Lessons of Darkness is hellish.

It opens with a quote by Blaise Pascal: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur like creation – in grandiose splendor.”

We are walked among ruins, and the abandoned machinery of torture. We meet woman who cannot speak, her sad eyes tell her story that parts of her spirit have been irreparably broken by the war. We visit “Satan’s National Park,” where everything that looks like water is oil. We fly into a minaret hollowed out by fire. It is utter devastation. Wagner plays while flying over burning Kuwaiti oilfields and a montage of heavy machinery, of men in waterproof turnouts pressure-hosing oil off. Their eyes are not of sorrow, somehow we know this is their liquid black gold.

There’s little human presence in the film, except these men. Every human sense you can perceive from the shots are grueling. The total devastation of the landscape and the people of this place suggests a determined, hurtling domination of a killing machine.

. . .

Fata Morgana. Ecstatic creation. Paradise without a conception of bliss. Splendor, albeit slightly frayed and scuffed, but alive!

Fata Morgana is perhaps the only film by Herzog that he does not narrate, Lotte Eisner reads from an adaptation of the Popol Vuh, a Mayan creation myth. and then Songs of Leonard Cohen plays. The images are monochromatic and sparse of desert landscapes, then the people, especially all the children, some dressed in bright blue, are especially striking against the landscape.

. . .

I watched these films together. I think I read somewhere that Werner Herzog doesn’t really care about doing psychedelics. These works are as immersive and humbling as LSD or perhaps a burst of adrenaline, if one leans in to the experience.