Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog

LESSONS OF DARKNESS & FATA MORGANA

Lessons of Darkness  is a 1992 film by director Werner Herzog. Shot in documentary style on 16mm film from the perspective of an almost alien observer, the film is an exploration of the ravaged oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait, decontextualised and characterised in such a way as to emphasise the terrain's cataclysmic strangeness. An effective companion to his earlier film Fata Morgana, Herzog again perceives the desert as a landscape with its own voice.

 Through avoiding establishing shots, Herzog heightens the apocalyptic effect of depicting the devastated landscape. Herzog remarked that "the film has not a single frame that can be recognised as our planet, and yet we know it must have been shot here".

The workers are described as "creatures" whose behavior is motivated by madness and a desire to perpetuate the damage that they are witnessing. A climactic scene involves the workers, shortly after succeeding in stopping the fires, re-igniting the flow of oil. The narration asks, "Has life without fire become unbearable for them?"

 The film won "Grand Prix" at the Melbourne International Film Festival. At the close of its screening at the Berlin Film Festival, the audience reacted furiously to the film, rising to castigate Herzog, with accusations that he had aestheticised the horror of the war. The director waved his hands fiercely and protested "You're all wrong! You're all wrong!", and later maintained Hieronymous Bosch and Goya had done likewise in their art.

Fata Morgana was shot in 1969, which captures mirages in the Sahara desert. Some narration recites Mayan creation myth (the Popol Vuh) by Lotte Eisner, text written by Herzog himself. Trying to interpret the world logically can often lead us to experience a fictional version of reality. In times when information about our world as we know it is becoming more and more difficult to perceive for what it really is let’s turn to art. Art not as a saving force, but as a tool to understand the world as crazy, violent, magical and bewildering as it is.