After holding on to the DVD for several weeks [Netflix just made me their Customer of the Month], I finally sat down and watched Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, which is a "documentary" concerned with Kuwait following the first Gulf War, lingering longest on the oil fires. I didn't know anything about the film prior to the viewing, but having some experience with Herzog and a finely-calibrated BS-o-meter, it wasn't long into the film before I was contesting the narrator's [Herzog himself, of course] words. The first highly dubious statement I heard was that the battle raged so ferociously that "grass will never grow here again." It may be a nicely romantic notion that the terrors of human behavior could affect nature in such an instantly dramatic, pre-packaged-for-Fox-News way, but that statement is obviously bulsh: 1) Life is extraordinarily tenacious, and will fight its way back through anything. 2) You're in a desert. There was no grass there to begin with, Werner.

The other scene that raised doubt is probably the most talked-about of the film, in which the firefighters, apparently having completed their task, are, according to Herzog, gripped by "madness", and being unable to bear "life without fire," one approaches the spurting geyser with a torch, and re-ignites it. This type of commentary seems irresponsible - Herzog could have unquestioning viewers believing that a group of highly-trained professional firefighters and engineers left their families to travel to the other side of the planet, risking their health and their lives to complete a task, and then, on a whim, decided to reverse the work. [I understand there are a few reasons, other than madness, why the workers would re-ignite an oil well, all of which are in support of their primary goal of ultimately putting out the fires.]

Reading about the film later, I learned that Herzog considers the film to fall between documentary and science fiction. The man has some ideas concerning "superficial truth", delivered in 1999 at our own Walker Art Center. Among some garbled confusion ["We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile"], are some thoughts which could apply to Lessons of Darkness. Tenet number five of the "Minnesota Declaration":

"There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such as thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reach only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

At this point, it's only fair to state that despite everything, I really, really enjoyed this film. I'm not certain I agree with all of Herzog's photographic decisions [the amateur-looking camerawork in Aquirre, the Wrath of God nearly ruined the film for me], but let it be said that the cinematography in Lessons of Darkness is simply stunning. The entire film is gray desert, gray smoke, brilliant flame. The music selected was equally enjoyable, drawing from Wagner, Mahler, Prokofiev, Grieg, and others. Some of the music-image pairings seemed rather inappropriate, such as a triumphant bit of Wagner [the theme featured prominently at the end of Excalibur] during slow-motion helicopter shots of empty, burning landscape... I suppose it's a biased judgment on my part, but I can't help it - I like the music.

As long as the ideas put forth aren't taken as literal truth, Lessons of Darkness is an fascinating and worthwhile film. Gasp at the imagery, enjoy some Romantic and post-Romantic music, struggle with the merits of Herzog's M.O. It seems counter-intuitive to critique the spoken component of the film, as it was the voiced-over musings of Herzog that so impressed me during my first exposure to his work, in Grizzly Man. Despite the man's efforts to plumb the depths of cinema verité, I fail to see how he could think it was a good idea to create such gorgeous and compelling images, which happen to be connected to one of the major events of current history, but then inflict his own "poetic" version of the truth upon his viewers as well.