Hacker Cinema
Lessons of Darkness
Lektionen in Finsternis
1992 · Film · documentary · 54 min
Directed by Werner Herzog
Shortly after the Gulf War, oil fires were raging all through Kuwait. In the week before this sea of fire would be extinguished, Werner Herzog filmed this apocalyptic landscape with its murky skies, scorched earth and capricious flames.
11 positive3 neutralfrom 14 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
17 comments on Hacker News
Tangentially related and recommended. Werner Herzog's film that also features longer sections on the fire fighting efforts on the oil fields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness
The aforementioned Lessons of Darkness is obligatory, but as I said, it is less a documentary than a kind of audiovisual poem. The footage is incredible [1].
Of his "straight" documentaries, Encounters at the End of the World is great. It's a film about the people who live at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Like his other biographical documentaries, it mixes quirky people and humour with brutally realist view of the world, all to great photography and music.
The Fire Within [3], his 2022 documentary on the popular volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, is wonderful. It's a superior companion piece to his earlier films about volcanos (Herzog really likes volcanoes), Into the Inferno and La Soufriere.
Of his fiction films, you can't avoid Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo. But a personal favourite of mine among his 1970s films is Heart of Glass [4], a quirky and beautiful retelling of a Bavarian folk tale, set in the 1700s.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHfVnM_duRg
[2] https://letterboxd.com/film/encounters-at-the-end-of-the-world/
[3] https://letterboxd.com/film/the-fire-within-requiem-for-katia-and-maurice-krafft/
[4] https://letterboxd.com/film/heart-of-glass/
Herzog is easily one of the greatest filmmakers alive today. He was at the forefront of the German New Wave of the 1970s, and has continued to produce great films throughout the following decades.
Many of his best films are documentaries, but he frequently blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction, such as by giving his documentary subjects scripted lines or by using non-actors in his movies; he calls his approach to art the pursuit of "ecstatic truths". Among the general public, his most well-known film is undoubtedly Grizzly Man, which is a very good film, but he has made many that are just as good. My favorite of his is Lessons of Darkness, which is a kind of audiovisual poem showing the destructiveness of humankind through images. The film opens with a quote from Blaise Pascal, which was in fact invented by Herzog himself [1].
Herzog is also a very, very good writer (and he somewhat paradoxically prefers, according to this interview, to be remembered as a writer rather than as a filmmaker). His non-fiction books Conquest of the Useless is great, and Of Walking on Ice is supposed to be wonderful. He just came out with his first novel, The Twilight World, as well as the autobiography mentioned in the article. For a taste, one chapter of the autobiography was published in The New Yorker [2] recently.
[1] https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Herzog.pdf
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/the-mysteries-of-pittsburgh
Had any of the examples been Lessons of Darkness or Grizzly Man or Burden of Dreams, this conversation would have gone quite differently, but since none of those films were released on Youtube they were not even an option to begin with.
For a poetic treatment of the fires of Kuwait, see Lessons of Darkness by Werner Herzog:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104706/
Trailer: https://youtu.be/vMIM-ma2juo
"Lessons of Darkness": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104706/
Also lessons of darkness. An amazing herzog documentary.
It is really good, the full thing is on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM-ZpC0luvA
The older thread recommended Lessons of Darkness (I haven't watched it yet):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness
It's real. "could be real"? hehe. Yeah, Treadwell did his filming of himself, Herzog came along after his death and put together the movie, did the interviews, voiceover etc. He often encourages the bizarre in his docos, doesn't edit it out, often leaves the camera rolling on an interviewee ages longer than anyone else would - I love that. Uses the least appropriate music imaginable (which often works brilliantly) I know what you mean, they seem very, very odd. It's mainly that every other camera person/director tries to make things/people seem relatively normal, not-weird.
I've seen almost all Herzog's docos, all worth seeing, Grizzly Man is my favourite though. The one about the internet, from a couple of years ago, is one of his best also. Try Fata Morgana for weirdness, or the bleak/beautiful Lessons of Darkness, both set in the desert.
Great question!
