This film is more affecting for me than Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Herzog's other jungle crash and escape documentary, with which it has many parallels in style and substance. More people need to see it. It was on Google Video for a short time, and is included on a short documentary DVD set. As with a lot of the director's work, he inserts himself shamelessly into the action. He takes the crash survivor Juliane on a plane, and his face is on the edge of the frame, asking, "How do you feel?" But she does not bite. For the first half of the movie, she is stoic and without emotion, the perfect foil for Werner. He has her stand and make monologues awkwardly, and her quiet voice is dubbed in English, making her even more remote. But as it progresses, as she goes to the crash site and each piece of wreckage is methodically shown to her, she eventually gets a little more animated, and it breaks my heart every time, the slow process by which a survivor of trauma allows themselves to feel the things which happened to them. She dismisses the TV movie-of-the-week about her (a bad actress runs from things, befriends monkeys), and we see a clip of it, and she contrasts it with how she spend her actual time in the jungle. She talks about a type of a bird (in a glass cage, in a (her?) museum) that was her "savior." Most importantly, her intellect, not her heart, saves her: she follows small rivers to large ones, and large rivers to civilization.
Werner's wonderful shamelessness about breaking documentary nonfictional piety has two amazing payoffs here. One, showing her a new piece of wreckage far-off from the crash site, he speaks in dubbed English about the horrible history of the airline, how it used motorcycle mechanics, and overpacked its airliners so more people died than necessary. He stands there, demanding emotion from her, in front of the camera, and she says, "Yes, theirs was the worst reputation imaginable." I wrote this on the marker board in my cubicle. If you're surviving, you keep the emotions tight. You move, you think, you don't dwell. Julianne is still doing this, decades later.
And second, the ending. (SPOILER of sorts) I interpret the beautiful ending as cynical on the part of our director. It contradicts the movie in front of it, full of the romantic idea of being rescued, implying death, and showing instead, her rescuer, himself today an injured man being helped up an embankment by his family. I love it, I watch it over and over. (SPOILER)
Werner's wonderful shamelessness about breaking documentary nonfictional piety has two amazing payoffs here. One, showing her a new piece of wreckage far-off from the crash site, he speaks in dubbed English about the horrible history of the airline, how it used motorcycle mechanics, and overpacked its airliners so more people died than necessary. He stands there, demanding emotion from her, in front of the camera, and she says, "Yes, theirs was the worst reputation imaginable." I wrote this on the marker board in my cubicle. If you're surviving, you keep the emotions tight. You move, you think, you don't dwell. Julianne is still doing this, decades later.
And second, the ending. (SPOILER of sorts) I interpret the beautiful ending as cynical on the part of our director. It contradicts the movie in front of it, full of the romantic idea of being rescued, implying death, and showing instead, her rescuer, himself today an injured man being helped up an embankment by his family. I love it, I watch it over and over. (SPOILER)