A NIGHTMARE

LESSONS OF DARKNESS, d. Werner Herzog (1992)

In 1992, Herzog took his cameras and a helicopter to Kuwait, and filmed the results of the brief but disastrous invasion of the country by Iraq. We are given two devastating face to face interviews with victims, but most of the film is about the shattered landscape, a place of mud and junk and oil and fire, an utterly alien landscape that is terrifying in both its scale and its intensity. Images from this film haunt me. War may be hell, but its aftermath is also hellish - and hot.