Fata Morgana (1971)
Directed by Werner Herzog

Film Review

Fata Morgana is the most abstract and loosely structured of Werner Herzog's films, a bizarre meditation on man's place in an imperfect universe that offers a unique and profoundly moving cinematic experience.  Neither documentary nor drama, it is an expressionistic visual poem that, in common with much of Herzog's subsequent output, has an overt spiritual dimension and a sense of pessimistic anxiety.  It is film that both celebrates and laments the imperfection of our physical reality, a film that evokes something of the wonder of the supreme mystery of existence.  

Herzog began making Fata Morgana just before he started work on his breakthrough film Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) (indeed there is some crossover between the two films, such as use of the Lanzarote location).  His idea initially was to make a conventional science-fiction drama in which alien beings would arrive on an inhospitable area of Earth and make a report in which they conclude the planet is unsuitable for life.  Herzog wrote a complete screenplay but abandoned this before he began filming the Sahara Desert sequences which take up the bulk of the film.  He still considers this a science-fiction film, since its perspective is that of an extra-terrestrial.

The making of this film, particularly the sequences shot in central Africa, proved to be an ordeal for Herzog and his camera operator Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein.  Mistaken for mercenaries in Cameroon, they were arrested and spent time in a jail, a situation which was aggravated when Herzog fell ill with malaria.  The crossing of the Sahara Desert also proved to be foolhardy, since Herzog chose to start the journey at the time of year when it was most dangerous to do so.  The director also risked his life by filming the outer perimeter of a military installation in Algeria, at a time when he could have been shot dead by patrolling guards had he been noticed. 

According to Herzog, Fata Morgana means "Mirage", which is an appropriate title since the film feels like a strange reflection of our world that is totally disconnected from our present reality.  Mirages, like reflections in a mirror, are phenomena which can be photographed with ease and Herzog uses this fact to great effect in this film, offering some of the most hauntingly beautiful images in his entire oeuvre. 

The film is structured into three parts.  The first part, entitled Creation, is the longest and the most beguiling, consisting mainly of long tracking shots across the Sahara desert, which have an ineffable sensual beauty, quite unlike that of any other landscape on Earth.  The stunning images are accompanied by a narration of a Mayan creation myth (read by the renowned film historian Lotte Eisner) and an effective mixture of classical and contemporary music.

In the second part, ironically titled Paradise, man is still absent but we see traces of his presence in wrecked machinery and derelict buildings.  This conjures up the image of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, a world purged by the gods in their anger.  When man does appear, in the third part, The Golden Age, he is a pathetic shadow of humanity, living a hard existence in the harshest of environments (including, bizarrely, a Lanzarote night club).

The last two parts of the film lack the stark poetry and coherence of the first and illustrate a possible flaw in Herzog's approach to filmmaking, which is not to have in mind a clear vision of what the film is about before he begins making it.  Some would argue that this is what makes Fata Morgana so powerful and appealing - its lack of premeditation is what gives it a spontaneous and abstract quality which compels the spectator to engage with it and make it a complete work of art.

Film Synopsis

A barren desert landscape, a wilderness that looks as if it has been devoid of life for an eternity...  Yet, there are signs of civilisation, signs that once life existed here.  A wrecked aircraft, the decaying carcasses of dead animals, abandoned structures...  It is impossible, unthinkable, but there are also people living in this wild desolation, this broken paradise...