Werner Herzog's 1992 film Lektionen in Finsternis is eerie, surreal, with science-fiction voice-over narration about a planet somewhere in our solar system, over footage of the Kuwaiti oil fires six months after the Gulf War in 1992. Swooping aerial shots of oil fires, oil fields, lakes of oil disguising itself as water, reflecting, bubbling, coating plant life, now dead. Strangely beautiful, always horrifying. A sweeping score of Verdi, Schubert, Wagner and Mahler. An hourlong tone poem, transporting, hypnotic.
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Her face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of her feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm . . . . irresistibly propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the pile of debris before her grows skyward. (Walter Benjamin, revised)
