Lessons of Darkness

Dir: Werner Herzog

1995

****

With Lessons of Darkness, Werner Herzog takes us to an Alien planet, where fairy tale characters behave in a bizarre and often cruel manner, cause harm to each other and behave illogically. The revelation comes like a sledgehammer to the face, wake up and smell the coffee, this is planet earth now, and we’re the ridiculous species, capable of unbelievable cruelty and destruction. War and devastation has never looked so beautiful but then it’s never been viewed quite like this before. Werner Herzog's sudo-documentary is shot in on 16mm film from the perspective of an almost alien observer and is an exploration of the ravaged oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait, albeit deconstructed and characterized in such a way as to emphasize the terrain's cataclysmic otherworldliness. It's a sort of companion piece to his earlier film Fata Morgana, and you could say that 2005's The Wild Blue Yonder completes the unofficial trilogy, that is a little bit like the The Qatsi trilogy in many respects, although with a totally different subject and viewpoint. Herzog again perceives the desert as a landscape with its own voice, which, without wanting to gush, is typical Herzog greatness. It is a meditation rather than an exploration, a poem on catastrophe, contextualized through the literary modes of science fiction and religion. The opening quotation by Blaise Pascal reads: "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendour." And it sums up the film pretty well. The film is split into thirteen chapters: "A Capital City", "The War", "After the Battle", "Finds from Torture Chambers", "Satan's National Park", "Childhood", "And a Smoke Arose like a Smoke from a Furnace", "A Pilgrimage", "Dinosaurs on the Go", "Protuberances", "The Drying Up of the Source", "Life Without the Fire" and "I am so tired of sighing; Lord, let it be night". The film is how you find it, we know it is the aftermath of the first gulf war – specifically the Kuwaiti oil fires but we are given none of the facts, the film features no politics, no geographical relevance and absolutely no narration. It is his aim for people to think about the situation without having their opinion swayed, as you would when seeing this delivered by a biased media with their own agenda. There is a lot more to see and learn by watching these events through the eyes of a visitor, Herzog stated 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", bringing the truth of the situation to the surface, when it feels like a sci-fi dream. It’s an effective method. The imagery is matched with the roar of Wagner, Herzog’s favourite composer, and occasionally he asks a question that an alien onlooker might ask, such as "Has life without fire become unbearable for them?”. Indeed, why do we do these terrible things to ourselves? Sometimes you can learn nothing from a documentary stuffed full of facts and sometimes, particularly in Herzog’s films, you can learn everything without one fact uttered.