Fata Morgana

A plane lands on a runway. Then another. The same image repeats. Then the desert comes. The camera moves across a plain without end. Sand, salt, abandoned buildings, a rubbish heap, dried animal carcasses and now and then people. A woman plays a piano. Two people say something to the camera. The narrator reads a creation story. The film tells no event. It is divided into three parts: creation, paradise and the golden age. The images do not match those titles and the mismatch is deliberate. Werner Herzog directs. Lotte Eisner narrates. It is a German production, made in 1971. It was shot in the Sahara under difficult conditions; the crew fell ill and were detained for a period. Its text draws on the Maya creation account, the Popol Vuh. The narrative is not documentary; the images were gathered by documentary means but arranged inside a construction. Herzog had been thinking of a science fiction project and the film is what was left of that idea. Songs by Leonard Cohen are used in the music. The matter it treats is the mirage; the title comes from there and the film questions the reality of what we see. The film was not understood on release and its distribution stayed very limited. Its limit is form; there is no narrative, the images repeat, and it leaves the viewer nothing to hold. Who it is for: viewers who like experimental cinema and early Herzog. Who it is not for: it has no narrative, it is slow, and the ending gives no closure.