Werner Herzog shot the footage for his 1992 film Lessons of Darkness over a period of a month on location among the burning oil wells of Kuwait set ablaze by retreating Iraqi forces in 1991. In a prologue and thirteen chapters introduced by intertitles, with extensive music mainly from the Romantic theatre music tradition, and limited voice-over, the film leans heavily on a limited range of filmic techniques, most of which avoid viewing humans, with the exception of firefighters in protective gear. Deliberately estranging, to the point that it has been described as ironic, the film presents catastrophic fires as spectacle and, in Mario Praz’s terms, agony. This article inquires into the sublime as an object of aesthetic observation and as a property of documentary cinema. It tests the critical consensus that Lessons is apolitical to the point of wallowing in dehistoricized apocalypse. Is Lessons the antipode of solidarity or, in extending solidarity from humans to nonhumans at scales from landscape to smoke particles, has Herzog opened, perhaps despite his own intentions, an audiovision of more-than-human solidarity?
Seán Cubitt (Thu,) studied this question.