Götz Dieter Plage
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Götz Dieter Plage (born May 14, 1936 in Germany; died April 3, 1993 in Sumatra), internationally simply known as Dieter Plage, was a worldrenowned German cinematographer of nature documentaries.
[edit] Career
Plage became internationally known in 1972 during the filming of an elephant in Manyara, Tanzania. He survived the attack of a berserk elephant only by a hairbreadth. In the following years he worked with worldrenowned nature film makers like Bernhard Grzimek, Heinz Sielmann, or Alan Root. His footage was often the result of perilous circumstances like a film from the Virunga Mountains in the Democratic Republic of Congo where he suddenly was attacked by a large silverback during filming of the Mountain Gorilla infants. Plages footage was used in nature documentaries from many television channels like Survival Anglia (ITV Network) and Built for the Kill (National Geographic Channel). In particular for Survival Anglia he shot successful nature documentaries like "Gorilla" (1974), "Among the Elephants" (1975), "Orangutan Orphans of the Forest" (1976), "The Leopard That Changed Its Spots" (1979), and "Cold on the Equator" (1988). His last finished film was "The Secret World of Bats" which premiered in the United States in 1992.
[edit] Death
In April 1993 Plage died during an experiment with the prototype of a new miniature airship called The White Diamond. The airship was flying above the canopy of the Sumatran rainforest where Plage wanted to film animals. Suddenly his camera got caught up in the branches and as he tried to salvage the camera from the canopy he fell off the airship and died. The tragic incident became the content of the documentary The White Diamond by Werner Herzog and Graham Dorrington which was filmed in Guyana in 2004.
