Notable Netflix, Foreign Film Edition

It's been a while since I've written anything, so I thought I'd do another Netflix report. This one is all foreign films, but don't let that put you off. Each one of these is pretty accessible (i.e., not some Bergmanesque meditation on the absurdity of life--not that there's anything wrong with that).

I've been waiting for Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, because it's a dramatic version of his earlier documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Technically, this might be an American production, and much of it is in English, but I'm still including it here. As a boy, Dieter Dengler's village was attacked by the Allies in World War II. When he saw the fighter planes, he became obsessed with flight. After he finished school, he moved to the United States, and he eventually joined the American navy. The Navy made him a pilot and sent him to the Vietnam war, and on one of his first missions, he was shot down over Laos and taken prisoner. He made a daring and dramatic escape through the jungle, and he was eventually rescued.

Herzog takes Dengler back to Laos to show him (and us) the conditions he faced as a prisoner of war and an escapee. The details of the man's ordeal alone make for an entertaining film, but getting to know Dengler himself is half the fun. He seems irreppressibly cheerful, even when describing his brutal treatment and the terror he must have felt. In many ways, then, this film is similar to Herzog's more recent Grizzly Man. Both are studies of extraordinary men who face extreme danger. Luckily, Dengler came out of his ordeal better than Timothy Treadwell.

One of the "must see" French films is Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (the longer title is A Man Escaped, or The Wind Blows Where It Wills). The word "minimalism" is usually paired with Bresson's name, and this film shows why. He does not use professional actors, the dialogue is simple and sparse, and the performances are unemotional and flat. And yet, the total effect is absorbing. A Man Escaped is the true story about a French Resistance fighter's escape from a Nazi prison. It's similar in this respect to Herzog's movie about Dieter Dengler, but it feels completely different (even apart from the fact that one is a documentary and the other a feature film). Bresson simply presents the escape as a problem to be solved and a plan to be executed, without trying to affect the viewers' emotions at all with music or techniques. But the viewers know what's at stake for this man, and so we can't help but become emotionally involved. The long silences (especially when the main character is sneaking out of prison) build up a level of tension worthy of Hitchcock. I haven't seen any of Bresson's other films, so I have little to compare it to, but I found this one completely absorbing.

I caught the last part of Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed on television last year, and was blown away by it, so we finally watched the whole thing this spring. Released in 1926, it's supposedly the first animated feature film ever made. Reiniger's films consisted of elaborate cut-out figures filmed as silhouettes, similar to Javanese shadow puppets. The level of detail of the figures and her use of depth and even color are stunning, and I was surprised at how much emotion her characters could convey. The story is essentially a fairy tale along the lines of The Arabian Nights, but really it's the images and the "How in the world did she manage to do that?" responses that keep you watching. It would be an impressive achievement today, but it's all the more impressive for having been made in the 1920's. Although it's a silent film, with dialog reported on title screens, Reiniger commissioned a German composer to create an original score, and a version of it accompanies the film on the disc I watched. The disc also includes a documentary about Reiniger and a couple of her short films, one of which turns out to be an advertisement for Nivea soap! You can read about her and see a few still shots from Prince Achmed here.