Planes Landing On A Loop Forever
Werner Herzog: 3 Documentaries (Part 3)
Ballad of the Little Soldier. 1984, 44 minutes.
Handicapped Future. 1971, 43 minutes.
Lessons of Darkness. 1992, 54 minutes.
“If a worldwide war would break out now I wouldn’t even notice it.” — Fini Straubinger, Land of Silence and Darkness, 1971.
Can the world be as sad as it seems, and is all the world a war film? Lessons in Darkness is another Werner Herzog meditation on apocalypse, this time with footage of the Iraqi harrowing of the Kuwaiti oil-fields as pleasing backdrop. Dating back to his 1971 desert dream mantra Fata Morgana, you get the feeling that Werner will never say ‘no’ to a bit of eschatology. The end of the world runs on a loop in his thoughts, over and over, like the aircraft landing again and again at the start of that earlier film.
Herzog gleefully cannibalises the image factory of his own films to create fresh combinations for his ongoing Gesamtkunstwerk: abandoned aircraft, sand dunes, bombed out structures and vehicles, animals in captivity or dead; all the tools of the atrocity exhibition. He’s like Ballard in that respect.