The Great Movies III

Among directors of the last four decades, has anyone created a more impassioned and adventurous career than Werner Herzog? Most people have only seen a few of his films, or none; he cannot be fully appreciated without a familiarity with his many documentaries and more obscure features (such as Heart of Glass and Stroszek). His zoos documentary Grizzly Man, about a man who spent thirteen summers with the grizzly bears of Alaska, is the spiritual brother of Fitzcarraldo-both times, men are driven by obsession to challenge the wilderness. Again and again, in films shot in Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, and South America, he has been drawn to the farthest reaches of the earth and to the people who live there with their images uncorrupted by the thin gruel of mass media.

"I don't want to live in a world without lions, and without people who are lions," he says in Burden of Dreams. At the darkest hour in Fitzcarraldo, when Robards fell sick and he had to abandon four months of shooting, Herzog returned to get more backing from investors. They had heard he was finding it impossible to get the ship up the mountain, and asked if it would not be wiser to take his losses and quit. His reply: "How can you ask this question? If I abandon this project, I will be a man without dreams, and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project."With Herzog, that has often been the case.

e must turn to the past for a film as innocent as Forbidden Games (1952), because our own time is too cynical to support it. Here is a film about children using their powers of fantasy and denial to deal with death in wartime. A modern film would back away from the horror and soften and sentimentalize it. It would become a "children's film." But in all times children have survived experiences that no child should have to endure.

Sometimes they're able to shield their innocence by creating games to process the pain. Forbidden Games was attacked and praised by adults for the same reason: because it showed children inventing happiness where none should exist. The Japanese animated film Grave oftbe Fireflies (1988) is another rare film with the courage to walk this path.

The film begins during the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. We meet a five-year-old girl named Paulette, with her parents. The road out of Paris is clogged with those escaping the city. It is being strafed by Nazi fighter planes. Paulette's little dog runs onto a bridge. She chases it, and her parents desperately run after her. Bullets kill both parents and fatally wound the dog. Paulette, lying on the ground next to her mother, reaches out a hand to touch the dead cheek, and then touches her own cheek. She does not cry. She does not quite understand. She holds her puppy. Its legs jerk spasmodically for a long time before it dies.

She is given a ride by strangers. The man throws her dog into the river. She jumps off their cart and runs down to save the dog, and is seen by a local boy named Michel, the young son of the Dolle family, peasants on a nearby farm. She is taken in by the Dolles and immediately becomes Michel's favorite. He will give his blanket to her. He will demand that the family keep her. He will have a playmate.

The love between the two children is almost too pure and simple to be believed-unless you can remember being a child. For some reason, we remember best the children we hated, or who hated us. But with a playmate we can construct a world so compelling that all our thoughts are given to its creation and maintenance. With Jackie, the girl next door, I spent days building a toy village on the dining room floor, around an electric train set. It was so elaborate, so invested with our stories of what each house meant, that when it had to be "cleaned up," we felt a hurt no adult could imagine.

Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) determines to bury her dog. Michel (Georges Poujouly) helps her, because she isn't big enough to handle the hoe she has stolen. The grave is hidden in an abandoned mill. They need a crucifix for it, and Michel hammers one from lumber. Paulette has never really dealt with the deaths of her parents. She acknowledges that they are gone, but they are gone in theory, not practice; that they are truly dead forever seems to elude her. Yet she becomes fascinated with death, and Michel joins her in burying a mole that was captured by an owl. Soon they are burying every dead thing they can find, even worms, even broken plates. At one point, while they are lying side by side on the floor doing his homework, he stabs a cockroach with his pen. "Don't kill him! Don't kill him!" she cries, and he says, "I didn't. It was a bomb that killed him."