O Pequeno Dieter Precisa Voar

Wow.this is a touching story! First i saw 'Rescue Dawn'.I didn't 'like' it. And now i have seen the person , Dieter Dengler , about whom this story is being told by Herzog.Very Impressing.Dieter is a driven human being who encountered the most opposite emotions in his live on this earth.what an extraordinary life this person has led. His tale about the capture by the Patet Lao/Vietcong and thus his suffering is horrifying but what's most impressive is his incredible will to survive.How could he find the strenght ? In a haunting way , Dieter is telling us in full flowing sentences about his terrible ordeal during his captivity... he is a great storyteller and Herzog does him the justice this brave man deserves.

In my opinion.'Little Dieter needs to fly ' tells it all ! , leaving nothing to the imagination , thus making ' Rescue dawn ' a superfluous film. The horror doesn't get more real than in the words of Dieter Dengler himself.He totally succeeds in painting the picture.

"I'm not a hero. Only people who are dead are heroes." - Dieter Dengler

Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a 1997 documentary by Werner Herzog of the life of Vietnam war-hero Dieter Dengler, begins with a quotation from the Book of Revelations: "And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them." As the film starts, Dieter walks into a tattoo shop in San Francisco and looks at a painting of Death in a fiery, horse-drawn chariot. "Death didn't want me," he says, referring to his survival after six months in a Viet Cong prison camp.

Herzog documents Dengler's life from his childhood in Wildburg in the Black Forest region of Germany to his escape and rescue from Laos. Growing up in Germany during World War II, Dengler listened to the constant sound of Allied planes overhead and dreamed of becoming a pilot. "As a child," Herzog says in voice-over, "Dieter saw things that made no earthly sense at all. Germany had been transformed into a dreamscape of the surreal." Dieter came to the United States when he was only 18, joined the Navy and was trained to become a pilot. He moved to California and was sent to Vietnam in 1966. "It all looked strange", Dieter says, "like a distant barbaric dream". On his first mission as a pilot, Dieter was shot down and captured by the Pathet Lao, then later turned over to the Viet Cong. He remained a prisoner in Laos for six months.

Told through archival footage, dream sequences, recreations in actual jungle locations, exotic music, and surreal imagery, the film is divided into four chapters, each representing a period from Dengler's life. Like a Greek tragedy, Herzog has named the sequences: The Man, His Dream, Punishment, and Redemption. Little Dieter Needs to Fly is not a linear documentary, but a very personal and poetic film, similar in a way to Agnes Varda's documentary essay, "The Gleaners and I". Having long been fascinated with the experience of men in jungles (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo) and having himself grown up in Germany during the war, Herzog provides a voice-over commentary that is as much about himself as it is about Dieter Dengler.

Dieter tells his gruesome tale in a strangely chatty, matter-of-fact manner without anger or bitterness, almost nonchalantly recounting mind-numbing details of his captivity and torture. He does not try to place the events in a historical or political context or to comment on the rights and wrongs of the war, but provides a strictly personal account of his survival against overwhelming odds.

Footage of both bombed out German cities in World War II and bombs lighting up the dense foliage over the Vietnam jungle make the experience very vivid. Dvorak and Bach, Tibetan throat singing, and native African chants are brilliantly interspersed to add depth and beauty to the experience. A chant from Madagascar, "Oay Lahy E", sung while Dieter walks through a sea of fighter planes, adds a final transcendent touch. Little Dieter Needs to Fly is an unforgettable film that moves beyond the limitations of the genre to become a moving testament to both the absurdity of war and the resilience of the human spirit.

NOTE: Be sure to watch past the end credits. There is a postscript on the DVD that truly completes the experience.

This film is excellent! Fear of watching documentary movies? Cancel your shrink and watch little Dieter's story. You won't believe how captivating this fine piece of film making is until you have experienced it. I'm eager to say that it even out goes almost any Vietnam war movie, including Apocalypse Now. It's a real story, it's a personal story, a story about the love for flying, the dream of being a pilot and the nightmare of being shot down above enemy's territory. All is shot in a "return to..." style - at location, Herzog asking the questions, Dieter answering them in a memorable German-English accent, and with fine remembrance pointing out what happened where about 25 years before. There is this part that I told friends over and over again: bailed out from his US Navy plane, Dieter becomes a POW of the Vietcong. Blindfolded for the greater part of the days, he is being dragged through the Southeast Asian jungle for miles and miles - on bare feet. Tortured, insulted, disorientated, hungered and covered with infected wounds, they arrive in a small, friendly village to spend the night. The next morning, after walking for several hours, Dieter discovers someone stole his wedding ring from his finger. That is it. He can take no more. He starts to cry, as a result of complete exhaustion. The Vietcong men react surprised. Dieter manages to explain what happened. Immediately, the group returns to the village and starts searching for the person that stole the ring. They find the man, immediately chop of his finger and return the ring to Dieter. - The movie is full of these mind boggling and surprising situations. The immense cultural differences, the clash of East and West, the fear of the unknown (i.e. all that stands for America on the one hand, the Asian jungle and his secrets on the other) can be sensed the entire movie. Back problems? That's because you sat at the edge of your seat for two hours and didn't notice.

The movie is mainly a monologue, with glimpses of Dieter's life nowadays, but built in its central section around the somewhat bizarre device of having him return to the jungle with a band of Vietnamese who partly reenact his experiences - he demonstrates torture techniques, the march through the jungle etc. Herzog is too much a filmmaker to be satisfied with mere memories it seems - he must also see: although with full knowledge that this form of retrospective seeing will be inescapably somewhat bizarre. Dieter's past traumas and current stability (although he's still preoccupied by the idea of closed doors and is still hoarding vast unneeded emergency food supplies - the former seems a bit staged, but that's part of the intrigue) seem to chime with Herzog's own past glories and now relative reduced state, and the title with its obviously childish edge has an air of longing and acknowledgment of past fantasies and their fatal possibilities. But despite the true pain of the monologue, Herzog doesn't dwell on adversity, but rather on the ultimate grandeur (for example, the final image of thousands of military planes parked in the desert) - in which context his movie seems to fall short of the true cosmic resonance of some of Errol Morris' work. But he coaxes Dieter's story expertly and has the classic strengths of a good story-teller, and the movie's quite fascinating even if it doesn't completely gel in all respects.

I consider this a breathtaking but deceptive film because it seems so simple and straightforward: a Vietnam survivor tells his harrowing tale and some of the story is reenacted on location. Reviewers sometimes even claim that Herzog's presence in the film is minimal, but how wrong they are. We know that all documentaries are "mediated" to some extent and this one has Herzog's subtle hand all over it, most notably in the stunning music, the unbelievably expert selection of archival footage, and the management of cascading images. The evocative power of this film is astounding, starting with its title, the opening title card from the book of "Revelation," and the initial voice-over. This is a movie that one can watch repeatedly with increasing wonder, not a simple commodity that is gulped down with one's favorite beverage on the way to the evening news. This is one of those movies that can resonate with you for a lifetime.