The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969)
"The fact that he has been rejected by his parents will give him the chance of going to school and enjoying a modern education. But who can say if this really is an advantage for him?"
Toward the end of the ’60s, Werner Herzog traveled throughout east Africa, the Sahara, and the Canary Islands, his “cameraman” Thomas Mauch in lock-step, to accumulate footage for what would become three films: The Flying Doctors of East Africa, Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), and Fata Morgana (1971). The former, Herzog’s first feature-ish-length documentary, was more “made as a gift to the doctors than [it was] a film,” rare for how extraordinary it isn’t, at least in retrospect.
Likewise, Herzog doesn’t regard the 45-minute Bericht (“report”) in terms of his typical aversion to characterizing his documentaries as documentaries. Instead, The Flying Doctors is what he refers to as a Gebrauchsfilm (a “utility film”). In A Guide for the Perplexed, Herzog makes plain the film’s usefulness: “...it earned [the doctors] a fair amount of money, enough to purchase two small aeroplanes.”
“I was asked to work on the project by a woman who raised funds for the doctors, and went with them into the field where they performed surgery, to places where people had never seen doctors before,” Herzog remembers, later describing how this woman was the wife of a “wealthy industrialist,” a man at whose party Herzog first met frequent composer and collaborator Florian Fricke, one of the founders of Popul Vuh, in 1967. “I would play football with him on the lawn of this enormous house.” Fricke not long after would appear as a piano player in Signs of Life.
Shot in Tanzania and Kenya, The Flying Doctors of East Africa introduces the AMREF Flying Doctors program, following early luminaries like co-founder Dr. Michael Wood and “Mama Maktari,” Dr. Anne Spoerry, as they bring medical aid to remote areas around Nairobi. The former (as we see in the film) builds runways for tribal villages over difficult terrain, insisting he pilot the small prop plane for every first attempt, and the latter was a WWII vet who spent time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp for being a member of the French resistance. With these two prelapsarian Herzog characters, we move: from the village of Ortum, then on to Kakuma near the Sundanese border in the north to work with semi-nomadic people, then later 200 miles south of Nairobi, where Dr. Spoerry works with the Masai. Early in the film, with one glimpse of the big city call center, our narrator (Wilfried Klaus) states that Flying Doctors receives somewhere around 200 calls per day.
Rarer still is that Herzog doesn’t narrate The Flying Doctors. Perhaps in the beginning he still wasn’t sure how confidently to place himself in his documentaries, or, in order to adhere to the purpose of this particularly charity-adjacent assignment, he was attempting to remove as much cinematic style as possible from his otherwise cinematic instincts. Maybe he was just told to get someone else to talk. But even then, his film breathes freely with an inimitable language—his cosmological turns of phrase, his succinct descriptions, his obsessions, his unflaggingly literal nature. Setting the scene at the Sudanese border, panning across a quiet and dusty yard that makes up the makeshift hospital, making all feel empty and abandoned, Klaus voiceovers, “There is no doctor here, no X-ray apparatus, no running water.” What a strange list, assembled with such finality that these three items, a distinct mix of necessity and sci-fi-ish technology, seem the pillars of progressive humankind. Declared definitively, these semi-nomadic people have no “access to civilization.”
The director has resisted political alliances or statements throughout his career, though one might mistake Herzog’s fixations and passions—for the overwhelming power of this planet, for revealing the folly of humankind’s narcissism, for the sublime, for a certain worldliness in opposition to modern conservative chauvinism—as the foundation for a healthy leftist ideology. About his first feature, 1968’s Signs of Life, he’s commented that, for a movie sparsely populated by wayward Nazi soldiers in the waning days of WWII, it has a lot more to say about that epochal year than most movies released at the time. “While I was out with the doctors, they were primarily doing preventative medicine, in particular vaccinations and lectures, in this case against trachoma,” he remembers in A Guide for the Perplexed. “Prevention is cheap and easy; the disease is caused by a lack of hygiene.”
