Abstract

This essay analyses German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s films Fata Morgana , Lessons of Darkness and The Wild Blue Yonder . Each of these films shares formal characteristics, such as being divided by chapter inter-titles and using voice over narration. However, they also have different iconographic features. Fata Morgana is set in the natural, desert landscapes of Africa. It shows quiet, other-worldly beauty among the ruins of civilisation. The landscapes in this film contain disintegrating relics of human culture, such as wrecked automobiles, aeroplanes and other machine parts. It is not until the twenty- minute mark of the film that the first human figure is seen. They are sublimely dwarfed on the horizon line of an immense desert terrain. Lessons of Darkness is set in Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf War during the period when the last of the burning oil wells were being extinguished. The film presents Kuwait as an unnamed planet that exists somewhere in our solar system. On the one hand, the audience knows that this planet is Earth and that it has been devastated by human action. On the other hand, the film also presents it as a mutilated planet on fire that reflects Herzog’s private, apocalyptic imagination. The Wild Blue Yonder is largely comprised of different found-footage. This includes images shot under an ice sheet in Antarctica by Henry Kaiser and images shot in 1991 by astronauts from inside the space shuttle Atlantis while in orbit around the Earth. These images are contextualised by a narrative that involves alien space missions and human time travel. In fact, in its opening title sequence the film describes itself as “A Science Fiction Fantasy.” The narrative ends with a number of human astronauts returning home after travelling to the outer regions of Andromeda only to find that the Earth has been radically reborn into a planet with no traces or signs of human civilisation