Fata Morgana (1971)

Top comments

1. 

   The_Claw

   In Paradise, all you will hear are Leonard Cohen songs. 11 years 4 months ago
2. 

   Siskoid

   Fata Morgana is the term for those heat mirages that make the landscape go blurry. It's also a Werner Herzog documentary (although, I often feel "non-fiction" would be a better label for his docs) that retells a Mayan creation myth, in German, using Saharan landscapes. The odd juxtapositions, an attempt to shoot a mirage of sorts, that of human history according to myth (Creation - Paradise - The Golden Age), Edens lost to eternity. The result is nature/archaeological photography, but including modern effluvia, objects despoiling the desert playing the roles of relics. It's the ancient world, but we're from the 100th Century. Herzog progressively includes more human beings - absent in Creation, then able to speak, and finally, performing - but it's in the absence of things that the film is most interesting. Not even so much the lack of people as the lack of CONTEXT. You're often asking, what happened here? And he gives you the time to reflect on the images and what they mean. Herzog sometimes takes breaks from the narrated tableaux for interviews with zoologists, and these moments are at odds with the rest (no matter how much I like watching a monitor lizard do its thing). Just Herzog being Herzog and getting distracted by stuff that suddenly interests him, I suppose. Bonus points for the Leonard Cohen tracks. 1 month 2 weeks ago
3. 

   karuss

   Highly absurdist creation myth- on film - by herzog. Too few films have beautiful photography as this one. The images of abandoned capitalist ventures and western “progress” lying broken on the desert are interspersed with various states of nature that speak truthfully of nature and the need to live, or die. Beautiful. 4 years 4 months ago

See all comments

Friends

Login to see which of your friends have seen this movie!