| Dir.: Werner Herzog. Closed-captioned English & Español subs (cc). From the book "Film As A Subversive Art" by Amos Vogel: "Films are now emerging from Germany that reveal, perhaps for the first time, the true state of mind of a country that has undergone fascism, total war, destruction, and killed its Jews; these films may be considered examples of a new, complex humanism tattooed -- for a change -- on the skins of shell-shocked, psychologically maimed Aryans. Such a film is Fata Morgana (cruelly disregarded by critics), which may some day be viewed as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari of the New German Cinema with its declaration of independence from the old, and shedding of both the commercial film and imitative avant-garde. Fata Morgana is a sardonic, melancholic comment on man in the universe, its subtle and hallucinatory images accompanied by texts from sacred 16th century creation myths of Guatemalan Indians and the 1970 German avant-garde. It moves on a poetic, visual level, has no conventional plot, but cunningly employs the trappings of surface reality (sandscapes, barbed wire, industrial debris, natives that do not fit their environs) to probe depths beyond surrealism and metaphysics. The land, though Africa, is a landscape of the mind, archetypal and eternal. The immense, inhuman grandeur of primeval dunescapes, waters, and horizons is caught in sensuous travelling shots revealing man's triumphant and empty rape of the land: flaming red girders of abandoned ... |
