Movie Details
Title: Lessons of Darkness
Release Date: 21 Feb 1992
Runtime: 54m
Genre: War, Documentary
Director: Canal+, Première
Production Companies: Canal+, Première
Overview: Shortly after the Gulf War, oil fires were raging all through Kuwait. In the week before this sea of fire would be extinguished, Werner Herzog filmed this apocalyptic landscape with its murky skies, scorched earth and capricious flames.
Additional Information
IMDB: View on IMDB
TMDB: View on TMDB
Ratings
Average Vote: 7.9 (129 votes)
Cast
Recommended Posts
Jacek, an angry drifter, murders a taxi driver, brutally and without motive. His case is assigned to Piotr, an idealistic young lawyer who is morally opposed to the death penalty, and their interactions take on an emotional honesty that throws into stark relief for Piotr the injustice of killing of any kind.
Werner Herzog follows mountaineers Hans Kammerlander and Reinhold Messner during their expedition into climbing the Gasherbrum mountains, which has some of the most difficult peaks to be conquered, and they'll do it without the use of oxygen tanks. Herzog also takes some time to hear about their past experiences with other mountains, their personal tragedies and the reasons why they are so involved with such activity.
Shot under extreme conditions and inspired by Mayan creation theory, the film contemplates the illusion of reality and the possibility of capturing for the camera something which is not there. It is about the mirages of nature—and the nature of mirage.
Werner Herzog takes a film crew to the island of Guadeloupe when he hears that the volcano on the island is going to erupt. Everyone has left, except for one old man who refuses to leave.
A group of pilgrims lie down on the thin ice of the lake Svetloyar and begin to look for the city of Kitesh. According to the legend, God saved the city from the Mongolian prince Batyi's soldiers by letting it sink to the bottom of the lake. If you listen carefully you can hear the bells of the Kitesh cathedral toll deep down.
Local girl Na runs a small hotel where every day is more of less the same until Ta arrives one day. Ta is an architect from the city who has come to oversee the building of a new development and very slowly the two build a friendship that develops into something more romantic.
A tense, brutal story of two Jewish boys who escape from a train transporting them from one concentration camp to another. Ultimately, they are hunted down by a group of old, armed home-guardists. The film goes beyond the themes of war and anti-Nazism and concerns itself with man's struggle to preserve human dignity.
A British military paratrooper disappears in mid-air during a jump from an army plane. Two investigators, Patrick Allen and Neil Connery, try to unravel how this happened. What they uncover is an alien plot to steal the bodies of earthlings by snatching them out of the air.
"Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it’s like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living!" (Harun Farocki, Zelluloid, no. 27, Fall 1988)
In the forested slopes surrounding the rural Tuscan village of Tirli, a group of lumberjacks work long hours felling trees in the hopes of making an ample profit. Amongst them, a recently widowed father struggles to overcome the pain of his wife’s death, whilst juggling the fresh financial pressures of raising two motherless children.
With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into chains of cells then more complex images from tribal cultures and contemporary modernist concepts. The images react, interpenetrate, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis (or redemption?) is achieved.
In 1980s East Germany, Barbara is a Berlin doctor banished to a country medical clinic for applying for an exit visa. Deeply unhappy with her reassignment and fearful of her co-workers as possible Stasi informants, Barbara stays aloof, especially from the good natured clinic head, Andre.
A ghost and a French marquis wander through the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, encountering scenes from many different periods of its history.
A documentary on Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide.
A Korean man in China takes an assassination job in South Korea to make money and find his missing wife. But when the job is botched, he is forced to go on the run from the police and the gangsters who paid him.
Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer who plans to build an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, so, in order to finance his project, he embarks on an epic adventure to collect rubber, a very profitable product, in a remote and unexplored region of the rainforest.
A group of graduate students and scientists uncover an ancient canister in an abandoned church, but when they open it, they inadvertently unleash a strange liquid and an evil force on all of humanity.
The Shadow Mountains, 1983. Red and Mandy lead a loving and peaceful existence; but when their pine-scented haven is savagely destroyed, Red is catapulted into a phantasmagoric journey filled with bloody vengeance and laced with fire.
When cocky military lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee and his co-counsel, Lt. Cmdr. JoAnne Galloway, are assigned to a murder case, they uncover a hazing ritual that could implicate high-ranking officials such as shady Col. Nathan Jessep.
0 Comment