For all his eloquence, he isn’t exactly sensitive. So Herzog might consider The Flying Doctors of East Africa not so much an indictment of colonialism but a plain observation of colonial powers at Empire’s end. Here watch as a few tireless volunteers try to undo the curse by which Europe brought “civilization” to Africa, creating conditions wholly dependent on economic benefit to the oppressing power and then never truly learning to communicate with the people subjugated. The subtext of Herzog’s film, which he transforms into text by having it expressed fully in The Flying Doctors’ final moments, is that these colonial forces have failed to grasp the breadth of cultures they’ve otherwise taken over, crippling these cultures before leaving them to consequences for which they bear no responsibility. Leaving the ghosts of the dead to rot.
Later in the film, a doctor explains how some children must be “adopted” following treatment, because their parents refuse to take them back, a cultural phenomena not much explained beyond that. In one instance, after leaving for appendicitis surgery, a young boy couldn’t return home, instead placed in an institution with deaf and blind children. Herzog and Mauch go to the institution, and find the boy standing by himself, the camera held on him, blankly but clearly traumatized. Klaus comments:
“It is perhaps significant that his only playmates are these deaf and dumb children in the group behind him. The fact that he has been rejected by his parents will give him the chance of going to school and enjoying a modern education. But who can say if this really is an advantage for him?”
Today, I can say: It probably isn’t! Shot on 35 mm, the effect being comparable in most available versions to what people of a certain age might recognize as “VHS quality,” the film stock fuzzes images, smearing them as they’re transferred from version to version. This intensifies Herzog’s message, casts the need of the people on screen as urgent and tactile, while distancing the viewer—across 50 years and thousands of miles and untold format conversions—so that when a child dies (according to the narration) on camera, gored by a spear following a “tribal clash,” I wonder if we have witnessed that moment, the small body losing life as a variety of white gloves crowd to keep it together, or if the narration is only bluntly describing the consequence of the image. Likely both. If an image like this is used like a tool, is it exploitation? If an image like this bears no usefulness, is it a waste?
A coast of millions of pink flamingos stretching miles of Lake Nakaru. Masai women very cautiously descending three steps. (“It looks odd to see athletic people like these walk down the steps.”) A gaggle of Irish doctors who appear to be floating toward the camera, not dressed as doctors but just as guys, as bodies in space ready to be forgotten. Even in utility, Herzog can’t help but explore the language of dreams. From A Guide for the Perplexed:
The most interesting scenes stem from my interest in vision and perception, the process of recognising images and how the brain sorts through and makes sense of them. One of the doctors in the film talks of showing a poster of a fly to villagers, who had never seen photographs or images of any sort. “We don’t have that problem,” they said. “Our flies aren’t that big.” …It was clear that certain elements of visual perception are in some way culturally conditioned, that these people were processing images differently to how Westerners might.
If it’s ironic that The Flying Doctors of East Africa is considerably harder to see than most of Herzog’s filmography, Herzog wouldn’t notice. I found it at the butt-end of a DVD-R, which I believe is a bootlegged version of this Tartan DVD that’s gone long out of print, from Movie Madness here in Portland, OR. Images for this blog post were taken on my phone, from my couch. Like last year’s The Fire Within, The Flying Doctors resembles fodder to be found flipping through TV channels, unique because of how coincidentally (even anachronistically) it can be encountered, and special because of how divorced it feels from prestige documentary filmmaking. If you’re fluent in Spanish (or in the original German), you can watch the full film here—if not, you may be able to discern the doctors speaking English underneath the din of Klaus’s loud translation:
As a piece of pseudo-journalism, the film doesn’t even amount to much in the filmmaker’s mind. But as evidence of Herzog’s fearlessness in his chrysalis phase, it can be devastating, unique among his many so-called documentaries, countless in the years to come, for how much it actually is a documentary.
Sources:
“4 Shorts by Werner Herzog.” 4 Shorts by Werner Herzog on Tartan (United Kingdom VHS Videotape), https://www.videocollector.co.uk/4-shorts-by-werner-herzog/34953.
Herzog, Werner, and Paul Cronin. Werner Herzog : A Guide for the Perplexed. London, Faber & Faber, 2014.