TV Reviews : Herzog’s Vision of a Kuwait on Fire

He dove into a piranha-infested river to prove to his cameraman that a shot could be done. He visited Emperor Boukassa’s torture chambers in the former Central African Republic. He insisted on filming the last man living on La Soufriere, the volcanic Caribbean island that experts predicted would blow at any moment.

German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s exploits in the search of the unfilmable are such a firm part of cinematic lore that his extraordinary nerve is now taken for granted. But with the airing of his new documentary, “Lessons of Darkness” (at 10 tonight on the Discovery Channel), Herzog’s larger purposes--beyond a fierce battle with the elements or his own inner constitution--powerfully assert themselves. It may simply be the most horrifying, and most beautiful, film on television this year.

It is not, however, the usual adventure foray that commonly fills Discovery Channel airtime, although the sheer adventure of the film’s making is implicit in every frame. Herzog, with cameraman Paul Berriff, dared to venture into the devastated oil fields of Kuwait immediately after the end of the Gulf War and film a new “war”: the battle to extinguish the oil fires set by the retreating Iraqi army. He went further, filming Kuwaiti women who survived Iraq’s invasion and--recalling his visit to Boukassa’s lair--a makeshift torture chamber.

These may be brief inserts of the human into the film’s vast helicopter panoramas of oil-drenched landscapes darkened further by a canopy of smoke-filled skies. But they make this one of Herzog’s purest film essays of sadness, haunted by predominantly mournful passages from music by Grieg, Wagner, Part, Schubert, Prokofiev and Mahler.

Herzog is a mystic (his own spare narration includes comments like “the oil is trying to disguise itself as water”) but a thoroughly human one, transfixed by evil and by our attraction to the beauty of evil’s destruction.

Herzog then plunges deeper and speculates on what that allure might mean. Just as perverse as the man remaining on La Soufriere volcano, the oil firefighters douse the flames and then, in a moment that could only happen in a Herzog film, fling matches at the wells and reignite them. “Now,” Herzog comments, “there’s something to extinguish again.”