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La Soufrière 1977

There is a definite element of self-mockery in the film; everything that looks dangerous and doomed ultimately ends up in utter banality. In retrospect I thank God on my knees it wasn't otherwise … It would have been ridiculous to have been blown sky high with two colleagues while making a film. - Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog has stated that the genesis of this short documentary came when he heard of an imminent volcanic eruption on the island of Guadeloupe and the refusal of one of the island's residents to evacuate. Herzog and his crew trek across the island, studying the abandoned houses and the animals left behind, before boldly climbing up to the mouth of the volcano. La Soufrière is one of the filmmaker's most nail-biting studies of the power of nature and the relationship humanity holds with its immense force.

30 minutes | Ages 12+

Lessons of Darkness 1992

The world had been saturated night and day with images of the burning oil wells in Kuwait, but through the filter of television news. I remember watching those broadcasts and knowing I was witnessing a momentous event that had to be recorded, but in a unique way for the memory of mankind … War has no fascination for me beyond its absurdity and insanity, and 'Lessons of Darkness' consciously transcends the topical and the particular; this could be any war and any country. The film is about the evil that human beings are capable of, which is why it will never age. - Werner Herzog

A visual document of the Kuwaiti oil fields ablaze in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Lessons of Darkness depicts a hellish landscape wrought by war and calamity. At its premiere in Berlin, the film was accused of aestheticising the horrors of war, however it is clear that Herzog instead intends to bring scope and weight to these images in a way the that the inherent limitations of contemporaneous television journalism could not. In doing so, he has crafted a hypnotic companion piece to his earlier Fata Morgana 1971, another totemic visual poem that utilises landscapes as its narrative language. Herzog's spare narration offers only distant, almost alien, insights; there is no simple political rumination to bring meaning to these images, that would suggest order and meaning could be found amidst the apocalypse.

50 minutes | Ages 12+