One of the more surreal, non-mirage images from FATA MORGANA seems to look ahead to Herzog’s BAD LIEUTENANT remake.
as the images become increasingly void of mean- ing and densely absurd and the mirages become more internalized in the people profiled in the form of their whims and obsessions. Some of the people photographed in the film stand perfectly still while being documented, indicating that they have awareness only of still photography and have never seen a motion picture. In this way, the film does document the end of a world. FATA MORGANA is an oblique and challenging film, one that I must admit failing to appreciate on my first viewing. Sometimes a viewer’s own experi- ence is not enough to unlock a film, and I found this to be one of those cases, at least for me. For- tunately, in his audio commentary for the film, again recorded in 2004 and accompanied by Crispin Glover and Norman Hill, Herzog provides the necessary key to invest these images with meaning. He re- calls that the project began as a science-fiction script, a film that would take the shape of “an alien report of an almost uninhabitable planet,” which in time is revealed to be Earth. But then, as he recalls, “very quickly into shooting it, I decided to leave the
science-fiction element out of it.” However, the ele- ment not only remains but lends meaning to the aforementioned post-apocalyptic tense of the third segment, which is more post-departure than post- destruction. Because the film opens as a recital of the sacred texts of a dead culture, by a Jewish scholar marked for decapitation by the Nazis at the very outset of their rise to power, the film can also be read as an examination of the ashes of Ger- many itself and the first stirrings within that deso- lation of a newer, more populist culture. If read this way, the film’s third segment becomes less post- apocalyptic and more reflective of a more absurd, surrealist, and humane cinema on the point of com- ing into its own. By the time I got through a second viewing with its commentary, I was on my way to considering this one of, if not the most original and compelling film Herzog had ever signed. Shot in color in standard academy ratio, FATA
MORGANA is framed at 1.33:1 and presented with German and English soundtracks, with optional English subtitles. (We recommend the German track, always.) The two transfers are comparable.
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