Out of Sight: ‘Lessons from Darkness’ in the Chaos of the Gulf War

Off the Radar is a weekly column that features missed movie reviews that students can access for free through NYU’s streaming affiliate programs. Dark Lessons is available to stream on Kanopy.

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Alia Lutra

Dark Lesson by Werner Herzog is an amazing documentary about the looting during the Gulf War. (Illustration by Alia Luthra)

Werner Herzog’s 1992 film Lessons in Darkness is a vivid symphony of destruction and trauma in the aftermath of human conflict. For 54 minutes, the documentary chronicles the senseless destruction inflicted on civilians and the environment as a result of the Gulf War. The lack of a clear narrative structure and contextual information allows the viewer to be completely immersed in the infernal hellish landscape of the Kuwaiti oil fields. Herzog, a master documentarian, uses dramatic orchestral music to piece together haunting footage of environments devastated by human conflict and strip away the patriotic theatrics used by new media to cover the Gulf War. His portrayal of the war and its aftermath is deeply raw, emotional, and paradoxically beautiful.

The film, divided into 13 titled parts, shows the carnage from the point of view of an omniscient observer. From above, from a helicopter, the desert, disfigured below, disfigured by aerial bombardments and flooded with a sea of ​​burning tar, is captured. The horizon is indelibly tinted with a veil of black smoke and dark orange hues; it’s hard to believe that the documentary footage is genuine and not a spoofed backdrop for a sci-fi blockbuster. The surreal environment is enhanced by Duke’s own narrative, vague and detached, prompting the audience to adopt the point of view of a passive – and possibly extraterrestrial – being looking at the consequences of human actions.

While Lessons in Darkness remains a visually stunning, compelling piece of Herzog’s filmography, its most enduring achievement is its minimalistic yet internally transparent illustration of a man at war. Round-the-clock coverage of the Gulf War left an immeasurable imprint on a whole generation of television viewers. Newsreels of the countless US troops and billion-dollar military equipment deployed in Iraq are etched into the collective cultural memory. This portrayal of the American war machine in full force by the media is a patriotic fantasy that deliberately obscures the human and environmental costs of the conflict. The Duke deprives the conflict of all its sensationalism, politicization and borderline fetishization. Focusing almost exclusively on images of burning oil fields, ruined buildings, and mountains of black smoke, Duke portrays the war not as a glorious feat, but rather one step closer to the apocalypse.

Duke’s documentation of these previously overlooked scenes of military intervention speaks eloquently of the devastating path humanity continues to follow. It takes a few words in this film to convey the barbarism of human greed and its terrifying potential to cause irreparable damage to the planet.

Contact Mick Gow at [email protected]

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