Lessons of Darkness

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Lessons of Darkness (German: Lektionen in Finsternis) is a 1992 film directed by

The film is a meditation on catastrophe, contextualized through the literary modes of religion and science fiction.[4] It begins with a quotation, attributed to Blaise Pascal: "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendor." This attribution is apocryphal, as the text was written by Herzog for the film and chosen, like the music, to give the film a certain mood.^[5] The prologue of the quotation is followed by thirteen sections, denoted by numbered title cards: "A Capital City", "The War", "After the Battle", "Finds from Torture Chambers", "Satan's National Park", "Childhood", "And a Smoke Arose like a Smoke from a Furnace", "A Pilgrimage", "Dinosaurs on the Go", "Protuberances", "The Drying Up of the Source", "Life Without the Fire" and "I am so tired of sighing; Lord, let it be night".^[6]

Mostly devoid of commentary, the imagery concentrates on the aftermath of the first

Herzog's sparse commentary interprets the imagery out of its documentary context, and into a fiction: the opening narration begins "A planet in our solar system / wide mountain ranges, clouds, the land shrouded in mist".[6] The narrative stance is detached, bemused; Herzog makes no effort to explain the actual causes of the catastrophic scenes, but interprets them in epic terms with vaunting rhetoric to accompany the Wagnerian score.^[8] The workers are described as "creatures" whose behaviour is motivated by madness and a desire to perpetuate the damage that they are witnessing.^[9] A climactic scene involves the workers, shortly after succeeding in stopping the fires, re-igniting the flow of oil.^[10] The narration asks, "Has life without fire become unbearable for them?"^[9]

Reception

Lessons of Darkness won "Grand Prix" at the

The Los Angeles Times' end of year review for 1992 recognized the film as "the year's most memorable documentary", describing it as "Herzog's apocalyptic, ultimately ironic view of the Gulf War".[13] Critic Janet Maslin remarked that the director "uses his gift for eloquent abstraction to create sobering, obscenely beautiful images of a natural world that has run amok";^[1] her colleague J. Hoberman called it "the culmination of Mr. Herzog's romantic doomsday worldview".^[4] Academic Rachel June Torbett hailed Lessons of Darkness as both "extraordinarily beautiful" and "deeply ambiguous", interpreting the decontextualization of the geopolitical background as an avoidance which meant that the intent of the work lacked clarity.^[12]

The technique of re-contextualizing documentary footage was also used in Herzog's later film The Wild Blue Yonder.

Soundtrack

The sources of music used in the film were classical, and predominantly theatrical:^[3]

Footnotes