it more real for the audience than anything else in the film. It's in this moment we fully understand that Dieter's been through some shit, and for a second I questioned if this was really a reenactment at all.
Certainly not his most interesting work, but Herzog proves his skill, making an entertaining film that arguably nobody else could have made much more watchable. Unfortunately I have no more mental energy to expend on this film, and must return to my finals.
I chose Cobra Verde to watch simply because out of Herzog's movies that we've screened in class, I enjoyed his collaborations with Kinski the most - excluding Fitzcarraldo which I found to be a disappointment.
ReplyDeleteIt seems as if Kinski and Herzog were able to capture lightning in a bottle with their early works. However, that faded almost as quickly as lightning strikes. While Fitzcarraldo was disappointing, it was by no means a terrible movie. It felt like more of a step backwards compared to Nosferatu and especially Aguirre. If Fitzcarraldo was a step in the wrong direction, Cobra Verde was a flag planted in that territory.
In My Best Fiend, Herzog discusses this era of his and Kinski relationship as being tiresome. It is quite clear from his discussions that by the time Cobra Verde rolled around Herzog had had enough of Kinski's bombastic - unquestionably mentally unhinged - behavior. It seems as if this was beginning on Fitzcarraldo too, but at least Herzog had his passion attached to that film to see it through. No such luck with Cobra Verde.
This is ultimately a shame. Underneath, at its core, there seems to be a really decent movie buried deep within the scales of Cobra Verde - trying desperately to burst through. Unfortunately, it never does. Despite being two hours in length, the film feels as if it were edited together with a meat cleaver. At times it gets so confusing to understand what's happened between one sequence and the next that I personally gave up trying to figure it out. In other moments, it almost seems lazy. In one sequence, Kinski's character tells his army of African women that they're not ready to fight. This is immediately followed by a sequence where he tells the women that they're ready. This would have been much smoother with some sort of scene spliced in between. The entire movie plays out this way.
Even Kinski is rather uninspired, moving around the set with his typical scowl and crazy eyes - interrupted by moments of his outbursts which - at this point - no longer contain the power and delivery they had in earlier films of his like Aguirre or even For a Few Dollars More.
It is because of all of this that Cobra Verde feels like a Herzog movie, with its landscape shots, spinning flags (mimicking the pinwheels in Signs of Life), and rambling dialogues, and yet it feels like Herzog's most uninspired movie. The piecing together of this movie is so breathless it just feels as if by the time post production rolled around Herzog said to his editor, "Fuck it, as long as it's somewhat cohesive. I don't care anymore."
There is only one moment in Cobra Verde that felt authentic - or non-fictional - to me, and it came at the end of the movie. Kinski watches as a group of young African girls sing a song. The same group of girls sings over the film's credits. I guarantee they were a group of girls Herzog heard or saw singing while on location and he decided on the spot to include them in the film. Other than this moment, the film lacks any other moment of authenticity - maybe due to its overall lack of inspiration.
In my opinion: Fitzcarraldo was a disappointment of something beautiful being lost, and Cobra Verde was a eulogy of that thing's death.