Lessons of Darkness [1992]

 Werner Herzog’s hypnotic essay Lessons of Darkness was an assemblage of two strikingly contrasting facets. It was an intensely grim and fatalistic meditation on warfare, carnage, the abyss of human folly and madness, and their infinite capacities for cruelty. This bleak meditation was accompanied by spectacular aerial photography of the ecological disaster wrought upon by the 1991 Gulf War, and these were made even more viscerally arresting through slow-mo shots, long takes, Herzog’s distinctively clipped style of speaking, and grand Wagnerian score. This, therefore, was akin to an apocalyptic tone poem on derangement and destruction by a filmmaker who’s been classified as a “poet of doom”. No wonder, some viewers were offended by it upon its release – alleging that this was akin to aestheticization of wars – and which Herzog angrily countered by quoting examples of Hieronymous Bosch and Goya who’d also made breathtaking artistic works foregrounded on violence and grotesquerie. Broken into thirteen short chapters, the moody docu shows us scarred and damaged landscapes, and in particular nightmarish images of the Kuwaiti oil fires, albeit largely without any political or geographical contexts. In his typically ironic tone, he even shows us how the expert fire extinguishing team reignited the fires – by throwing torches into the gushing oil flows – so that they have something more to extinguish. These flamboyant, widescreen and “obscenely beautiful” vistas were briefly interspersed with sobering chronicles of torture and trauma experienced by the locals, and shared by a couple of women. The film’s ominous undercurrents, vivid abstractions, and counterpointing of sparse and lurid expressions made it a fitting member of the German filmmaker’s oeuvre that’s filled with similar exercises across both narrative fictions and essayistic nonfictions.

Director: Werner Herzog

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: German/Arabic

Country: Germany