Lessons of Darkness
| Lessons of Darkness | |
|---|---|
"Has life without fire become unbearable for them?"
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| Directed by | Werner Herzog |
| Produced by |
Paul Berriff Werner Herzog Lucki Stipetić |
| Written by | Werner Herzog |
| Narrated by | Werner Herzog |
| Cinematography |
Simon Werry Paul Berriff Rainer Klausmann |
| Edited by | Rainer Standke |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | Werner Herzog Filmproduktion |
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Release date
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1992 |
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Running time
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50 minutes |
| Country | Germany France United Kingdom |
| Language | German English Arabic |
Lessons of Darkness (German: Lektionen in Finsternis) 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.
A co-production with Paul Berriff, the film was financed by the television studios Canal+ and Première.
The film is a meditation on catastrophe, contextualised through the literary modes of religion and science fiction. It begins with a quotation, attributed to Blaise Pascal: "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendor." This attribution is anecdotal , as the text was in fact written by Herzog for the film and chosen, like the music, to give the film a certain mood. The prologue of the quotation is followed by thirteen sections, denoted by numbered title cards: "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".
Virtually devoid of commentary, the imagery concentrates on the aftermath of the first Gulf War — specifically on the Kuwaiti oil fires, although no relevant political or geographical information is mentioned. Herzog intended to alienate the audience from images to which they had become inured from saturated news coverage, and thereby to "penetrate deeper than CNN ever could". Herzog uses a telephoto lens, truck-mounted shots as in Fata Morgana, static shots of the workers near the oil fires, and many helicopter shots of the bleak landscape. 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".
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Wikipedia