Features: DVD, Limited Edition
Contains two documentaries from director Werner Herzog including LESSONS OF DARKNESS and special bonus DVD of FATA MORGANA.LESSONS OF DARKNESS: In the aftermath of the Gulf war, retreating Iraqi soldiers left the oil fields of Kuwait a raging inferno. True to form as perhaps the world's most death-defying filmmaker, Werner Herzog and a small camera crew arrived on the scene to film the carnage. What resulted was Lessons Of Darkness--less a simple documentary about an environmental catastrophe than it is an apocalyptic vision of hell, Herzog has created a science fiction film, in which our planet vanishes beneath pillars of flame, oceans of oil and impenetrable clouds of smoke. Punctuated by soaring music and Herzog's own commentary, Lessons Of Darkness is a powerful, breathtaking and strangely beautiful portrait of a world on fire. FATA MORGANA: In one of the strangest and most mesmerizing films ever made, world-renowned director Werner Herzog brings his cameras to the Sahara desert in order to film mirages. But Fata Morgana (literally, "mirage") is much more than that--as Herzog combines the apocalyptic, often hallucinatory images he discovered in the desert (plane wreckage, exotic beasts, and one of the oddest musical acts ever filmed) with passages from the Mayan creation myth, transforming a simple trick of the light into what he calls "a science-fiction elegy of demented colonialism."
"[Lessons] Horrific and awe-inspiring." Sight And Sound
"[Lessons] One of the great documentaries of the 1990s." San Francisco Bay Insider
Editor's Note
A collection of two documentaries by Werner Herzog, FATA MORGANA (1971) and LESSONS OF DARKNESS (1992), this program illustrates Herzog's sustained vision, one where nature and man are continually at war with one another. Made more than 20 years apart, these two films are remarkably similar. FATA MORGANA, shot in the Sahara desert, is a mostly silent film, accompanied only by the reading of the Popul Vuh, a Mayan creation myth, and the songs of Leonard Cohen. Poetic, beautiful, and often humorous, Herzog's images twist and turn in the mind, forcing the viewer to step outside themselves and look at the world as a combination and clash between the natural and the man made. LESSONS OF DARKNESS is ostensibly a documentation of Kuwait in the aftermath of the Gulf War, when oil fires were burning up the land and transforming the formerly beautiful countryside into a surreal new landscape. Mostly silent and accompanied by classical music, in a few segments local Kuwaitis bemoan the destructiveness of the fires and the war. Herzog, however, shoots the changed landscape in a way that makes it at once terrifying and beautiful.
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