Fata Morgana

The quintessential Werner Herzog panorama: an unclassifiable sequence of scenes on the creation myth - African desert images with detours into grotesque brothel music entertainment, monitor lizard madness monologues or desolate factory landscapes. On the soundtrack: Herzog's own condensation of the sacred Mayan book "Popol Vuh", performed by Lotte Eisner and in the (naturally particularly perverse) "Paradise" section by the crazy visionary director himself: "In paradise, man is born dead." Each image lurches iridescently, irritatingly between harsh reality and fantastic surrealism - a jumbo jet lands at the beginning, six, seven, eight times, until it looks like a spiritual symbol, as banal as it is unfathomable. Herzog speaks of a science fiction film: the antithesis to Kubrick's 2001, as a radical enigma at least as monumental and endlessly fascinating as the latter. The desert as the utopia of civilisation when it frees itself from its comforts. Before that, a film experiment of a different kind: not produced with a camera, the drama of Mothlight is based on nothing other than light and movement, caused by moth wings, colour fades and scratches on the celluloid. (C.H./E.S.)

Photo: Austrian Film Museum