The first Gulf War was successful dramaturgy. It began with the prettiest green fireworks you can imagine. Then a guided bomb goes down a chimney and General Schwarzkopf explains, "That was the office of my counterpart." Then our tanks blowing the lids of their tanks. The highway of death. Then the war was over, we celebrated, the Kuwaitis celebrated, everybody celebrated our victory.
We didn't get very much information on the aftermath of the Gulf War, which is the subject of Werner Herzog's heartbreaking documentary. There's not much media interest in a woman whose sons have been tortured to death in front of her and who has lost the power of speech. And blazing oil wells are good for some video footage but nothing to dwell on.
Before he and his troops quit Kuwait, Saddam ordered the oil wells of the country to be set on fire. Our own troops had orders to protect the oil wells -- not the banks or museums -- but arrived too late to stop the catastrophe. Civilian contractors were hauled in to extinguish the flames. In retrospect it all seems rather pointless. "We", in the sense of Homo sapiens, drill oil wells in the desert, then "we" set them on fire, then "we" put the fire out.
You might expect a production like this to take one of two forms. Either it's an informative and careful documentation of the steps taken by firefighters with a sonorous narrator, or it's an impressionistic muddle with jiggling hand-held cameras and excited people shouting to one another.
But this is neither. Here, as elsewhere, Werner Herzog is on his own poetic and mutedly humanistic trip. The camera is either steady or moves only slowly. The images are devoid of sentimental claptrap. We don't see any slimy birds flapping around in the muck. Herzog's narration is sparse and usually only comments on what we are looking at, without explaining it. If we see a desert landscape filled with shimmering rivers, pools, puddles, and oxbow lakes, Herzog tells us we're looking at oil. "The oil tries to disguise itself as water." And what a voice it is, too; the kind you wish your shrink had -- a slow, melodic, sensible, serious German accent with British overtones.
Because there is so little narration, the musical score plays an important role in lending the film its impact. We hear rather darker pieces from the likes of Wagner (including, inevitably, "Gotterdammerung"), Verdi, and Grieg. If I had to compare it to another documentary, it might be Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi" without the directorial flourishes.
It's hard to imagine how Herzog and his crew managed to make the film. The camera seems to be right up there next to the inferno where the firefighters take breaks to stand in the stream of water from the hoses in order to avoid being roasted.
The victory that ends the film is hollow. After all, the whole thing needn't have happened in the first place. And God knows how long it will take the landscape to recover from this insult.
We didn't get very much information on the aftermath of the Gulf War, which is the subject of Werner Herzog's heartbreaking documentary. There's not much media interest in a woman whose sons have been tortured to death in front of her and who has lost the power of speech. And blazing oil wells are good for some video footage but nothing to dwell on.
Before he and his troops quit Kuwait, Saddam ordered the oil wells of the country to be set on fire. Our own troops had orders to protect the oil wells -- not the banks or museums -- but arrived too late to stop the catastrophe. Civilian contractors were hauled in to extinguish the flames. In retrospect it all seems rather pointless. "We", in the sense of Homo sapiens, drill oil wells in the desert, then "we" set them on fire, then "we" put the fire out.
You might expect a production like this to take one of two forms. Either it's an informative and careful documentation of the steps taken by firefighters with a sonorous narrator, or it's an impressionistic muddle with jiggling hand-held cameras and excited people shouting to one another.
But this is neither. Here, as elsewhere, Werner Herzog is on his own poetic and mutedly humanistic trip. The camera is either steady or moves only slowly. The images are devoid of sentimental claptrap. We don't see any slimy birds flapping around in the muck. Herzog's narration is sparse and usually only comments on what we are looking at, without explaining it. If we see a desert landscape filled with shimmering rivers, pools, puddles, and oxbow lakes, Herzog tells us we're looking at oil. "The oil tries to disguise itself as water." And what a voice it is, too; the kind you wish your shrink had -- a slow, melodic, sensible, serious German accent with British overtones.
Because there is so little narration, the musical score plays an important role in lending the film its impact. We hear rather darker pieces from the likes of Wagner (including, inevitably, "Gotterdammerung"), Verdi, and Grieg. If I had to compare it to another documentary, it might be Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi" without the directorial flourishes.
It's hard to imagine how Herzog and his crew managed to make the film. The camera seems to be right up there next to the inferno where the firefighters take breaks to stand in the stream of water from the hoses in order to avoid being roasted.
The victory that ends the film is hollow. After all, the whole thing needn't have happened in the first place. And God knows how long it will take the landscape to recover from this insult.