I first saw Werner Hertzog’s Lessons of Darkness as a 14 year old around 2000. The Kuwait war was something I had never been formally introduced to, or at least it hadn’t been something that I had remembered, if it was mentioned in my curriculum or at the time of its duration. I think I might have been Herzog’s perfect viewer, fascinated, horrified, unable to believe that this had really happened. In reviews I have read this is referred to as a sense of alienation that is created by the decontextualized photography and narration, the apocalyptic romanticism that Hertzog espouses. The power of the film is difficult to dismiss, although it looses some of its power as it is contextualized by the type of information that we use to understand such events; the nations that act, the reason for the initial drilling, the conflicts and reasons behind the physical events. I am not persuaded by the arguments that the film is corrupt because of it’s aestheticization of this violence. Perhaps from the perspective of someone who knew of the oil fields and had been introduced by the BBC, rather than by Herzog, would see this information recast into the guise of this alien documentary and have such a reaction, but to someone without that knowledge, the style of the film serves an indispensible role in its power. It was the trance of vision without full knowledge that made my first viewing unforgettable. I wonder if anyone else in the class has a different first experience?
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