Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Blake Rivera If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Red-Barracuda Fata Morgana may arguably be maverick German director Werner Herzog's most left-field work. This is saying quite a lot considering some of the oddities in his filmography. With this film he has outright made an experimental film and not, I hasten to add, a documentary. While this often has the feel of a documentary and some sequences evoke one, this resolutely is not intended to inform the viewer of facts in any traditional sense. In fairness, many of Herzog's fiction and factual films have crossed over with one another and his cinematic style often falls into the netherworld where these two distinct forms of film overlap. Herzog himself has stated that he makes no distinction between the two formats himself. In any case, Fata Morgana is possibly the most opaque and hard to classify of his films on account of its lack of any plot or obvious message.Set in the Sahara desert of North Africa, this is seemingly an attempt to evoke a perception of the Earth from the point of view of an alien, although you'll be doing very well indeed if you pick up on this yourself without being told about it. It's a very rhythmic film where images and music work alongside each other. There are a few long tracking shots which capture both the natural beauty and the ugliness humans create. The focus often moves onto other inert objects of the desert, such as dead animals (nature), a wrecked aircraft (humankind). Later on, there are appearances from an assortment of eccentric characters all of whom reside in this harsh land. The most memorable of these is a pianist and drummer who play a very strange form of music in a fully committed fashion. Herzog said that this middle-aged couple were the owners of a brothel, although tidbits like this can only be garnered from the commentary track; in fact, this is one of the very few films that might actually be better with the commentary track playing, as the ever fascinating Herzog himself offers much interesting info on this bizarre cinematic adventure.The term Fata Morgana itself means mirages and these are returned to several times. The film opens with a succession of edits of airplanes landing all shot from exactly the same angle and each time, the planes appear to land into the midst of a mirage. Later on, we witness a different mirage of a mysterious vehicle many miles away driving in what appears to be senseless circles in the middle of the desert. Divided into three parts – 'Creation', 'Paradise' and 'The Golden Age' – there is intermittent narration that recites excerpts from an ancient creation myth. There is also – unusually for Herzog – a selection of contemporary music accompanying the imagery, with a couple of tracks from Leonard Cohen, amongst others. In truth, it's all very baffling from a logical point-of-view and is very hard to interpret the meaning. But it has a certain hypnotic effect and, if you can somehow get into its very specific rhythm it's a film that can be appreciated. It's certainly not a film for everyone though and will even pose problems for some hardened Herzog fans. It's one I get more out of the more I watch it.

Cosmoeticadotcom Fata Morgana, the 1971 documentary-like film by German filmmaker extraordinaire Werner Herzog, filmed over several years in the late 1960s, is one of those rare DVDs that should be listened to with the commentary turned on. It is a visual feast of North African (mostly Saharan) imagery that is timeless. You simply could not tell that it was made over thirty-five years ago. The soundtrack to the film, including German classical music (Mozart and Handel), and rock music by Blind Faith and Leonard Cohen, also lends its timeless quality. The narration by three different German narrators (German film historian Lotte Eisner, Eugen Des Montagnes, and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg) is solid, and Herzog goes on and on of Eisner's import to this project, himself, and film history, but the English speaker of the translation, James William Gledhill, has a voice that seems downright deific, which lends itself far more perfectly to this project, even though much of the text- in either language, is rather superfluous. Yes, the faux Biblical sounds of the Popul Vuh Mayan creation myth in the film's first part, Creation, is interesting, but the text Herzog wrote for the remaining two parts (Paradise and The Golden Age), along with quotes from a German poet Herzog names as Manfred Eigendorf, almost seems a satire of the first part's somber tone…. The film, it seems was pieced together during the shooting of several other Herzog projects concurrently- the fictive Even Dwarfs Started Small, and the documentaries The Land Of Silence And Darkness and The Flying Doctors Of East Africa, but these projects' rejected material only add to the beauty of this film, such as aerial scenes of a flamingo mating lake from afar that give one an eerie unearthly sense, one which Herzog crows about in his commentary. This unearthly feel is present right from the film's start of several airplanes landing on a desert runway, with their images getting successively blurrier as the heat from the ground rises, and increases the distorting waves that mar the images. That this film was influential in the –Quatsi films of Godfrey Reggio is an understatement. But, whereas Reggio is content to just toss images at you, Herzog has an ability that only American filmmaker Terrence Malick also has: to make a wholly self-contained vocabulary out of the juxtaposition of images and words, and one dependent upon an emotion-first thrust. Analysis can fail when brought to such endeavors. Herzog often does not understand even why his art is great. The best he does often is wholly unconscious and mesmeric. This is why his contempt for the Lowest Common Denominator pap of Hollywood is openly stated on the commentary.Perhaps the best illustration of this comes in a scene that, on the commentary, Herzog tells us followed a severe drought in Cameroon. It shows the jerkied carcasses of cattle, and Herzog describes the unbearable stench. Yet, the viewer can sense this all from the images, the blackness of the sun dried portions of animals, and the blanched bones. Yet, even in that commentary, Herzog focuses on the stench, not any deeper meaning. He is content to let you imbue and interpret what you will into and of his work, such as the almost erotically feminized shapes of sand dunes, which recalls a scene from Ingmar Bergman's Hour Of The Wolf, where Max Von Sydow, runs his hand over Ingrid Thulin's beautiful nude body's curves. But, the archetypal image in this film, which symbolizes much of Herzog's career, is of a mirage of a faraway car driving back and forth on the surface of what appears to be a lake. It is deep, hypnotic, illusive, elusive, supernatural, yet real, just as Herzog, the believer who came from a family of militant atheists, is. But, then, like everything else, it ends.

