Screening:

Werner Herzog,
Lessons of Darkness, 1992

Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992) is a haunting, operatic meditation on the aftermath of the Gulf War oil fires in Kuwait. Shot in a deliberately stylized, almost extraterrestrial register, the film transforms industrial catastrophe into a surreal landscape of burning wells, scorched earth, and slow-moving military machinery. Herzog refuses conventional documentary framing, instead composing a voice-over that drifts between philosophical reflection and apocalyptic poetry. The human presence is minimized, almost spectral, as if civilization has already receded. What remains is a world suspended between destruction and transcendence, where fire becomes both spectacle and existential condition. The film questions perception itself.