A continuation of sorts of his Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, what with its moving classical score and semi-narrated images, is an eloquent anti-war piece painted broad with an artist's touch. Non-narrative, it begins as Fata Morgana begins: with a plane touching down, this time from the plane's point of view as Herzog arrives like some Coppola hero in a Kuwaiti port town hours before its liberation would lay it to waste, the Iraqi occupiers setting oil wells aflame as they retreat. Bones of strange animals litter the blackened landscape and the picture resolves itself through a trance of burned-out husks of vehicles, buildings, and men. "All we could find were traces that people actually lived here... All we found were places where grass would never grow again," Herzog says in his voiceover, revealing a level of forward motion lacking in the works of his most similar to this. (Fata Morgana, of course, but also Heart of Glass and, in the lament of a grieving mother, portions of Nosferatu's danse macabre.) Perhaps it's the treatment of the material--the dead land draped like Eliot's in mourning clothes of splendour and poetry--that lends the film its gasping haunting. If there is ever somehow a film adaptation of Henryk Górecki's Symphony for Sorrowful Souls, this is what it might look like.

The shots of the oil wells on fire are the centerpiece of the thing. Shooting several stories into the air like taps sunk directly into Hell, they leave a wool blanket of black smoke to smother the desert. When Red Adair's firefighting crew arrives, throwing millions of gallons of water at the things just to get close enough to dynamite the air from around it, the battle touches the face of archetype. It's Man attempting to leash what other men have set free--an idea as precise as any of the way that war can escalate beyond anyone's desire even as the film serves to echo the Pandora story. Lessons of Darkness draws a line pure from the failures of our past to the failures of our present and future. It highlights our technological accomplishments while underscoring the tragedy that with miracles at our fingertips, mankind is still unable to curb its bestial nature. A work of sublime science-fiction (like all of Herzog's best work), Lessons of Darkness is a fable of the steady deconstruction.

Anchor Bay issues Lessons of Darkness on a double-sided platter with Fata Morgana, the disc available either by itself or as part of the company's indispensable Herzog box set. Lessons of Darkness' 1.77:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is spotless and lovely; Englishman Paul Berriff's cinematography betrays a nice touch with the Dutch angle, whether on purpose or as a result of being this close to Herzog's ego. Whatever the case, the pic looks fantastic on DVD, where it's joined by DD 2.0 stereo mixes in German and English that are more than up to the task of reproducing the gorgeous score and Herzog's honey rhythms. Find in place of the usual commentary track Anchor Bay's excellent Herzog bio as well as Mark Wickum-penned "Production Notes" that not only detail the helter-skelter way the project came together, but also include a couple of choice criticisms of how the film has been misread throughout its existence.-Walter Chaw

Werner Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a summation of the director's work in so many ways that one is tempted to point the neophyte to it ahead of better-known Herzogs like Aguirre: The Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo. It's beautifully shot and masterfully edited, the technical aspect of the filmmaking near-perfection, naturally, and spellbinding at times--but the genius of the picture is that it's a documentary in its truest, most finely-distilled vintage. Not of the experiences of titular Dieter Dengler, an ex-POW shot down over Laos, that are recounted, revisited, and recreated during the course of the film, but of the process of filmmaking and how movies as a medium fit into our collective memory and individual identities. It's a mistake to dig too deeply into the facts of Dengler's case: attempts to do so result in Herzog's own confessions that great parts of the picture were collaborations between himself and his subject in an effort to render the story more visually compelling--acts of faux-absolution that remind of T.S. Eliot's wryly-convoluted endnotes for his "Wasteland." Contemporary post-modern documentaries like Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans and, more specifically, David and Laurie Shapiro's mesmerizing Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, follow the template set by Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and the epiphanies offered the meta-viewer are transcendent and indispensable.

In its mellifluous, deceptively straight-forward way, the eye of the filmmaker sees things that it can't have seen and knows things that no one (not even Dengler, in this case) could know. All the lacunae of life as it accelerates back to nothing are filled in by stock footage and subtle dramatic recreations (it's here that Herzog's flirtation with surrealism finds poignant company in images of post-war Germany) that combine to create this ineffable feeling that life is a long mystery and at the end of it, we look back and make of myth our mendacity. What better way, too, to describe the filmmaker's craft than as the culling of information with disparate, desperate moments of grace, one swollen with drama and import in the hope that a single human life can reflect the experience of all human lives and gain a moment of immortality as it passes its brief shadow across the projector's beam. Little Dieter Needs to Fly is film as a philosophy towards better understanding the impossibility of identity and the slipperiness of memory. It's the product of a master filmmaker in the last third of his career, checking his vehicle into eternity for imperfections as it circles back into itself in endless, voracious consummations. The picture finds Herzog worrying the essential questions of representation in the way of any artist who has evolved into a true believer; the twenty-four images per-second that trick the motor of the mind carry with them every one the face of man in his own image--the author of gods and religions from every life, however spent.

