Directed by Werner Herzog
Nature, in Werner Herzog’s view, is something unfinished, unthinking and ruthless to those who exist within it. Something angry and dangerous by its unpredictable being, like a curse cast from someplace wholly unfamiliar to our human ways. With Lessons of Darkness, an experimental documentary about the aftermath of the first Gulf War in Kuwait, he roams the hellscapes mankind creates for itself.
Featuring title cards and sparse narration that carries Herzog’s trademark doomsday prophesying, it mostly travels by air, because the ground is scorched. Fields are now craters, the roads are riddled with burnt-out cars and warfare debris, and infrastructure looks like ruins from an ancient civilization.
A night sky full of explosions opens Herzog’s documentary, showing us the terrible fire of creation that brought this world about, and Lessons of Darkness roils with both disgust and awe at the power of what transgressed here in the desert. When Herzog doesn’t speak, classical pieces by Schubert, Wagner, and Mahler play over scenes of an otherworldly hell, choir song adding to the alienation.
Billows of smoke from the burning oil fields extinguishes the sun, the ground’s covered in a toxic oil sludge that reflects the sky to disguise itself. Sand goes gray as burning crude oil settles on it. It’s the most horrifying nature documentary you’ve ever seen, this cursed earth, and it’s fitting that when Herzog does touch down, it’s to show us how it’s no longer a place where humanity resides.
A woman who watched her sons be tortured to death has lost her ability to speak, the shock took it away. A boy, still small enough to perch on his mother’s arm, speaks no more, traumatized by soldiers invading his home and stepping on his head. As men start to populate Herzog’s film, it’s those of the oil companies trying to get things up and running again, donned in equipment that obscures them, blank glasses and face coverings masking their eyes and muffling their voices.
Herzog overtly (and rightfully) paints this war as the machinations of the oil industry, tying ruin to the benefit of the great capitalist machine. It makes Lessons of Darkness a damning portrait of the destruction we’re capable of for no good reason, and this wretched landscape almost matches too well Herzog’s heavy handed commentary.
Here it’s all but warranted though, and with the temperament of a meteor crashing through the atmosphere, Herzog’s film is a perfect example of his belief that some fiction in documentary filmmaking helps it approach some semblance of the real truth.
Lessons of Darkness is Herzog proving himself a masterful experimental filmmaker as well, employing a more minimalist approach in terms of images and music, but accomplishing an outsized effect because of it. Some things just look too strange on their own, evoke feelings too terrifying, that for anyone to try and explain it with a sanitized voiceover would be foolish. Herzog’s creative decision-making lends him great power, and with gobsmacking imagery, he shows us what hell on earth can look like, all for the sake of the Western world’s idea of progress.
Mikkel Frederiksen 