Film Screening:

Vernon, Florida (Errol Morris, 1981, 55 min, USA, in English, Color, Blu-Ray) 

-- Introduced by Jim Haverkamp (AMI)

Vernon, Florida is an odd-ball survey of the inhabitants of a remote swamp-town in the Florida panhandle. Henry Shipes, Albert Bitterling, Roscoe Collins and others discuss turkey-hunting, gator-grunting and the meaning of life. This second effort by Errol Morris, originally titled Nub City, was about the inhabitants of a small Florida town who lop off their limbs for insurance money ("They literally became a fraction of themselves to become whole financially," Morris commented.) but had to be retooled when his subjects threatened to murder him. Forced to come up with a new concept Morris created Vernon, Florida (1981) about the eccentric residents of a Southern swamp town.

“… delightful in its loving - but detached - portrait of the more eccentric inhabitants of small-town America, in this case the backwater community of the title.” -- Time Out

Lessons of Darkness

(Werner Herzog, 1992, 54 min, Germany/France/UK, in English and German w/ English subtitles, Color, Blu-Ray)

Straddling a line between documentary and science fiction, Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness (Lektionen in Finsternis) is an epic visual poem set in the burning oil fields of Kuwait following the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War. Herzog, as much a daredevil as a documentarian, took his small crew in a helicopter and, floating above the fields, photographed jaw-dropping footage of the blazing, blackened landscape. Alternately horrific and majestic, the movie is a phantasmagoric, if distanced, catalog of horrors. Boiling lakes of crude oil, twisted scraps of melted metal, and ominous billows of smoke and fire abound. On the ground, the images are just as otherworldly. Herzog filmed scenes of firemen in full-body suits, working -- futilely it seems -- to contain the blaze. There are also a couple of interviews with Kuwaiti women, who talk heartbreakingly of the brutalities they suffered at the hands of Iraqi soldiers. In his voice-over narration, Herzog assumes the identity of a spectator from another planet, making bemused comments about the catastrophe with no attempt to inform the viewer of the factual circumstances behind it. His high-flown rhetoric, dense with mythical portent and allusiveness, underscores this visionary movie's detached view of the destruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields.

-- Winner of Grand Prix Award in Melbourne International Film Festival (1993)!

“The burning oil fields of Kuwait furnish [...] the apocalyptic raw material for [Werner Herzog's] magnificent, harrowing documentary essay." -- Nathan Lee, The New York Sun

Cost: Free and open to the public.

Sponsors: The Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI).