Werner Herzog
Fata Morgana

LA RECENSIONE

This is the first feature film by one of the greatest directors that cinema has ever known, and it is a dazzling debut, probably the most beautiful example—still unsurpassed today—of the fusion between landscapes, direction, editing, photography, texts, and music.

Fata Morgana is a film about a journey, a journey that is not narrated, set in the middle of nowhere, which in this case is the Sahara, Kenya, Tanzania, Guinea, and the Canaries. This is a film about the relationship between man, nature, and God—a constant theme recurring throughout Herzog's work, who has certainly been the most skilled in developing this topic in a clear, rebellious, and vigorous way.

Herzog uses the sacred text of the Popol Vuh as inspiration and, like it, divides it into three parts: The Creation, The Paradise, and The Golden Age. He blends the reading of this with images of desolation, death, decaying animal carcasses, vanished and useless technologies, planes destroyed by fate, forgotten lives, extinct testimonies, oddities at the brink of reality, and beautiful music by Mozart, Handel, and Leonard Cohen, to name a few.

Herzog thus traces an imaginary path of the origin of life and its own destruction, a documentary that gradually becomes stranger until it diverges into the surreal, into magic, into fate. With this strange and unpredictable mix, he captures the viewer, now under the spell cast by Fata Morgana, a beautiful enchantress and seductress, a deceiving documentary, a documentary of the soul.