Bath Film Festival 2007

Rescue Dawn

Dietrich Dengler is an easy-going but resourceful fighter pilot, catapulted into the hell of the Indochinese jungles when he’s selected for the covert Tonkin Bay operation that sparked the US entry into the war in Vietnam. Miraculously surviving the downing of his plane, he faces near-starvation, capture and imprisonment with an unstinting belief in his own salvation. A seemingly uncharacteristic foray into the mainstream from Herzog, and yet how typical it turns out to be. He’s still fascinated with putting his performers through the mangle, but, as with Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, Herzog downplays the drama and inflects his work with a documentarist’s sensibility. Close regard for mundane procedures such as the coaxing of fire from bamboo shavings or the forging of a handcuff key from a rusty nail suggest the main body of the film is a riposte to the idiotic survival primer screened to Dengler and his buddies at the outset. CB

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