With Lessons Of Darkness, Werner Herzog turned the Gulf War into science fiction
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Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With Werner Herzog’s Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds hitting Apple TV+, we’re highlighting some of the iconic director’s best documentaries.
Lessons Of Darkness (1992)
Probably the earliest example of an apocalyptic vision in cinema is found in “The Oil Gush Fire In Bibiheybat,” an approximately 40-second film shot in August of 1898 in what is now Azerbaijan by the photographer Alexander Mishon. The environmental horror of this documentary fragment is like something out of religious prophecy. We see a pillar of flame reaching into immense clouds of black smoke and wooden derricks that resemble church steeples or minarets, and then it’s over. As in so many of these early films—which from our point of view are basically shots, discrete but lacking in beginning and ends—a sense of what-are-we-looking-at mystery is inevitable.
However, Mishon (sometimes spelled “Michon”) knew the subject matter well, as he had spent the preceding decade running a portrait studio in Baku and documenting the environs of what was then the center of the global petroleum industry. This is to say that, while “The Oil Gush Fire In Bibiheybat” is in many ways typical of its era’s postcard style, the fire—combined with the rarity of seeing something in deep focus against a darkened sky—looks unreal, like an old-fashioned miniature special effect.
If it’s possible to think of Michon’s film as a spiritual predecessor to Werner Herzog’s Lessons Of Darkness, which was shot almost a century later in the post-Gulf War oil fields of Kuwait, it’s in part because the latter still feels like the culmination of the Herzogian documentary aesthetic and its attempts to recapture those cryptic qualities that are so often found in the early films. There is an argument to be made that all great filmmakers are in a sense trying to return the medium to its origins. In the case of Herzog, this has long entailed an affinity for the silent cameramen: their sense of landscape; their nomadic ways and indifference to fact; their overall perspective on a strange, undocumented planet. He has always been the last of the romantics.
In our own hyper-contextualized age, the fundamental air of mystery must be cultivated or faked. In that respect, Lessons Of Darkness is a work of deliberate impurity: too vague to be an essay, too metaphysical and contrived for journalism, too short to even be considered a feature, sweeping the landscape in majestic aerial shots only to periodically confront us with its human inhabitants. But for all of its ironic detachment, it is unmistakably a film about war and wreckage, surveying craters and monumental industrial ruins from a Herzogian flying-saucer’s-eye view.
An outside observer is not necessarily an impartial one. Politically, the movie might be called a filmmaker’s middle finger to the deceptions and trivializing power of cable news, which had turned Desert Storm into the first 24-hour-news-cycle war. The level of aestheticization is high, from the fictitious epigraph to the trademark musings of Herzog’s narration to the soundtrack (the transportive overtures of three Wagner operas and Grieg’s “The Death Of Aase,” more redolent of Alpine and Scandinavian scenery than of the aftermath of the Iraqi army’s scorched-earth retreat). There is also the dual ambiguity of the oil fire, which seemed obvious even in Michon’s time; one is never completely sure whether it represents our own ruinous industrial ambitions or the more elemental forces of potential destruction that make us look small.
Like so many works of politically pointed science fiction, Lessons Of Darkness confronts us with abnormalities that we recognize to be facts of our own civilization. This is what we find in all of Herzog’s best films, which are puzzled, sometimes even maddened by both nature and human behavior, reminding us that, on our own indifferent home world, we are, on an existential level, aliens.
Availability: Lessons Of Darkness can be streamed for free on Tubi (with ads) and Shout! Factory TV. It can also be rented or purchased digitally from Amazon, Google Play, Apple, YouTube, or Microsoft.
14 Comments
Is this Werner Herzog week or something? What did I miss?Also – can every week be Werner Herzog week? Remember his 11 Questions (or was it just an interview)? That was the best one ever.
With Werner Herzog’s Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds hitting Apple TV+, we’re highlighting some of the iconic director’s best documentaries.
I’m an idiot; I rarely read the bylines. Thank you for pointing that out in a gentle manner.
Every week is Herzog week in the sense that every week leads us all closer to our deaths and the realization that in the face of an uncaring universe, all weeks are ultimately insignificant.
I actually like the brief oil field scene in Jarhead better only because it portrays the other aspect of this disaster – the disastrous effect on those walking through this hellscape. One reason Gulf War Syndrome was (and is) so hard to treat is that the etiology was so diverse – some probably came from the poorly tested (and ultimately unnecessary) prophylaxis given the night of the invasion that might not have worked anyway if Saddam had launched chemical weapons, some came from others, and some probably came from spending days and weeks in the oil fields without PPE. I have friends who’ve never really recovered from it.It’s strange how many good Gulf War movies there are especially considering how brief and irrelevant the actual event was to most Americans. Add Courage Under Fire and Three Kings to movies that have aged pretty well.
Clooney’s and the movies attack on George Bush (the first one) for not invading Iraq proper and taking out Saddam rings a touch different in hindsight. The entire plot seems naïve
Oh, it’s somewhat naive in its geopolitics, although I don’t think it calls for taking out Saddam as much as it did for protecting the Shi’is (which is also something Schwarzkopf had mentioned in anger in like 1992 when he admitted he’d gotten bamboozled by one of the Iraqi generals on that and air.) The plot is also a bit silly at times.But it also is really about the only popular media representation of Shi’i/Sunni before 9/11, and its portrayal of the media clusterfuck that was the Gulf War and the utter fear of Saddam still rings true today, and I’d take it well ahead of almost all OIF/OEF movies.
Is that another American who fails to get dark comedy?
Ditto on your Jarhead observation. I think that movie and Herzog’s Lessons both do a pretty good job of illustrating just how immense these fires were. It wasn’t simply a few wellheads, but entire oilfields going up. Hellscape is an apt description. I was on a carrier in the Gulf during Desert Storm and we even got smoke from the fires and sometimes could see the glow from them at night.Take Deepwater Horizon and multiply it by 700. When you add the Gulf War oil spill, well over a billion barrels of oil either went up in smoke or was dumped into the sea. It was a huge environmental disaster.
The aftereffects of the Gulf War and the subsequent Iraq/Afghan wars also gave us a fantastic side plot for the fourth season of Justified.
Anything traced to airborn particles of spent uranium rounds once they hit a target?
Yeah, that falls into the ‘others’ category – depleted uranium rounds were something that has long been suspected but never really confirmed.
Cover Fata Morgana please!
I’m so glad you guys hit this and Encounters this week, my two fav Herzog docs. I love the opening shot of “mountains” that are actually just tire tracks. Herzog is such a motherfucker and it’s great. The hellscape of those burning oil fields is unforgettable.