Customer Reviews

Lessons of Darkness / Fata Morgana

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While I cannot comment on this particular DVD issue, I have seen a PAL video of "Lessons of Darkness" and cannot express how thrilled I was to see that Anchor Bay had scheduled this film for release. In addition, they have included an extremely rare, full length documentary, "Fata Morgana," which I have never successfully been able to track down on video (as if Lessons of Darkness alone were not sufficient incentive to order this DVD). Given the high quality of the video and audio transfers for the other Herzog films in Anchor Bay's catalogue, I have little doubt that this DVD issue, which like the other Herzog issues includes audio commentary, will be nothing short of outstanding. Now if only the catalogue of Fassbinder, Godard, or Resnais films on DVD were equally exhaustive.

Lessons of Darkness is a haunting account of the burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields in the aftermath of the Gulf war, and, with the exception of a few engaging interviews with local village dwellers, is told almost exclusively through images, set to the music of Mahler, Arvo Part, and Strauss. This is perhaps Herzog's most absorbing film visually, and, with due respect to "God's Angry Man" and "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," the latter also being released by Anchor Bay, "Lessons of Darkness" is perhaps the director's most compelling documentary. Moreover, the images of the firefighers struggling to put out the infernal flames rising out of the oil fields are all the more timely and moving given recent events. Highly Recommended!

Fata Morgana is an absolute masterpiece. It's Werner Herzog's most unconventional film and the most bizzare film I've ever seen. It doesn't have a plot or story. Instead, we're presented with a brilliant collection of images, words and music woven together by a master filmmaker. Fata Morgana is not a documentary either. Most of the people in this film are directed and given lines to read. It has some of the most beautiful and haunting images ever commited to film. Herzog photographs actual mirages and we see cars and people floating around in the middle of the desert who aren't actually there but hundreds of miles away reflected due to the heated strata of air. All of the tracking shots were done with a camera mounted on top of a VW van that Werner Herzog drove himself. The use of music in this movie is amazing; from Leonard Cohen, Mozart, Blind Faith and the Third Ear Band. Imagine Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey taking place in the desert instead of outerspace. Fata Morgana is so hypnotic that it has the ability to make you feel as though your spirit has left your body. This film is a must see and is not recommended for conformists who've been forced fed a steady diet of Hollywood-commercial fast food movies. It will change the way you view films. Rating: 10 out of 10.

" Fata morgana " means mirage, a metaphore used by german filmmaker Werner Herzog to show us our decadent world as a phantasm, connecting in a very personal way with the pessimist and romantic philosophy of Schopenhauer and a mayan ancient myth that explain the world as a creation that has not been finished. " Fata morgana " is at the same time a disheartened and mesmerezing movie: during the two first parts of the film Herzog blends apocalyptic and ghostly images of Sahara desert ( animals skeletons burned by the sun; tumbledown airplanes in the middle of nowhere )with segments of the mayan myth of Creation ( the " Pupul-Vuh" ) narrated by prestigious cinema essayist Lotte Eissner. The third and last part, ironically entitled " The golden age ", of this shatteredly lyrical movie introduces several sardonic and bizarre vignettes as that one of a west scientist dressed with a picturesque clothing to fit to the new environment holding a lizard, a creature older than man. The message is clear: man is shown by Herzog as an alien; as a grotesque creature that has broken the eerie order of nature in the name of cosmic boredom. In Herzog's words: " Fata morgana" is a "science-fiction elegy about demented colonialism" ( 1 )

" Lessons of darkness " is a haunting documentary shot in Kuwait where Herzog follows the traces of the disasters perpetrated during the Gulf war. ( 2 )

Full-frame ( 1 ) / Widescreen edition ( 2 ). Extras: biofilmography of Werner Herzog; Herzog commentaries about " Fata morgana "

Both films are brilliant, and the appearance of Fata Morgana will be a great relief to Herzog fans who have waited so long to be able to see it again. But it is Lessons of Darkness that is the real epiphany. A haunting, gorgeous, almost perfect film that is deeply moving and deeply inscrutable at the same time. Few films present you with images of such awe-inspiring horror on such a large scale. While it is earth that is hurt here, one cannot help but see this film as an elegy for man. Together with "My Best Fiend," this is Herzog at his most penetrating, deeply insightful best. Nothing else even comes close. The DVD is wonderfully executed, too.

