Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)

"If it didn't exist, there would be a hole in my life."

In April 1979, during a workshop at the Facets Multimedia Center in Chicago, Werner Herzog said to Roger Ebert:

Land of Silence and Darkness is a film that is particularly close to my heart because it is so pure. It’s one of the purest films that I have ever made in the sense that it is one in which things are allowed to come across in the most direct way. 

In the book Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, from 2014, Herzog says as much to Paul Cronin:

Land of Silence and Darkness is particularly close to my heart; if it didn’t exist there would be a hole in my life. Fini Straubinger—the fifty-six-year-old deaf and blind woman at the centre of the film—helped me understand something about loneliness to an extent I never had before.

It’s strange, given all his vacillation and contrarianism, to hear Herzog’s feelings toward this early (1971) documentary stay this constant and this uninterrupted over the course of some 45 years. Because engaging with Werner Herzog the 81-year-old public persona can sometimes demand wading through several layers of irony—all of it heaped on him and none of it, by his own admission, does he understand—to get to the sincerity of his work. See his recent interview with Piers Morgan, who pathetically fails to get Herzog to agree that cancel culture is the greatest crisis of the modern era, but does get a meme-ready soundbite that compares watching Barbie to witnessing Hell. It almost doesn’t even matter that Herzog likely wasn’t comparing watching the movie to feeling like one is actually in Hell—he meant it as immersively as filmmaking can afford, that Greta Gerwig had intentionally created Barbie’s world as a plastic facsimile of Hell—because the headlines have long come and long gone. A tweet will soon go viral that capitalizes on how funny his voice sounds when he says “Winnie the Pooh.” If he doesn’t actually say it, an AI will soon enough.

Regardless, he always means what he says, like that Fitzcarraldo is his greatest documentary and Little Dieter Needs to Fly his greatest fiction, and he frequently confesses to writing dialogue for his documentary subjects to recite as their own words. The timbre of his films, regardless of ostensible labels, is dreamlike, reality always a bit in flux. Herzog isn’t lying, but his truth is easily misinterpreted.

Toward the end of Land of Silence and Darkness, a quotation appears on screen, white words on opaque black:

“If a world war were to break out now, I wouldn’t even notice it.”

From A Guide for the Perplexed: “I wrote those words because I felt they encapsulated how someone like [Straubinger] might experience the world.” She was, in Herzog’s estimation, “outside of society and history.” Not only did she have barely any memory of World War II or major world events—manifest only in, say, the intense vibrations of explosions she felt overhead when she was soundlessly hustled to the cellar during a bombing raid—but she grew up bedridden, addicted to morphine, and confined to a mental health facility. She’s a prototypical outcast. Her loneliness is total, all-consuming.

The film aches with it.

Fini Straubinger (bottom right) visits a facility for the deaf and blind.

Herzog met Fini Straubinger during the making of Handicapped Future, a “utility film” (like The Flying Doctors of East Africa) that Herzog finished with a microbudget at the behest of a sponsor. Though the short documentary eventually aired on German public television to spread awareness about social issues at the time—in the case of Handicapped Future, the lack of accessible public facilities for disabled people—Herzog is mostly dismissive of it, which may explain why it’s not available, as far as I can tell, with English subtitles. In A Guide for the Perplexed, he says:

I don’t know if I like the film today. It tries to maintain some kind of friendly attitude, and seems dangerously conventional and well behaved. If I were to work on a similar film today, it would have a harsher tone when it came to the lack of acceptance of disabled people in general.

While filming, Herzog and cameraman Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein went to see a speech by Gustav Heinemann (president of West Germany from 1969 to 1974), where Herzog noticed a “man tapping with his fingers onto the hand of the woman sitting next to him.” This scene is in Land of Silence and Darkness; Straubinger, with only a brief opportunity to address the president, asks in her clarion, well-apportioned voice, “Mr. President, think also of the deaf-blind. Get us out of our isolation. Help us to find those who can break our loneliness.” Herzog approached her, able to “establish an immediate trust with her” by quickly picking up the tactile language. Just as learning that language represents a “spiritual birth” (Straubinger quoting Helen Keller) for the deaf-blind person, so does learning that language for Herzog unlock a door into Fini’s experience.

This is how Straubinger would agree to Herzog’s fabricated quotes, because she trusted him—not only to represent her accurately, but to film the experience of deaf and blind people with an attempt to comprehend the vastness of their isolation. “Fini allowed me to make Land of Silence and Darkness because she understood that the film wouldn’t be just about her, but also the community in which she lived and the people she surrounded herself with.” He goes on, again from A Guide for the Perplexed: 

Happiness or unhappiness never played a role in Fini’s existence. She experienced complete isolation having been bedridden for so many years, unable to see and hear, but there were things that were more important to her. She knew her life had meaning because she was such a support for other deaf and blind people. We filmed, on and off, for more than a year, following her to various events, meetings and special occasions.

This pretty much sums up the film: Herzog, with Schmidt-Reitwein at his side, joins Straubinger as she talks to various communities of deaf and blind people, reunites with friends, and visits care facilities, all while speaking of her life and occasionally venturing a few words to encapsulate the loneliness that defines her. Many of the deaf and blind people we meet in the film talk of a “void,” or sprawling “land,” as if the extent of their emotions are best measured in continental expanses. In one scene, Straubinger meets Else Fährer, a deaf and blind woman not much younger than her who spent most of her life in a psychiatric facility, unable to communicate with anyone. Else retreated into herself. Even Straubinger can’t break through. Then this quote appears on screen, probably written by Herzog:

“When you let go of my hand, it was as if we were a thousand miles apart.”

Desperation and need wind through these words, seething. Imagine saying this to someone you love, trying to let them know the hole they’ll leave in your life when they’re gone. Imagine eating that hole, swallowing that hole, filling up with a loneliness that will never go away. When Straubinger then cradles a chimpanzee, gripping the creature close, the moment opens up almost unbearably. It’s a gesture of intimacy across an unfathomable distance. 

A passage from A Guide for the Perplexed might help explain what Herzog meant when he told Ebert that in Land of Silence and Darkness “things are allowed to come across in the most direct way”:

You can feel the tender approach we took in the camerawork of Land of Silence and Darkness. I wanted the characters to come across in the most direct way possible, and told Schmidt-Reitwein that if he used a tripod, we would end up with fixed, lifeless images. I wanted him to let the camera beat as if it were part of his own heart, and by extension that of the people he was filming. …I told him that wherever possible he shouldn’t use the zoom, but instead move towards the people with his whole body. 

As an effort to document with closeness and patience and as much understanding as can be afforded the incomprehensible, Land of Silence and Darkness is unspeakably empathetic. In long takes and handheld rhythm, that Herzog can draw upon even a shallow sample of the solitude the deaf-blind endure—and in a visual medium—is overwhelming. This is what a film can do, what it can connect you to, what voids it can conquer—helping us understand loneliness to an extent we never had before.

It’s gutting.

Sources:

Ebert, Roger. Herzog by Ebert. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Herzog, Werner, and Paul Cronin. Werner Herzog : A Guide for the Perplexed. London, Faber & Faber, 2014.

“Werner Herzog vs Piers Morgan” Piers Morgan Uncensored, created by Piers Morgan, season I Dunno, episode Who Gives A Shit, Useless Old Twat Productions, 2024.