A poetic journey through Africa, as lyrical and surreal as a dream, fragmentary in its lack of story, yet driven by an inner coherence. Herzog places myths of creation against images of destruction.

Afer the opening credits we see an airplane landing, seven times from almost exactly the same camera angle. A reference to the creation according to Genesis? On the last landing, music begins: “Kyrie eleison”– Lord, have mercy! A shadow moving on the horizon melts into the shimmering heat. Then film historian Lotte Eisner’s voice begins to recite a Guatemalan creation myth, one that apparently failed on the first attempt. We see a fire at a drilling station blazing high into the sky, airplane wrecks (motifs that seem to follow the director to this day) – signs of demise. Images of death accompany the soundtrack bearing the myth of creation. Animal carcasses, the immense loneliness of the Sahara, where the dunes exude a nearly erotic aura, ghostly villages, apocalyptic scenes of scattered, half-mad people wandering about, lost, and reciting raving monologues, sometimes augmented with bursts of scornful laughter. We are told tales of paradise where “the landscape is devoid of a deeper meaning” and where “people are born dead”. Herzog divides his film into three chapters: Creation, Paradise and the Golden Age. Towards the end, the landscape becomes an abstract pattern; it once again becomes evident that it is the film only that lends the chapters their own existence and coalesces them into a single, independent cosmos where the difference in the film locations – Kenya, Tanzania, the Algerian Sahara, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Lanzarote – becomes unintelligible. “FATA MORGANA is the visual coagulation of Herzog’s anger over what he referred to in an interview as the absurdity of the universe... In this landscape, a beguiling stranger hovering between personal vision and objective reality, the future of humanity is already buried.” (Jürgen Theobaldy)
This vision of a world devoid of all meaning is as fascinating as it is terrifying, yet it is also a startlingly beautiful illusion perfectly reflected in Herzog’s ideal of never-before seen images. This film draws its strength from the juxtaposition of the destruction Herzog sought out and his own act of creation.

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

1968-1971

Production Year

1971

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,33

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Experimental Film

Topic

Film History

Available Media

DCP, DVD, Blu-ray Disc

Original Version

German (de)

DCP

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Italian (it), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar), Lithuanian (lt)

DVD

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Italian (it), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar)

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Italian (it), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar), Lithuanian (lt)