Gender specifics

Hope and Hero make a feminist case

Born in 1942, German filmmaker Werner Herzog has started ruminating in his documentaries on an eventful, precarious life. My Best Fiend (1999) chronicles his tumultuous, literally murderous, relationship with the seemingly psychotic Klaus Kinski, the great star of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and other Herzog classics. Wings of Hope (1999), November 20 through 27 at the Harvard Film Archive, flies back in time to show how frighteningly close Herzog came to not making Aguirre or any of his wonderful movies, including this luminous work.

He was in the Lima airport on Christmas Eve, 1971, trying to get to the Aguirre set out in the jungle. A full plane took off without him, and 92 passengers and crew disappeared off the map in a fatal crash. One passenger survived, a 17-year-old German girl named Juliane Koepcke. For Wings of Hope, Herzog decided to relive his trauma of that fateful 1971 night by locating Koepcke, having her tell her extraordinary story, and asking her to re-create her trek back to civilization, 28 years after.

Is there enough here for a meaningful movie? Our first sight of Juliane Koepcke is not promising. She's an average-looking woman with glasses and perhaps dyed-blond hair, who shows little animation when she talks. She might be an optometrist or work, unnoticed, in a drugstore. But are appearances deceiving! By the time Wings of Hope has concluded, Koepcke has emerged as a superhero whose survival in the jungle was as shrewd and enterprising, and as courageous, as Robinson Crusoe's.

How did she get to the ground? The first miracle. Koepcke and three seats whirled two miles through the air ("We're not in Kansas anymore!"), and she landed, soundly knocked out, amid soft vegetation. A day later, she awoke with a bad concussion, a frightening gash on her arm. But alive! She wandered away from the crash to try to find help. The cut on her arm filled with maggots, and, against a rain-soaked world of gnawing bugs, she was wearing only a tattered mini-skirt.

How did she know what to do? The second miracle. Koepcke had been raised by her German émigré parents on an ecological site in the jungle. She had grown up with survival training. (Today, she is a biologist studying rare bat species out in the Peruvian wilds.) Therefore, she realized that she had to locate flowing water and follow it downstream, until the water turned into a navigable river, where natives might find her. And she knew from experience how to traverse jungle water, not caring when crocodiles dove across her path (timid creatures, they were fleeing from a human!) but using a walking stick to fend off lethal sting rays.

She drank water, but she was too stunned to eat anything at all. Indomitable, Koepcke stumbled on . . . for 11 days! Amazing! And to Werner Herzog's credit, Wings of Hope is among the rarest of films that's not sexist, or gender-specific, in any way. The final miracle: at no point does Herzog marvel at Koepcke's survival because she is a woman!

An insider's vantage on Wings of Hope? Herb Golder, a BU classics professor, has been collaborating with Herzog in recent years, and he signed aboard for this filmic undertaking as the assistant director. A sublime speaker, Golder will be at Harvard for the November 21 and 22 screenings.

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Gender is everything, however, and femaleness the rub, for A Hero for Daisy, Mary Mazzio's rousing, inspiring documentary playing November 20 at the Museum of Fine Arts. This film's deserving superhero is Yale crew legend Chris Ernst, a live wire of willfulness, audacity, and nonconformity who in 1976 led a forever-famous protest at her Ivy League school over the lack of locker-room facilities for the women's crew team.

Poor beleaguered Yale, just recently opened up to the softer sex, where George W. Bushmen got their gentlemanly C's and roamed caveman free! Suddenly there were these humungus women demanding a place to take showers, their way paved by the musclebound, androgynous Ernst. Oh, what they did in the Athletic Office! The whole crew team stripped, exclaiming, "These are the bodies Yale is exploiting." On their bare backs: the phrase "Title IX," reminding Yale of the 1972 congressional legislation mandating gender equality for schools receiving federal aid.

The rest is history: the embarrassed college built a locker room for its female crew. All across America, Title IX began to be enforced, precipitating a wonderful explosion of female athletics. Ernst became a two-time Olympian and today she's a plumber. But she's as colorfully unyielding as ever: she does showers but leaves toilet unpluggings to her (male?) underlings.

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I'm leaning more and more toward a gay, Third Man reading of Fight Club, with the "surprise twist" a smokescreen. Matt Zoller in the New York Press: "The Narrator is gay and doesn't know it . . . fascinated with the male body and images of macho beauty; Tyler is his idealized self-image, a fusion of gay and straight iconography. . . . The Narrator knows he's supposed to sleep with women, but he finds the act so repellent that he must invent a persona to do the deed on his behalf."