This blog entry is part of my "movie year countdown round #2". Read more about that here.
Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (Land of Silence and Darkness)
I had seen the last third or fourth of this movie a few years ago when my roommate had rented it, and it was fascinating enough for me to want to watch the whole thing. It turned out that the ending actually was the most interesting part in my opinion, but it was still certainly worth watching it all.
The reason Werner Herzog may be my favorite film maker in certain regards is not even necessarily that all of the movies I've seen of his are the greatest (although all of them are at least quite good and worth watching), it's because of the subjects that he is interested in exploring. I would say most of his movies deal with the question, what makes us fundamentally human? Or what is a human? Many times he does this by examining people in extreme circumstances where they are experiencing extreme desires or emotions, or where they are put in life or death situations, or where they have lost everything they've had and need to start over. But the instances that interest me the most are where he examines people who are stripped of fundamental things that influence us as human beings, so that it's almost impossible for us to imagine what it would be like without them.
In my favorite Herzog movie, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser which is based on a true story, a boy spends his entire life until some point as a teenager living in a cell. For his whole life he never sees another human being. His captors were never seen by him, and he was never let out. Food was somehow delivered to him when he was sleeping so that it was there when he awoke. He didn't even realize anyone else existed in the world other than himself. Then one day suddenly a man appears, teaches him a few words, and tries to help him walk. Then he leaves him in the middle of a town. The boy had no history of human interaction, no language to contemplate things. After he entered society philosophers and theologians spoke with him to see how a person with this sort of complete blank slate would think about things.
In Land of Silence and Darkness, a documentary, Herzog interviews and watches people who are both deaf and blind. Some of them became that way later in life. Some of them were born that one. One primary figure is a woman who was born with both capabilities but lost them later in life and now devotes her life to helping people like her to live and communicate in society. The latter part of the film that I found the most interesting was just watching people who have been this way since birth, even ending with a boy who also has down syndrome. What are these people thinking? Can we even imagine what goes on in their head without the use of words or some kind of language. Language is the fundamental of how we think about things. And how do you communicate or teach abstract or moral concepts. Do these people have conceptions of such ideas or not? If they do, how do they understand them or communicate them? Fascinating questions that will keep you with existential thoughts for days.
Rating: 8/10