The movie that got Werner Herzog spat on: “1400 people howled in disgust”
Due to his demanding and eccentric filmmaking style, Werner Herzog’s films are often embroiled in criticism and controversy. From animal abuse allegations on the set of Nosferatu The Vampyre to plots to have his leading actor killed, Herzog’s films have no shortage of reasons to be criticised and disliked. While he’s made many influential movies, as with any intense auteur, there are plenty of people and audiences who have found his films offensive and dangerous – even when he’s not making a political statement.
However, it wasn’t the uncompromising aesthetic vision of Fitzcarraldo, which saw his leading man actually carry a boat over a mountain and a crew member cut off their foot, that drew the most visceral reaction. Nor the boiling alive of 1000 rats to dye them for Nosferatu. No, instead, it was Herzog’s documentary on post-Gulf War Kuwait that elicited the biggest wave of disgust from audiences.
Herzog’s Lesson of Darkness focuses on the ravaged oil wells of Kuwait after the Iraqi military set them alight during its retreat. Instead of establishing a clear political stance, the film focuses on the disaster’s catastrophic and surreal landscape. With the intention of alienating the audiences from images that had saturated their TV screens, Herzog captured the apocalyptic nature of the fires with a telephoto lens, truck-mounted and static shots, helicopter footage and little commentary. What commentary the film did have took the imagery out of its context, in an attempt to portray it from a detached and alien perspective.
While the film won the “Grand Prix” at the Melbourne international film festival and was lauded by critics for its sobering and beautiful abstraction, the audience at the Berlin Film Festival wasn’t as convinced. The end of the screening was met with furious reactions, as the audience felt the film had aestheticised the disaster and the horror of the Gulf War.
In 2009, Herzog reminded an interviewer of the incident when he claimed all critics loved him. Seemingly offended by this incorrect statement, Herzog said, “It is not correct. I’ve had only bad reviews. One thousand four hundred people at the Berlin Film Festival howled in disgust at Lessons of Darkness.” He even claimed that when he walked out of the theatre, he was “spat on by at least a hundred people.”
For the Berlin audience, Herzog’s attempt to make clear the horror of the war and the fires through contextualisation and alienation was nothing more than a romanticisation of war. While some saw this film as a way of criticising all war, some audience simply saw it as a glorification of this specific war. For them, finding a way to capture something in all its sublime horror was a misstep so grand as to warrant saliva projectiles.
But Herzog seems to wear the criticism as a badge of honour, finding praise to be much more horrifying. Or, if not horrifying, it’s just downright untrue. He goes as far as to remind his interviewer that “Aguirre: The Wrath of God had very bad reviews, too.” Just in case he didn’t remember.
