Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)

Dir: WERNER HERZOG
Country: FRANCE/UK/GERMANY

Like the ski flier Walter Steiner in Herzog’s earlier documentary The Great Ecstasy of  Woodcarver Steiner (1974) Dieter Dengler had one overriding dream as a child - this dream was to fly. That this dream would take Dengler from the poverty and hunger struck ruins of post war Bavaria, to the streets of New York, to the US navy, and eventually to sixth months in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp speaks volumes for his will and determination to achieve his life long ambition. The latter episode of course was totally unpredicted, but part of Dengler’s charm is the naïve innocence that led to him joining the navy and eventually piloting an aircraft. In many ways for Dengler the Vietnam War was simpler the enabler of his dream. He had little concept or awareness of the human cost beneath the green canopy of the jungle, but just two hours into his first flight he found himself within that terrain and plunged into a fight for survival. Herzog contextualises this with the inclusion of some inspired stock footage. The images of the jungle landscape exploding in slow motion were recycled for his feature film based on Dengler’s experiences Rescue Dawn (2006) and they possess an odd and haunting poetry. In contrast the footage of jungle survival techniques put out by the military in the 1960’s is laughable and painfully ironic when one thinks of Dengler’s ordeal.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)

Dir: LES BLANK
Country: USA

The Criterion Collection’s DVD of Burden of Dreams (1982) is an excellent package offering a wealth of important contextual information. This includes commentary tracks from directors Werner Herzog and Les Blank, Blank’s informative and absorbing diary of his time in the Peruvian jungle shooting his documentary, a lengthy retrospective interview with Herzog, and most priceless of all a short 20 minute documentary made by Blank in 1980 called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Any release of short documentary material either by or about Herzog is a mini event in itself, and due to the films content and its title this has always been an exotic and long sought after item for those seeking out Herzog related material. Herzog’s militant attitude to filmmaking is given an opportunity to flourish in this short piece which was filmed during one of numerous breaks in the fragmented and troubled production of Fitzcarraldo (1982). At some point in the late 1970’s Herzog made the bold assertion that he would eat his shoe if young filmmaker Errol Morris succeeded in his quest to make a film. This bet was both an inspiration to Morris and an example of Herzog’s attitude to the importance of individuals battling the odds to achieve their vision. Naturally Morris succeeded and the film opens with Herzog flying in to attend a screening of Gates of Heaven (1978) and to make good on his shoe eating bet.

Burden of Dreams (1982)

Dir: LES BLANK
Country: USA

Burden of Dreams is a remarkable documentary that in many ways holds a greater prominence than the film it is documenting. The filming of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) was becoming a legend while it was happening, but Les Blank’s documentary helps to clear aside the mythologizing in much the same way that Herzog’s army of extras cleared away a mountain pass for the central metaphor of the film. Blank’s camera helps to humanise the proceedings and documents in unflinching detail the heavy price that numerous people paid in service of Herzog’s dream. Dreams hang heavily in the air like the humid temperatures of the Peruvian jungle, and this is a document about the futility of attempting to capture a reality on screen that exists within the fevered realms of a dreamscape. The ‘making of’ documentary has become a debased form in the modern age of DVD with producers employing film crews dedicated to producing bland and generic featurettes during the making of the film for the sell through market. These artless self-centred ego trips are barely watchable, but it means that the cost of producing material for the DVD is absorbed into the budget of the film. The genius of Burden of Dreams, and the reason such a film wouldn’t be made now, is that it concerns itself with things other than the making of the film. Blank’s documentary possesses an organic and improvised feel which uses the events surrounding the production of Fitzcarraldo as an anchor for a very inquiring camera.

La Soufriere (1977)

Dir: WERNER HERZOG
Country: WEST GERMANY

The subtitle to this short thirty minute documentary from Werner Herzog is 'waiting for an inevitable catastrophe'. Within that statement lies an aspect of Herzog’s approach to cinema that has helped to create a mythology of reckless risk taking, a sense that danger is a fundamental aspect in his never ending search for new images. Although an impression of catastrophe is not inevitable in Herzog’s cinema, there is always an echo within the frame of the extremities and hardships undertaken to achieve the finished product. More so than any other filmmaker, the act of filmmaking itself becomes an essential aspect to understanding the fictional world Herzog creates. The same idea can be usefully applied to his documentaries - but La Soufriere is surely the one in which the spectre of death and destruction looms most palpably in every frame. In late 1976 Herzog along with his two cameramen Jorg Schmidt-Retwein and Edward Lachman travelled to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, an island that had been evacuated due to the imminent explosion of the volcano La Soufriere. However a handful of peasants had remained on the island, despite claims by volcanologists that to do so would mean certain death. Intrigued by this attitude to impending death Herzog was determined to interview these men to get a better understanding of their cavalier approach to life.

The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974)

Dir: WERNER HERZOG

Country: WEST GERMANY

aka:
Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner

This magnificent documentary is a both a study of sporting endeavour and a journey into the psychology of a man willing to risk his very existence to attain his life long dream of flight. The Swiss ski jumper/flier Walter Steiner is probably Werner Herzog’s perfect protagonist. Steiner is an exceptional and introverted figure, a man on the edge of the world, who lives a life of contrasting and conflicting emotions. On the one hand Steiner lives a simple rural life in which he spends his days quietly carving objects out of wood. He appears unassuming and shy, somewhat awkward and self conscious in front of the camera, although when left to his thoughts is surprisingly eloquent and poetic. Herzog deftly emphasises the mundane aspects of Steiner’s life which allows for a far greater impact when we see Steiner launching himself at ridiculous speeds into the alpine skies and clearing 170 meters. The film opens with this image - a beautiful but eerie shot of Steiner in slow motion, his mouth agape, the mountainous backdrop still and implacable and the ethereal music of Popol Vuh giving the shot a resonance and grandeur that slips it into the realm of the ecstatic.

The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)

Dir: WERNER HERZOG
Country: GERMANY, FRANCE, AUSTRALIA, UK

German director Werner Herzog has made a career out of an intriguing and often controversial fusion of fiction and documentary. His fictional feature films such as Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) foreground the hardship, toil and risk of their filming and come across as much as essays on the perils and difficulties of the filmmaking process as they do works of poetic art. Likewise, documentaries such as The Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974) and Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) have all the embellishments and stylisations one would expect in a feature film.

Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

Dir: WERNER HERZOG
Country: USA

Eccentric Bavarian filmmaker Werner Herzog continues to defy categorisation - which is some achievement after forty seven years of making films. His movies are never less than inscrutable, perplexing and enigmatic. Even when Herzog deals in more straightforward subject matter he brings to it an otherworldly sensibility. Encounters at the End of the World is a mystifying and unfathomable experience in large part due to an episodic structure that mirrors the itinerant souls that find themselves encamped at the end of the world. Herzog was inspired to shoot a documentary film in Antarctica by the unearthly underwater footage shot by diver and musician Henry Kaiser. A good deal of this found footage appears in Herzog’s bizarre science-fiction parable The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) doubling as a strange and ethereal alien world. Herzog’s Antarctic adventure was approved by the National Science Foundation, and he was determined not to treat the landscape in the romanticised sentimental fashion displayed in March of the Penguins (2005). Instead he sets about asking the peculiar questions of nature and life that we have come to expect of him, and treats the landscape with a reverence bordering on the spiritual.