The Great Escapes: Freedom and Space in Peter Weir’s The Way Back and Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn

Magdalena KEMPNA-PIENIĄŻEK

Instytut Nauk o Kulturze, Wydział Humanistyczny, Uniwersytet Śląski, ul. Uniwersytecka 4, 40-007 Katowice, Poland , Poland

Abstract

The subject of the article is the role of space in the presentations of freedom found in Peter Weir’s The Way Back (2010) and Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn (2006), respectively. Both directors draw on the structure of the prisoner of war movies, but avoid a conventional approach to the theme of freedom by making use of the semantics of landscape. While in standard prisoner of war movies freedom is shown as the highest value and a right of which the protagonists have been deprived, in the case of The Way Back and Rescue Dawn, non-confinement turns out not only a desire the protagonists cherish, but also a challenge not each of them is capable of meeting. Both Herzog and Weir build up the plots of their movies around the motif of wondering, thus relating them to their authorial poetics. In the opening part of the article, the author characterizes the prisoner of war films as a genre and then analyzes Rescue Dawn and The Way Back, considering the metaphors and symbols by means of which each of the two directors wishes to find the essence of the concept of freedom. The author also investigates the strategies that distinguish Weir’s and Herzog’s works from other film narratives exploring this value.

Keywords:

prisoner of war movies, freedom as a film motif, Werner Herzog, Peter Weir, landscape in film