Anchor Bay offers Little Dieter Needs to Fly on DVD both individually and as part of their Werner Herzog box set. I recommend buying the latter, of course, and taking a leisurely couple of months tapping the vein, though however you approach it, you hold in your hands a lovely 1.85:1 anamorphically-enhanced video transfer that is hard to slaver over given the mismatched stocks and archival footage. Still, the image looks clear and as consistent as it can. The DD 2.0 stereo audio does what it needs to do with a minimum of flash. Exhaustive and brilliantly-written production notes round out the disc along with Anchor Bay's excellent Herzog bio. Worth mentioning is an anecdote that Dengler tells of seeing his Naval unit's hanger battered but knowing in his mind that the planes would reassemble themselves just as a coffee cup would in a film run backwards through a projector, knitting and leaping whole back to the table. An eloquent parable taken by itself for Herzog's brand of documentary as well as for Anchor Bay's efforts to preserve them as works of art deconstructed in the past (and poorly) and already due for not only reassessment, but also, it goes without saying, resurrection.-Walter Chaw

My Best Fiend is Werner Herzog trying to dispel some of the myths surrounding his career by magnifying a few of the myths surrounding Klaus Kinski's. As such, it feels a lot more like a cheap shot than like a tribute, burying as it does Kinski's indisputable genius beneath a lot of documentary evidence that Kinski was a slavering lunatic. And though Herzog betrays a definite affection for Kinski (nowhere more so than in a hilarious/warm reminiscence offered to the very proper German couple living in the apartment once shared by the director and actor), more often the piece is given to obfuscating outtakes and anecdotes. Consider the eclipsing impact that B-roll footage of a raving Kinski on the set of Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Herzog's comments about the natives offering to kill the actor for him have on Kinski's astonishingly reserved, haunted performance in the film. If you've never seen Aguirre, you'd think that Kinski was awful in it--and if you have seen Aguirre, your mind begins to blur what's actually on the screen. It's subtle, but it starts to resemble a snowjob akin to the belief, held by most (even those who've seen the films), that Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are splatter flicks when in fact there's more blood in Psycho than in those two films combined.

While there seems to be a consensus that Kinski was insane, there's also little argument that Herzog at his most productive was very likely insane, too; this collision of two madmen is only interesting because the art they created over the course of five films is, at times, as brilliant as cinema has ever been. There's more lore about Kinski and Herzog, in fact, than there is about possibly any other director/actor combination in history--the rumour that Herzog directed Kinski from behind the camera with a rifle trained on him being the one with the most longevity. (Herzog has always vehemently denied this accusation, though he does admit to threatening Kinski with summary execution and vice versa.) The phenomenon to which My Best Fiend most owes its existence is the modern pestilence of box office-watching (and, by extension, celebrity transparency). It's the sickness that suggests the reason that Gigli and Jersey Girl failed had everything to do with the overexposure of Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez, and, further, the attendant sickness that such a suggestion might be right. My Best Fiend is Herzog exhibiting the kind of intellectualizing of his work that has led to a steady decline of same, and as his career has to some extent been in the service of muddying the distinction between feature and documentary filmmaking, My Best Fiend, at its worst moments, feels like a self-loathing attack on itself. Anchor Bay presents the film in a fine-looking 1.77:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer on a DVD sold individually or as part of the company's indispensable Herzog/Kinski box set. The mix of archival and new footage creates surprisingly few problems for either the video or the Dolby Surround soundtrack, though the latter is generally inexpressive. A theatrical trailer rounds out the presentation.-Walter Chaw

With casting, in true Herzog fashion, being the lion's portion of performance, Finnish strongman Jouka Ahola starring as legendary Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart in Herzog's Invincible is a stroke of inspired madness; Herzog fashions Ahola's total lack of experience and guile into something like an ecstatic holiness. He's done this before, of course, with madmen Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek and the certifiable Klaus Kinski in some five astonishing pictures (astonishing not only for their quality, but also for the fact that there were five), so although extra-textual complexity ever-threatens to become a distraction in Herzog's films, it's the sort of distraction that edifies Herzog's preoccupation with blurring the distinction between performance and naturalism, fiction and documentary. No less so than in Invincible: the first time Herzog has returned to the pre-bellum Nazi period in Germany since his directorial debut, Signs of Life, it pits one of Herzog's classic social naïfs against a creature of pure manipulative malevolence, Hanussen (Tim Roth), who is, naturally, the kind of master showman/entertainer Herzog has always mistrusted.

Hanussen is angling to be the secretary of the Occult in the ascendant Third Reich, and the way that Herzog stages his burlesque show (it occupies a good third of the picture) is itself an illusion malevolent and compelling. Roth is exceptional, his greasy wiliness at perfect loggerheads with Ahola's lunkheaded purity--qualities in tension against one another, provided an extra level of damnedness by Herzog's own obvious mastery of visual storytelling. The director is firmly of Hanussen's part: consider how a dream sequence in which a mass migration of crabs insensate across a train track, engine looming, recalls the rising tide of Nazi red while making of the train a dual premonition of the Holocaust and the eventual, self-destructive automatism of Hitler's military bureaucracy. It's the efficiency of wordless passages like this that make so much of the rest of Invincible something of an ordeal. For as well-cast as Ahola is, when given long passages of dialogue, he starts to remind--and not in a good way--of Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride. And the entire first half as Zishe is trekking to Berlin (he wants to be the "new Siegfried" for his Aryan admirers before declaring himself the "new Samson") is remarkable mainly for one scene in a moviehouse where he is introduced to not just the marvels of modernity, but the means of representation to which he will become both perpetrator and slave, too.

New Line ushers Invincible home in a DVD presentation that, at least in terms of technical achievement, exceeds expectation. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is simply glorious, rendering the squalor of Zishe's ghetto with as much texture as Hanussen's eye-splitting study and the mad circus of Zishe's stage debut. The scene in the cinema is alive with motes and shafts of light--it's near-showcase material matched by tremendous Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and an even better DTS option. Rafters-shaking yet distinct and precise, the DTS track is a first for a title in Herzog's library, though the filmmaker's expertise with all aspects of motion picture technology makes the marriage a logical one. Turn to Hanussen's stage show again for a demonstration of the full range and fidelity of the mix. Aside from a theatrical trailer plus trailers for S1m0ne, Shine, and Tumbleweeds, there are no extras on this disc, a somewhat glaring omission given Herzog's friendliness with the medium.-Walter Chaw