Friday, February 12, 2010
Film Humanity, Hellfire, and Herzog
Posted by Benjamin Mercer on Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 1:09 PM
Legend has it that during filming Herzog was kicked out of Kuwait by officials who quickly became leery of his project. The amount of slow motion and the paucity of interview subjects (two women who suffered at the hands of retreating Iraqi troops) suggest the filmmaker was not in the country long, but the immediacy of his dispatch, the awful scale of the oil fires and their sky-shrouding plumes of dark smoke, calls attention away from the film's sometimes seemingly haphazard assembly. In Herzog's corpus, Lessons of Darkness is often grouped with Fata Morgana (1971) and The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), a loose trilogy of so-called sci-fi documentaries, but as Lessons' lifeless waste panoramas give way to closer-in shots of men struggling to contain the raging fires with water and dynamite, more exalted filmic company comes to mind. Though there is no hubristic individual madness among these workers, and the voiceover situates their toiling as an eternal cycle apart from nature, their direct contending with hellfire nonetheless evokes the deranged expeditions of astonishing dimension central to Herzog's finest collaborations with Klaus Kinski, Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. Lessons of Darkness does not stand shoulder to shoulder with those two films, but its oil-drenched landscapes are perhaps more haunting than anything in Herzog outside of his mid-70s heyday.
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