Here are two examples of what I like to call "post-production creation"; i.e., shoot some intrinsically compelling footage and then subsequently "make something of it" in the editing suite and at the typewriter. The earlier film here, Fata Morgana, dates from the early '70s and features a barely coherent narrative built around some hauntingly surreal images shot in the southern Sahara/northern Sahel region of Africa. An off-camera narration tells of an Ancient American story of creation while we see images of desert ecology, eerie natural phenomena, and human dereliction. Along the way, we're "treated" to an interesting myriad of both native and European personages and creatures. The late appearance of an apparent husband & wife musical duo (and a quite bad one, at that!) is a most comical non sequitur in this piece of concocted "alien reportage". I have no idea what the opening sequence of repeated passenger jet landings represents other than perhaps a very far-fetched depiction of a supposed alien landing on this strange planet with its forbidding landscape -- work with me here, folks! Considering that much of the footage in Fata Morgana is roughly shot (jerky pans, static handheld shots, etc.), the film in totality leaves one mostly earthbound emotionally. The eerie images of desert mirages do linger in the mind, however. This film is an obvious indulgence by its creator and possibly a peculiar treat for the more open-minded viewer. Much like Herzog's very fine later masterpiece Fitzcarraldo, the story of its making may actually be more compelling to some.

The more technically accomplished film here, Lessons of Darkness, dates from the early '90s and is almost entirely comprised of incredible footage of the massive oil well calamity in Kuwait perpetrated by retreating Iraqi forces in the wake of Operation Desert Storm. Interestingly, it presents much the same otherworldly "apocalyptic" narrative as Fata Morgana; this one, however, is shorter, more compact, and is definitely more compelling from beginning to end. The dramatic images are not only beautifully shot (steadicam and/or tripod must've been used and the aerial shots are nothing short of spectacular!), but are juxtaposed in such a way, and in concurrence with the fatuous narrative and a poignantly moving "human" element, as to make for a most lasting visceral impression. This time, Herzog gets it right!

I first saw Fata Morgana (the "bonus" movie here) on a double bill with Even Dwarfs Started Small at Facets Multimedia. They were both 16mm prints, and while I adored Dwarfs (and still do), I actually feel asleep during Fata Morgana. Now, having watched it again, it is one of Herzog's strangest films and arguably one of the strangest films ever made. Herzog shot a ton of footage in North Africa, brought it back to Germany, then added a strange narration reminiscent of the Mayan creation myths (with Popol Vul music and a touch of Leonard Cohen). The film cannot be honestly described, only experienced. The footage and terrain are absolutely fascinating to look at (even if there was no sound, it would still be fascating), and it's a testament to Herzog's genius that he made one of his most fascinating, surreal, and mystical films ever.

Lessons of Darkness is an astounding documentary, one of Herzog's best docs. It consists of mostly helicopter shots of the awe inspiring (and environmentally disasterous) oil fires set by the fleeing Iraqi army after the first Gulf War. Herzog wisely avoids the politics of the war and gets at something deeper with this film. Set to Wagner music, the shots of the oil fires say more about the war and man than probably all the CNN reporting ever did. The film runs a mere hour, but still manages to say more than films do today.

This is one of Anchor Bay's best DVD's. You get two films for the price of one. There's a great commentary on Fata Morgana, as well as absolutely fascinating production notes about Herzog and Fata itself.

