Le pays du silence et de l'obscurité

'If there were another World War, I wouldn't even notice it.'

The above quote closes the documentary Land of Silence and Darkness and in many ways sums it up perfectly. Film-maker Werner Herzog has over the years made many films – fiction and fact alike – that focus on outsiders on the extreme fringes of society. With this film, I think it could be argued that his subjects are the most remote and in some ways unknowable of all. The people in this film are all deaf-blind. The loss of these two most key senses puts them in a strange mysterious world where they are cut off from our reality. The principal character is a late middle-aged woman called Fini Straubinger who suffered a fall when she was nine, that went unreported and untreated. As a consequence of this, she gradually lost her sight and hearing so that by her teens she was deaf and blind. She subsequently spent thirty years in bed but later re-emerged and went on to focus on helping others in a similar situation. This involved teaching them to communicate and organising field visits.

Like is mostly the way with documentaries focusing on people with severe disabilities, at first the participants seem quite alien to us but as we observe them for a time they emerge as identifiably human. Fini is in a more unique position than her more famous counterpart Helen Keller, in that she lost her senses at an age old enough to remember more about them and the world around her. This has allowed her to learn to communicate via an extraordinary touch-based system. It still seems incredible for us to imagine what it must be like to be in a void without sound or vision only to intermittently feel this physical communication and moreover, to be able to actually function under these circumstances. Fini is frankly an extraordinary person and her achievements are quite astonishing. The documentary introduces us to several other deaf-blind who are in even more difficult and frankly heart-breaking situations. One middle-aged woman lives in an asylum after the only person who communicated with her, her mother, died. We also encounter some who have borne this affliction from birth. This makes it especially difficult teaching them anything, some concepts becoming completely impossible. One of the most memorable of these scenes involves a 22 year old man who has never been taught how to walk, chew or communicate. We first see him sitting on the floor buzzing strangely while violently throwing a ball about. He seems to all intents and purposes like an infant. Incredibly, once Fini interacts with him she immediately makes a communication breakthrough. There are many unbelievable scenes such as this sprinkled through this documentary and it is a film that makes you pause and not only remember how lucky you are but also to ponder what being human is actually all about.

Herzog's documentary is a stunning revelation of what it means to be human. When we first see the profoundly disabled people on the screen, we shy away from them, disturbed to consider that these creatures might be people like ourselves. But through the love of the woman whose work Herzog captures here, we discover them as precisely what they -- and we -- are: human brothers and sisters endowed by God with both the need for love and an unimpaired (despite physical handicaps) capacity to love. Watching this movie some 20 years ago, I found this remarkable film one of the most exhilarating cinematic experiences of my life (and I'm now 55 and a veteran of many, many movies, and this film retains its wondrous place in my memory), a testament to the unity of the universal human family told with the artist's -- Herzog's -- aesthetic objectivity, yet clearly giving voice to a passionate embrace and advocacy of life, no matter how physically disabled.

LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS is an early documentary in the career of German film-maker Werner Herzog, a story laced with sadness and alienation that bears some stylistic similarity to Herzog's dramatic film THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER. This one's all real though, a documentary that proves to be depressing and uplifting in equal measure.

It's a documentary that explores the world of deafblind people living in Germany, controlled by a campaigning woman, Fini Straubinger, who makes it her business to travel the country and help those in need. What transpires is a travelogue fraught with unforgettable moments; moments that I don't mind admitting had me in tears on more than one occasion. The sequence with a 22 year old man who's never had any education or even contact with the outside world - he can't even walk - is the film's moving highlight.

Herzog lets his story speak for himself, although he makes some strong choices as director. Visits to a cactus house and a zoo are utterly engrossing and the addition of some classic music to the soundtrack really helps to tug at the heartstrings. Not an easy film to watch then, but one which is nevertheless thoroughly compelling.

... this Werner Herzog film - as powerful today as when it was made, introduces us to Fini, deaf and blind, and the empathetic things she does to help those similarly affected.

This Herzog film is unorthodox, as usual. It is approximately an hour and a half long, and somewhere in the middle it might seem like the film is not going anywhere. However, those who permit themselves to feel the power of this harrowing documentary will discover in the ending of the film a moment well worth their persistence. What is the purpose of mature film making? I like to think it is the sincere attempt to help us understand what it means to be human. If this generalization is accurate, Herzog's LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS is mature film making. It is literally investigating what it means to be human without the sense of sight and speech. It has a heroic figure in 56-year old Fini Straubinger and a number of other characters who are compellingly mystifying. We wonder what is happening inside the minds of these human beings who are partially cut off from the world around them.