A near-silent documentary journey through (and over) the Sahara scored to Leonard Cohen songs and narrated by both director Werner Herzog and German film historian Lotte Eisner (reading from the Mayan “Popul Voh” creation myth), Fata Morgana is one of Herzog’s earliest – and most evocative – cinematic essays on the uneasy relationships between man and Earth, unaffected reality and orchestrated drama. Initially conceived of as a science-fiction project, the film captures the vast African wasteland in all its overwhelming, ominous glory, the big sky portentously hovering over the rolling sand dunes and the husks of modern machinery that litter the ground like relics from an obsolete civilization. When his gaze turns to the desert’s residents, Herzog seems to be consciously testing the limits of non-fiction filmmaking’s policy of non-intrusion, with these scenes exuding a deliberately staged quality that somewhat undermines the air of authentic, otherworldly mystery begat by his seductively roaming cinematography (some of which was reportedly shot by attaching a camera to the roof of a VW van driven by Herzog himself). Still, there’s a beguiling poeticism to Fata Morgana that, even in its slightly redundant latter third, is awe-inspiring, whether it be the majestic shots of shimmering mirages – images that beautifully encapsulate the director’s own bordering-on-surreal documentary aesthetic – or the comments of a man whose admiration for a rare reptile’s ability to survive the harsh desert embodies Herzog’s own career-long fascination with the contentious but vital relationship shared between the natural world and its inhabitants.
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