Patricio Guzman: La batalla de chile, Nostalgia de la luz, El boton de nacar (i.e. everything I've seen so far)
Bob Connolly & Robin Anderson - First Contact, Joe Leahy's Neighbours, Black Harvest (Trilogy about a half-white, half-native New Guinean farmer)
Werner Herzog - (apart from those already mentioned) Lessons of Darkness, Les Blank's Burden of Dreams
Everything by Scott Noble - watch on metanoia-films.org/
Bus 174, Harlan Country USA, How To Start A Revolution, Silenced (2014), War on Whistleblowers, The Century of the Self
Man with a Movie Camera, Man on Wire, Dark Days, Kumaré, Dear Zachary, Children Full of Life (2003)
Riding Solo to the Top of the World (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903013/
The Atomic Cafe (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083590/
At Sea (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1829648/
The Vietnam War (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1877514/
Lessons of Darkness (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104706/
Tim's Vermeer (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
Weiner (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5278596/
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379357/
The Art of Japanese Life (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7002974/
The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493420/
The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398/
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4299972/
I specifically excluded defending your own country and/or home. Everyone certainly should be allowed to that.
My point is - we as a society should be actively distilling in everyone the reverse of the results of the stanford prison study - you are responsible for your actions, even if someone else tells you it's ok or even orders you. Because in the end, as the attacker, you always have a choice, when it's just you and someone else.
In the end it's just a person against another person, just because someone told them that the other guy is bad. Everyone should be taught to question that. Probably he/she is just as scared as you are.
I recently watched "Lessons of Darkness" (documentary by Werner Hertzog) again and the scene where a woman describes soldiers coming into her home and stepping on the head of her infant was just haunting, because I could not stop thinking of, why would anyone do that. In that moment, it's not your superior ordering you - it's you making the decision to be the terrible torturer.
Please, just walk away.
Lessons of Darkness[1] - Werner Herzog did a moving documentary about the Kuwait oil field fire.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness
My favourite of his is Lessons of Darkness. It is fairly uncategorizable; it can hardly be called a documentary.
The film roams across the oil fields of Kuwait, left burning after the first Gulf War. Steadycam helicopter shots glide over landscapes set to the haunting music of Mahler, Arvo Pärt and others (there is, of course, some Wagner). There's little narration; the few fragments are abstract and prophetical. The whole film is a rather disturbing tone poem about a futuristic, burning apocalypse. It's fantastic.
The White Diamond [2] is also great. The subject matter (an attempt to fly a special air balloon to study the rain forests of Guyana) is interesting, but takes second or third place to the beautiful photography of the forests and the superb, eerie music of Ernst Reijseger, whose film music was released as the album Requiem for a Dying Planet [3], and a couple of Herzogian moments as he gets sidetracked by a weird native (whose philosophical monologue may have been scripted by Herzog) and a waterfall.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessons_of_Darkness
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Diamond
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS1wabo4rXk&index=2&list=PLCOIBtqK1bke_WhtnZMLbOYRjUl6ib8me
Herzog has this concept of the ecstatic truth, which means his documentaries are rarely as simple as they can seem; it's almost a third form of film.
I'm an unabashed fanboy, but in any event, Lessons Of Darkness is highly, highly recommended.
This puts me mind of Herzog's fantastic documentary, Lessons Of Darkness [1], about the crews putting out the oil well fires in Kuwait. Also, the Door To Hell [2] in Turkmenistan.
[1] http://www.fandor.com/films/lessons_of_darkness
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell
Werner Herzog has made a number of excellent documentaries. Here are a few of them with brief summaries.
Lessons of Darkness: the aftermath of the first Gulf War in Kuwait.
Little Dieter Wants to Fly: A young German emigrates to the USA, become a Navy pilot, and is shot down in Vietnam. He escapes and lives to tell the tale. Herzog later re-made this as Rescue Dawn, but the original version is better.
Encounters at the End of the World: Herzog travels to Antarctica.
My Best Fiend: Herzog recounts his movie-making with Klaus Kinski. (For the counterpoint, read Kinski's autobiography, "Kinski Uncut.)
The White Diamond: an experimental zeppelin flies over Guyana.
Grizzly Man: Bear aficionado gets too close and is eaten. Herzog assembled this one from the aficonado's footage and narrates.
Out of all of these, I'd rate "Dieter" as the best.