At the age of 18, Dieter Dengler left his home in the Black Forest to become a pilot in America. After serving in the United States Air Force, he joined the US Navy where he was stationed as a fighter pilot on an aircraft carrier. He was then sent to fight in the Vietnam War, during which he was shot down over Laos and taken prisoner. After making a remarkable escape, he returned to his military unit in Thailand. Werner Herzog films Dengler at his house not far from San Francisco, accompanies him on a visit to his old hometown in the Black Forest and travels with Dengler to the Far East, where, together, they recreate episodes of his escape. A short epilogue shows Dieter Dengler's funeral in 2001 at Arlington National Cemetery.

Herzog introduces his film with a verse from John the Apostle: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die; and death shall flee from them.” (Revelation, 9:6). Herzog thus demonstrates from the onset that he sees more in the fate of Dieter Dengler than that of just one man, following his instincts without reflection. In the opening scenes, the director films his hero walk into a tattoo parlour and choose a tattoo. The image is reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer's ”Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

During their visit to his home town of Wildberg, Dieter Dengler recalls how he first came to want to be a pilot. As a small boy, he had watched as the American aircrafts bombed his neighbourhood. At first it had been hard for him to imagine the freedom above the clouds; the death and destruction below had been too overwhelming. The direction his life would take was not influenced by the pursuit of a dream job but by a traumatising experience. ”I never wanted to go to war,“ admits Dieter, but it was the only way he was going to get to fly an aeroplane. He may not have wanted to become a soldier but he nonetheless became a perpetrator. The damage he thereby suffered, however, appears rather harmless and a little curious. We see a man entering his house on the San Francisco hills. He locks and unlocks the front door a number of times before actually entering. Once he is in, he immediately steps out again. Dengler feels compelled to perform this ritual. After having been kept prisoner, it is important for him to know he has absolute control over doors. Large pictures of open doors adorn the walls of his enormous living room. Inside the house Dieter hoards food provisions. He even reveals a hiding place beneath the floorboards. On the roof terrace overlooking the valley, a model of a Spitfire is perched on a mast, a fighter plane from WWII. It was presumably a Spitfire that Dieter had seen as a child. Herzog asks Dengler what it means to him to be a hero. The ex-soldier answers, ”Only the dead are heroes.“ A conviction that stems, perhaps, from the Nazi era of his childhood. Years ago, says Dengler, his grandfather was the only inhabitant of Wildberg to have voted against the National Socialists, for which he was persecuted. In honour of his memory, Dieter claims to have refused to sign a declaration against America's war in Vietnam during his captivity. A somewhat peculiar parallel, which Herzog leaves without elucidation.

Time and again during this documentary, the question arises as to how much is truth and how much is fabrication. Why does Dieter disclose the details of his food stash, a secret that helps him ”sleep at night“, so openly in a film? Herzog himself has labelled ”Little Dieter Needs to Fly“ as a feature documentary, a hybrid and contradiction in itself. But the director is not concerned with the simple cataloguing and displaying of facts. He wants to delve deeper into his hero's dilemma. At first glance, as is so often the case with Herzog, the film seems apolitical. At no point during his commentary does the film director overtly condemn the Vietnam War. Herzog instead makes a political strongpoint of the mechanical workings of war. Take, for example, the archive footage taken from a bomber plane. No people are visible from such a height and the explosion below looks like a bouquet of rapidly blossoming flowers. Herzog thus enables the viewer to see through the aesthetics of horror, something on which war films, including Coppola's ”Apocalypse Now“, so often capitalize. The same can be said of Herzog's choice for the soundtrack, which is sometimes abrasively incongruous with the image: the air raid is accompanied by tangos from the Argentinean composer Carlos Gardel, scenes in the Lao jungle by songs from the Mongolian singer Kongar-ol Ondar, while Dvorak's ”New World Symphony“ plays during Dieter's dream of an aeroplane wreckage.

When Dieter Dengler recalls his captivity and subsequent escape, it reads like a never-ending sequence of horrors; but precisely these scenes (whether contrived or not) show the overriding will to live in direct contrast to the film's running theme of having a death wish. This contradiction is left unresolved. After leaving the US Navy, Herzog tells us that Dieter worked as a test pilot, surviving four further crashes. Why did he carry on for so long?

Even the scenes filmed in Arlington National Cemetery in 2001 leave us in some doubt as to whether or not Dieter Dengler really was laid to rest there. It is possible that the presence of Dieter's rescuer, Eugene Deatrick, with whom Dieter had celebrated Thanksgiving years back, was prompted by the film director. The US flag, which soldiers fold above the coffin in a mechanical manner, is then handed over to an Asian looking woman who is accompanied by a young man, perhaps her son. Consequently, Herzog does finally depict a kind of reconciliation and union between the two fronts, as ambiguous as this may be. Whether he fabricated it or not is ultimately of no consequence.

Production Country

Germany (DE), United Kingdom (GB)

Production Period

1997

Production Year

1997

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,37

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Documentary

Genre

Biography / Portrait

Topic

Violence, Film History

Available Media

DVD

Original Version

English (en)

DVD

Subtitles

German (de), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Italian (it), Turkish (tr), Russian (ru)