This brutally formless documentary about the firemen going in to clean up the ravaged oil fields after the Gulf War was derided at the time for decontextualising the war and turning it into meaningless art. Werner is the perfect existentialist lens through which to see this sort of atrocity against nature - and looking back at it three decades later in our boiling future it looks unfathomably worse. These unspeakable atrocities, not just against people, but our shared world. They don't deserve narratives. I'm glad as he matured even further as a documentarian he lost the penchant for title cards - because their pomposity and frequency here undermines the message somewhat.
Review of Lessons of Darkness