Fata Morgana, the 1971 documentary-like film by German filmmaker extraordinaire Werner Herzog, filmed over several years in the late 1960s, is one of those rare DVDs that should be listened to with the commentary turned on. It is a visual feast of North African (mostly Saharan) imagery that is timeless. You simply could not tell that it was made over thirty-five years ago. The soundtrack to the film, including German classical music (Mozart and Handel), and rock music by Blind Faith and Leonard Cohen, also lends its timeless quality. The narration by three different German narrators (German film historian Lotte Eisner, Eugen Des Montagnes, and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg) is solid, and Herzog goes on and on of Eisner's import to this project, himself, and film history, but the English speaker of the translation, James William Gledhill, has a voice that seems downright deific, which lends itself far more perfectly to this project, even though much of the text- in either language, is rather superfluous. Yes, the faux Biblical sounds of the Popul Vuh Mayan creation myth in the film's first part, Creation, is interesting, but the text Herzog wrote for the remaining two parts (Paradise and The Golden Age), along with quotes from a German poet Herzog names as Manfred Eigendorf, almost seems a satire of the first part's somber tone.... The film, it seems was pieced together during the shooting of several other Herzog projects concurrently- the fictive Even Dwarfs Started Small, and the documentaries The Land Of Silence And Darkness and The Flying Doctors Of East Africa, but these projects' rejected material only add to the beauty of this film, such as aerial scenes of a flamingo mating lake from afar that give one an eerie unearthly sense, one which Herzog crows about in his commentary. This unearthly feel is present right from the film's start of several airplanes landing on a desert runway, with their images getting successively blurrier as the heat from the ground rises, and increases the distorting waves that mar the images. That this film was influential in the -Quatsi films of Godfrey Reggio is an understatement. But, whereas Reggio is content to just toss images at you, Herzog has an ability that only American filmmaker Terrence Malick also has: to make a wholly self-contained vocabulary out of the juxtaposition of images and words, and one dependent upon an emotion-first thrust. Analysis can fail when brought to such endeavors. Herzog often does not understand even why his art is great. The best he does often is wholly unconscious and mesmeric. This is why his contempt for the Lowest Common Denominator pap of Hollywood is openly stated on the commentary.
Perhaps the best illustration of this comes in a scene that, on the commentary, Herzog tells us followed a severe drought in Cameroon. It shows the jerkied carcasses of cattle, and Herzog describes the unbearable stench. Yet, the viewer can sense this all from the images, the blackness of the sun dried portions of animals, and the blanched bones. Yet, even in that commentary, Herzog focuses on the stench, not any deeper meaning. He is content to let you imbue and interpret what you will into and of his work, such as the almost erotically feminized shapes of sand dunes, which recalls a scene from Ingmar Bergman's Hour Of The Wolf, where Max Von Sydow, runs his hand over Ingrid Thulin's beautiful nude body's curves. But, the archetypal image in this film, which symbolizes much of Herzog's career, is of a mirage of a faraway car driving back and forth on the surface of what appears to be a lake. It is deep, hypnotic, illusive, elusive, supernatural, yet real, just as Herzog, the believer who came from a family of militant atheists, is. But, then, like everything else, it ends.

No aspect of Lessons of Darkness can be praised too highly. What I'd like to know is, how can I find out the artists who performed the various musical works? Herzog has chosen the most sublime renditions of his sublime selection: Verdi's "Recordare" from the Requiem, and similarly the best of Strauss, Wagner and so on. I'd like to gt the same recordings. Any help? Thanks in advance: send to johnwood@umich.edu

This dark documentary is disturbing in showing the depths of evil. I purchased the movie and from what I gather, Hertzog assembled it solely from CNN clips (from the credits at the end of the film), his original commentary, quotes from the Bible, and classical music.

Not easily awed, I was by the panorama of destruction of the oil fields and by the vastness of it, disgusted by the revelations of torture and murder by the Iraqi occupation through interviews with relatives of two victims, and struck by the beauty of the music Juxtaposed with it.

There are deep lessons to be learned from this movie.

I can only comment on "Lessons Of Darkness" as I have not seen "Fata Morgana". The former is an utterly fascinating film, filled with unforgettable images of the horrors left behind by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Though frequently described as a documentary about the hundreds of oil well fires which were a portion of the devastation, that is only a portion of the film. Nearly the first half is dedicated to elegant aerial footage of Kuwait City before the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War, followed by largely unnarrated sequences of destroyed buildings, vehicles, and military facilities. The camera's unblinking eye strays into a torture chamber and across a table strewn with bloody torture instruments (this sequence alone makes this film most definitely adults-only territory), then wanders to the oil fields, pausing occasionally for a brief interview sequence. One especially eloquent and almost unbearable example shows a woman whose sons were tortured to death, who has been unable to speak since. She struggles to speak, all the while attempting to tell her story through hand gestures which break through and language barrier.

In classic Werner Herzog form, "Lessons Of Darkness" presents an unvarnished look at the utter horror of war as seen through what it leaves behind. Smooth, elegant footage presents details that leave the viewer wanting to flinch despite their frequent beauty. You will come away from this film haunted by a view of the Gulf War that most definitely did not make it onto television, enhanced almost to the point of agony by Herzog's classical score and minimalist narration. Once seen, this film may never be forgotten. And what it depicts should not be. Here is war without glory, without purpose, without patriotism. Here is mere pointless destruction, tragedy, and death, the underlying ingredients of any war in any age. This, above all, we should remember. So speaks Herzog. And I agree.

A somewhat enigmatic and ambiguous ending is the only flaw I find in this shocking film. But real life does not provide Hollywood endings, and the stained sands of Kuwait are most definitely not Hollywood.