MisterWhiplash It would be something to try and tell someone what Fata Morgana is very simply about. Or, maybe it isn't: Herzog goes to the Sahara desert and nearby villages to film assorted landscapes and the locals. But this is just the broadest stroke. It's a feat that you either surrender yourself to, or you don't. He gets into the form of the world around him entirely, without a story, bound only to certain aspects of written poetry, as his camera (shooting on supposedly discarded film stock) wanders like in a pure travelogue. One might even jump to that easy conclusion, as he puts up these immense landscapes, then moving to more rough civilized culture (though not the actual 'normal' culture itself), and to a point levels too abstract to be able to convey properly here. Sometimes it takes a while to get along, close to a purity through the "creation" section, but a purity in how parts are manipulated either by nature or by broken-down machines. Soon the narration, readings from the Popol Vuh (who, by the way, does the music for most of his films), with the gradual procession of actually highly stylized shots adds a whole different level to it. It's a hybrid film, and it's not easy, but the rewards are what best comes closest to Herzog's idea of "ecstatic truth", images he's been out for his whole career.One wonders if the images end up, by the time the second section, Paradise, leading along the words spoken, or if it's the other way around. You're eyes are moving along with the stills and pans, and the wording is close to being religious writing, but there's also the music choices, how the bizarrely spare singing and low-key classical music goes together with Leonard Cohen and Blind Faith. I think each side ends up complimenting the other, and it's something that still *seems* like it shouldn't work. Perhaps that's the draw to it, the chances taken in going through desolate wastelands and the smallest run sections of any kind of civilized life (in this case the shacks of the desert), that make it so fascinating. If only for the cinematographic sense it's a marvel, too indescribable for the casual photography fan because of molds of technique, and some of the strangest images of any Herzog film. There's pans, there's long-shots, there's hand-held while driving by the towns, there's a bus dozens of miles away that via mirage seems only a couple, there's full-on close-ups of fire and a man holding a reptile and talking about its radar (truly classic gonzo comedy), there's people holding still in fake poses, and a man and woman playing inane music. But, most importantly, it ends up feeling, at least for me, natural for the personal nature of the approach.I'm sure only Herzog would know for certain why he made this film, as opposed to the simple 'how'; he was already filming Even Dwarfs Started Small, and he ended up going through many perils to finish it. Yet this is what makes Fata Morgana such an amazing feat- it will appeal to one depending on what someone brings to it in actually watching it. It's definitely unsettling, but there's the temptation to want to see it again very soon after, just to experience all of the ideas and realities turned abstracted strange vibes (yes, the word 'vibes' applies here). It's one of the truly spectacular "art-films" ever made.

tedg Herzog has produced works of genius. That's because he has incredibly trustworthy cinematic intuition, believes in forces that called be charmed forth and is unafraid to take deep risks in his quest for the hypnotic.He also has some interesting things to say about his work. But I advise you to _not_ listen to what he has to say because the subtlety and depth of his work is greater than his conscious insights.A man like this constantly works/ Some of his output is well formed, others just notebooks. This is the latter. It still has moments of wonder but the scope is very local. This is a collection of short form studies. During this period, he was also writing journals, several hundred pages of cinematic notes. Next years "Wrath" was where these ideas were coherently shaped.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.