Lektionen in Finsternis

Lessons of Darkness (1992) looks and acts like a companion piece to Fata Morgana (1971). As with the earlier film, Lessons either captures viewers or leaves them confused and bored within the first few minutes. Early in Lessons we see an aerial shot of an unusual city. It is obviously a contemporary urban area because we see highways, traffic, stoplights, and large buildings, but it is also obvious that it is not an American city. The narrator (Herzog) announces that this city is about to be destroyed by war and the thought of this strange but vibrant place being destroyed becomes completely repugnant. Thus, Herzog succeeds here with the approach he initially planned and then abandoned in Fata Morgana. Lessons of Darkness triumphs as a mock Science Fiction story of an apocalypse that threatens all of civilization. Luckily, it doesn't take a college education to realize that the footage is shot in Iraq in the aftermath of the First Gulf War. Luckily as well, Herzog's anti-war statement does not need to be explicit to be effective. Early in the film, interviews with two Iraqi women suggest the human price of this military event. In the rest of the film, humans appear to be on the periphery of the "action" but they keep coming back to the center of our consciousness. Those who persist in their viewing will eventually encounter a chilling repetitiveness in this film (the fires are still burning!) However, that repetitiveness can become cumulative and mesmerizing. This is not a film experience for everyone, but for those who have a taste for it the film will be unforgettable.

Werner Herzog narrates sparingly from an alien's perspective, but for the most part lets the images do the talking themselves. And yes, there are some pretty powerful images contained within this 50 minute documentary.

This is a pretty typical Herzog documentary, which if you aren't familiar with him, that means it's a pretty slow paced film. But the images are so great, if you let yourself get caught up in them, I don't see the slow pacing to be a problem. Herzog always says he's looking for "ecstatic truth" in his films. I think he achieved that with this one.

Herzog has been making brilliant films since the late '60s, and frankly it's a bit of a pain in the arse keeping up with such a prolific director.

However, if you are a fan of his features and staggering documentary work, "Lessons of/in Darkness" demands your immediate attention.

The film is essentially a birds-eye view (often quite literally) of the plague of oil-choked death, fire, chaos and destruction that resulted from the brief but grotesquely internecine technological blitzkrieg of the Gulf War. Herzog, of course, takes particular interest in the seeming madness of the crews of mercernary American firefighters that are putting out the oil well fires across the deserts.

Various points on the conflict and its aftermath inevitably bubble to the surface, but arise without overt proselytizing. The images do the majority of the talking.

And they are eye-popping. Startling, frightening visuals that stand out even in the Herzog canon -- great vistas of blackness and glowing terror that would make any sci-fi director soylent green with envy. They are accompanied by little else: brief interstitials, an almost nonexistent, terribly serious Herzog narrative and a ghostly and elegiac score.

The short interviews with individuals who suffered are heartbreaking, perhaps all the more so due to their brevity.

See this.

Never call Werner Herzog a dilettante. When he sets out to make a film, he's willing to die for it. Although this film could have easily been adjusted to a pure documentary of the oil fires in Kuwait after the Iraq invasion, Herzog takes it to much higher levels. War. Apocalypse. Mythical Disaster. The End of Life as we knew it. THE Struggle (and, since this is made by a dark-visioned German, we do NOT win the struggle. At best, we earn a temporary truce with the Devil.) This is perhaps the MOST BEAUTIFULLY PHOTOGRAPHED COLOR film I've EVER seen. Bar none. The scoring, as usual, is unique and perfect. "Lessons of Darkness" is atypically vague for a film in my category "Life Changers", yet I am left extremely moved by the powerful effects of an exquisite visual and audio work of Art.

While Werner Herzog has stated that he looks at his 1992 film Lessons of Darkness as a work of science fiction, it shouldn't be discounted as a documentary either. But unlike the recent Wild Blue Yonder, where Herzog made a true science fiction documentary, this time the line is further blurred by making everything involving humans ambiguous as to their connections with their surroundings. Despite the locations being discernible as to where it's at, and the two interviews being indicative of where the people are possibly from, he keeps his 54 minute plunge into the Kuwait oil fields a primarily visual trip. It sometimes even felt like someone had decided to do a documentary on some civilization in the future in some obscure sci-fi novel (or, for a moment, like some wayward planet in the Dune universe). It's best then, as Herzog suggests, to take one out of context of the period, even if seeing the green-screen images (however brief) of the war conjures up immediate associations. If looking at this without the associations of the Iraq war part 1 or the Kuwait connection in it all with oil however (as with Wild Blue Yonder not associating that its 'just' NASA and underwater photography), it fills one with an immense wonder at what can be captured by a lens not bound by conventions.

But amid the freedom that Herzog decides to use with his resources, he ends up striking his most visually compelling treatise on destruction to date. It's like he decided to take certain cues from Kubrick via 2001, and from just general nature documentaries, in order to capture the sort of alien aspect to this all. Because the act of setting these oil fields, which were left in a state of disrepair following said "fictional" war, is like facing nature off on a course against nature (fire on oil, then water on fire). There's also the element of industry that finds this way in this mix, especially because of the presence of human beings in this mix. Herzog, in avant-garde fashion (ala Dieter and Yonder) sections off the scenes with Roman numerals, and in theme and tone it does work (e.g. a part meant for showing the machines trudging around is labeled as being part of 'dinosaurs', or when the people set the oil on fire and the others are "mad" in coming in on it). And eventually what starts out as just simple, yet spatially complex, aerial takes on the tattered fields, turns into an act of seeing ruin and something that would seem incredible in an objective frame of reference.

But that doesn't mean Herzog limits it completely to total dialog-less landscapes (which, as Herzog has said in the past, he likes to think in grandiose terms he "directs") of fire and obtuse figures fanning and producing the flames. He also gets two interviews with women who were around when the war was there- one who is given no words for what she says except that her husband was killed, another who had a child with her and who is now traumatized- and somehow this too works even out of context. I'm sure that if Herzog had wanted to, even in limited time and circumstances he was in, he could be able to work some political stance in the proceedings. His decision to keep politics or anything of the immediate recognizable in concrete terms is a wise one. Not that there isn't something concrete to seeing destruction of this magnitude. But there's an abstract quality to all of this after a while that makes it all the more real in nature, while still keeping to a control of the subject matter into something that looks out of this world, ethereal, and somehow unnatural while still being about nature all the same (hence science-reality).

It's almost too arty for its own good in a small way, with Herzog's inter-titles and ultra-somber voice-over becoming like gravestones marking the sections of one set of madness to another. But there's also a daring here that is totally unshakable too, and from a point of view of cinematography it actually goes on par (if not occasionally seems to top) what Kubrick did in 2001 or what Lynch could've done in Dune, which is that a filmmaker uses places and objects that are of this world, but then taking the audience to a place that is also assuredly not so. It adds a level of mental discomfort, but then that's likely a big part of the point- seeing the oil burned by order of a government that's been on the news we watch every night is one thing (or rather was), but it's another to suddenly take it in another light, where in the realm of science-fiction it asks the viewer to raise questions via abstractions one might forget when taking it as complete truth. It's a hybrid film that you'd never see this in a cineplex next to the big-bang sci-fi action fare, but then most probably wouldn't want to.