Mar 11

Mar 11 Movie Review : Lessons of Darkness (1992)

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote an article in 1991 called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The thesis of these essays was that the Gulf War was basically just the US carpet bombing their enemy into oblivion from the air and that it was presented through American media like an efficient, well managed non-event. The antithesis to what Baudrillard was talking about (although he wasn’t wrong) is Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness. A hallucinatory documentary featuring only repercussions of the Gulf War.

Although it is merely 54 minutes long, Lessons of Darkness is split into nine chapters which loosely explorer the repercussions of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In case you didn’t know, Iraqi forces lit over 600 oil fires while retreated from Kuwait after Operation Desert Storm and left Americans and locals with the responsibility of putting them out. Lessons of Darkness focuses mostly on that process while the old German himself narrates an apocalyptic and loosely factual version of what happened. It's great, really.

Hostile to Human Life

I’ll be honest with you: Lessons of Darkness didn’t hit as hard as when I’ve first seen it twenty years ago, but it hit hard nonetheless. I believe part of the power of this weird, almost non documentary is that Werner Herzog just went into Kuwait not exactly knowing what would happen and what he would gonna do. There’s a narration, but no commentary. A lot of Lessons of Darkness consists in incredibly violent images of firefighters working in hostile condition set to classical music. The topic imposed itself on Herzog.

These images haven't lost any potency in over thirty years. You are shown mainly fire, smoke, obscenely large and sturdy machinery that can operate at vicious temperatures and firefighters, trying to survive while mopping that mess. He doesn't interview any of them and it’s a brilliant choice as their actions speak for themselves. Herzog explores a landscape that has been made violently hostile to human life by war and the courageous attempts to neutralize the many horrors it threatened Kuwait with.

Seriously, it gets suffocating to watch at times. The scale of the flame, smoke and machines reminded me of the scale of Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies. The grandeur of the horrors showed in Lessons of Darkness is almost Lovecraftian. It would be impressive where it fictional, but the very idea that people had to deal with blazes of this magnitude confronts you to the horrors of war better than any conventional narratives ever could. No one dies, no one gets hurts, but the fabric of reality in these conditions is violent.

Context is Overrated

Herzog never gives any context in Lessons of Darkness and I believe it's one of the reasons why the movie works so well. It works like a horror movie. When not given any context to explain the nature of what we're seeing, the human mind comes up with its own and it'll always be a thousand percent more terrifying than what the context really is because it feeds off our own anxieties. Werner Herzog was seemingly aware of that and he weaponized it in order to create something violent and unforgettable.

There are testimonies from victims of the war before Herzog ventures into the oil fields, but they feed this lack of context because the victims don't seem to understand exaclty what the fuck just happened to them. They are just stating facts from memory, shell shocked and emotionally burned out. That’s the closest I’ve felt to being in an actual war, I suppose: seeing people die and everything around you being destroyed and only having a loose understanding of what's going on an where it comes from.

Lessons of Darkness is unique. I’ve seen maybe two thousand movies in my life and there's nothing that even resembles what’s going on there. It's raw and powerful. It’s one of these movies where feeling what’s happening is more important than understanding it. It’s not gonna be for everyone, but it’s free with ads on YouTube and also free with ads on Tubi and it’s under an hour long. If you want to understand what’s so magical and about the way Werner Herzog sees the world, this is the one movie you should watch.