My Favorite Werner Herzog Film

This one was a bit of a struggle. When I settled on writing about Werner Herzog for this month, I immediately thought of his two New German cinema classics, "Aguirre the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo." Herzog made his name with those two portraits of madness and colonialism, with the help of his most famous leading man, Klaus Kinski. I love these films dearly, but as I was going back over Herzog's filmography, I found myself considering entirely different options. Herzog is still working steadily, and these days he's perhaps better known for his documentaries than his fictional films. There's such a particular style and sensibility to them, that they're quite unlike anything else I've ever seen. "Grizzly Man" is the best known in the U.S., the one brought him to the attention of the mainstream culture, and lead to references and parodies popping up in all sorts of strange places. However, the one that has stuck with me ever since I saw it, is the documentation of his trip to Kuwait in the wake of the first Gulf War, "Lessons of Darkness."

Like so many of his other works, "Lessons of Darkness" is about madness. Herzog looks at the aftermath of the war totally devoid of any politics. Rather, his approach is to look at the destruction itself, manifested in various forms. We begin with an opening quotation, attributed to Blaise Pascal, "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendor." And then we are presented the horrors of war like a travelogue of Hell, with long, loving shots of the rubble of civilization, including several aerial views to show us the full scope of the carnage. Human beings are present, and a few are interviewed, but the focus remains on the ruined landscape. The second half of the film is largely devoted to the burning Kuwaiti oil fields and the efforts of firemen and engineers to contain them. The images of the oil wells on fire, creating plumes of smoke hundreds of feet high, is an awe-inspiring sight. Herzog backs long shots of them with stirring classical music, inviting us to contemplate their terrible beauty with him. He's evidently a Wagner fan, which is entirely appropriate.

Herzog's famously fatalistic narration is relatively sparse in "Lessons of Darkness," but when he does speak, it is to impart a worldview that is both deeply pessimistic and filled with wonder. He marvels at the workers at the oilfields, who seem to lose their humanity as they acclimate themselves to extreme conditions and a nightmarish, seemingly impossible task. He describes the devastated terrain like that of an alien planet, an unrecognizable place inhospitable to the life that once occupied it. In Herzog's eyes, he has arrived at the Apocalypse, and so dutifully frames the experience in epic, existential terms. The film is split up into segments, each denoted by title cards like "Finds from Torture Chambers" and "Satan's National Park." Some critics have described the film as being akin to science-fiction, as Herzog explores the hellscape like a visitor from another world, repulsed yet fascinated by what he has found. Some interpreted this to be ironic, but I found Herzog to be in deadly earnest.

It's difficult to find films to compare "Lessons in Darkness" to, aside from fictional apocalypses like Lars von Trier's "Melancholia." Herzog doesn't hesitate to dig deep into his subject matter and grapple with the larger questions, but the narrative he constructs is so unlike what you would expect from a documentary about the first Gulf War, it's hard to think of it as a Gulf War documentary at all. Instead, the film feels more akin to a Chris Marker style cinematic essay on the nature of humanity's self-destruction, one that just happens to use Kuwait as its backdrop. Wikipedia currently classifies it as a fictional rather than a documentary film, and though I don't agree, I can see the argument for this. Thanks to Herzog's efforts, "Lessons in Darkness" transcends current events, and remains as timely and as haunting as ever, long after the first Gulf War has been overshadowed by the second. I've seen very few other documentaries that have been able to escape a sense of their own history in this way.

As much as I love his earlier feature work, I suspect that Herzog is going to be remembered in cinematic history primarily as a documentary filmmaker. He's been equally daring and ambitious with both, often blurring the line between them. However, anyone can make a fictional film about a madman. Not many directors choose to seek out the madness in oilfields and the Vietnamese jungle and the Alaskan wilderness, and elevate them the way that Herzog has through the documentary form. So I have no reservations about declaring my favorite Herzog film to be a documentary, the first I've written about for this series. "Lessons of Darkness" is as potent an examination of the warped human soul as "Aguirre" or "Fitzcarraldo," and is as easily as beautiful and as moving.
---

What I've Seen - Werner Herzog

Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)
Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)
Fata Morgana (1971)
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Heart of Glass (1976)
Stroszek (1977)
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Cobra Verde (1987)
Lessons of Darkness (1992)

My Best Fiend (1999)
Grizzly Man (2005)
Rescue Dawn (2006)
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009)
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010)
Into the Abyss (2011)
Queen of the Desert (2016)
Lo & Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016)
The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022)

---