Rating: 3.5/5
Anti-Criterion Challenge 2024 | 16/52 | Slow cinema, but it’s 95 minutes or less
A plane lands. Then another. And another. The heat off the surface of the tarmac creates a rippling mirage effect where the airplanes look like they are underwater — above the ground and on it simultaneously.
In the desert, between land and sky, riding on the horizon are blue lakes — a Fata Morgana: illusory mirage that appears above the actual image, sometimes reflecting the object.
There’s something powerful and strange about a natural illusion that a camera can capture. How were ancient people to discern from its scientific possibility and the mythical effect of gods on the world? What do you call a phenomenon that lies so directly to your senses?
The film also visits people who live in these supposedly uninhabitable places. It does everything possible to strip any narrative from their lives. In one way, it allows them to be what you see. In another, it strips them of agency and makes them props to whatever narrative you desire. This is probably what Harmony Korine took most from Herzog’s work.
The meta-narrative is so dense — an abandoned science fiction narrative, countless arrests, beatings, and abandoned equipment in brutal weather conditions.
The movie’s most immediate impact was in the psychedelic movement, which reduced the film to a drug movie.
What is onscreen is ambiguous in intent but amounts to the purest road movie. It’s also the fertile breeding ground of Herzog’s obsessions with the stark realities of living and the narratives we construct to make it tolerable. Herzog and the filmmakers he influenced would revisit this film like the plane landing in the opening.
In other words, the film is an incomplete drawing begging to be completed.
In college, I attended a guest lecture, and he asked the audience if anyone had seen Fata Morgana. I was the only one who raised my hand. And I was lying! I don’t know why I lied about it, but a professor said after the lecture, “I can’t believe you’ve seen that obscure Herzog movie.” Panicked, I said, “I eat Herzog for breakfast.” He laughed, and it never came up again.