Werner Herzog
Fata Morgana

The desert is one of the strongest experiences I have ever lived. The desert speaks to you. The desert calls you. The desert does not forgive. The beauty of the desert is captivating. I was in the desert a few decades ago for several months, in the real desert, in Yemen, 100 km inside nothingness from Marib (a city that was the capital of the Kingdom of Sheba). If the road from Sana to Marib can be enjoyed for its plateau with canyon-like landscapes, from Marib into the furnace of sand, the landscape is shocking; a flat desert begins, there are no dunes, flat. I ended up there for work, as a fitter, in winter, 50° in the shade, at night it nearly reached zero... The sand was worse than water, it got everywhere. There was a sandstorm, you can't understand what it is if you haven't lived through it, I'll just say that we were praying.

In an unreal, almost solidified heat, mirages occurred every moment; we all saw the same things, everyone: structures wavering in the distorting heat, Fata Morgana, people, entities, other things... The mirages were tangible, they became friends. One day I was staring at an unknown point and in a trance, I started walking towards "the center of the desert". Arabia Felix was calling with the silence of the Sirens. After a kilometer I realized and shook off that magnetism, thinking that I wanted a can of Simmenthal for dinner. Today I am a vegetarian, but I am alive because of a can of meat. How good I felt there, in the middle, alone, where the silence disintegrated you more than the heat, where you no longer thought about your body, where the acceptance of detachment opened you to "views of the real world".

Herzog, in this testimony of chasing a conscious suffering, opens up to these views, relentlessly. He "offers" himself, risks death on several occasions, death rejects him: the impersonal is indigestible to it, death is carnivorous. The camera handled by his friend Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein sheds light on the essential, the invisible. Werner drives the (auto)hypnosis car in a catatonic state and glides along the line of an infinite dolly. The eternal return takes off in the déjà vu of a dervish landing, looping from end to beginning.

The appearances of human beings spark an absent wonder, sensations are teleported, deliriums are weighed, non-existent normalities are falsified, the purpose of presence in this dimension is called into question with that absurd little piano-drums (and raspberry voice) orchestra that, towards the end of the film, triggers the ultimate hallucinations. Honest Herzog, he does not claim to be simple and winks at that immovable which we do not grasp.

Werner captures the psychic reportage of the "journey" in the nullification of a dual challenge, the interpenetration of the state of things, magically crystallized on film. And it is magnificent to see the stopping of time that makes us float in the immediate. We feel on us, as if we were there, the entire flow of matter putting the bug in our ear that a little trip in time can be done with unexpected tools. The "concrete" rendering of the work oscillates in a heavy absence, turning the finger in the wound of our illusions: could the mirage be the light closest to the truth?