Land of Silence and Darkness

'If there were another World War, I wouldn't even notice it.'

The above quote closes the documentary Land of Silence and Darkness and in many ways sums it up perfectly. Film-maker Werner Herzog has over the years made many films – fiction and fact alike – that focus on outsiders on the extreme fringes of society. With this film, I think it could be argued that his subjects are the most remote and in some ways unknowable of all. The people in this film are all deaf-blind. The loss of these two most key senses puts them in a strange mysterious world where they are cut off from our reality. The principal character is a late middle-aged woman called Fini Straubinger who suffered a fall when she was nine, that went unreported and untreated. As a consequence of this, she gradually lost her sight and hearing so that by her teens she was deaf and blind. She subsequently spent thirty years in bed but later re-emerged and went on to focus on helping others in a similar situation. This involved teaching them to communicate and organising field visits.

Like is mostly the way with documentaries focusing on people with severe disabilities, at first the participants seem quite alien to us but as we observe them for a time they emerge as identifiably human. Fini is in a more unique position than her more famous counterpart Helen Keller, in that she lost her senses at an age old enough to remember more about them and the world around her. This has allowed her to learn to communicate via an extraordinary touch-based system. It still seems incredible for us to imagine what it must be like to be in a void without sound or vision only to intermittently feel this physical communication and moreover, to be able to actually function under these circumstances. Fini is frankly an extraordinary person and her achievements are quite astonishing. The documentary introduces us to several other deaf-blind who are in even more difficult and frankly heart-breaking situations. One middle-aged woman lives in an asylum after the only person who communicated with her, her mother, died. We also encounter some who have borne this affliction from birth. This makes it especially difficult teaching them anything, some concepts becoming completely impossible. One of the most memorable of these scenes involves a 22 year old man who has never been taught how to walk, chew or communicate. We first see him sitting on the floor buzzing strangely while violently throwing a ball about. He seems to all intents and purposes like an infant. Incredibly, once Fini interacts with him she immediately makes a communication breakthrough. There are many unbelievable scenes such as this sprinkled through this documentary and it is a film that makes you pause and not only remember how lucky you are but also to ponder what being human is actually all about.

This Herzog film is unorthodox, as usual. It is approximately an hour and a half long, and somewhere in the middle it might seem like the film is not going anywhere. However, those who permit themselves to feel the power of this harrowing documentary will discover in the ending of the film a moment well worth their persistence. What is the purpose of mature film making? I like to think it is the sincere attempt to help us understand what it means to be human. If this generalization is accurate, Herzog's LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS is mature film making. It is literally investigating what it means to be human without the sense of sight and speech. It has a heroic figure in 56-year old Fini Straubinger and a number of other characters who are compellingly mystifying. We wonder what is happening inside the minds of these human beings who are partially cut off from the world around them.

'Land of Silence and the Darkness', written and directed by Werner Herzog, is an extraordinary documentary -- remember that word, please -- about Fini Straubinger. As a child in Germany, she suffered a terrible fall which caused a popping sensation in her neck. She was afraid to tell her parents (I can well believe this), so the injury was never treated. As a teen, she progressively lost her hearing and her sight, becoming totally deaf and blind. When Herzog made this film, Straubinger was well past middle age, and had spent most of her life in silence and darkness.

Americans who see this film will be reminded of Helen Keller. But Keller lost her sight and hearing (to scarlet fever) in very early childhood, and retained only very slight memory of her stolen senses. (Touchingly, Keller did recall seeing the rainbows formed by sunlight refracted through the crystal prisms of her mother's chandelier.) Because Straubinger retained a full memory and understanding of vision and sound, she became useful as an ambassador to the kingdoms of the blind and deaf. Fini Straubinger has dedicated her life to working with people who are deaf and blind, most of whom have borne those double handicaps either from birth or (like Keller) from infancy.

Herzog follows Straubinger on a trip through Germany, financed by an organisation for the deaf-blind. We see her communicating with other deaf-blind people through a sort of tapping code. Activities which the rest of us take for granted are truly alien experiences for these unfortunate souls. For instance, the simple act of taking a shower: for someone who has never experienced this before, and cannot have it adequately explained, the sudden onslaught of pressurised water is deeply terrifying. In the final sequence, we see a deaf-blind man hugging a tree: attempting to experience this alien life-form through his senses of touch, taste and smell.

One sequence, showing Straubinger interacting with a chimpanzee, I found unpleasant and unnecessary. I get the impression that this scene was staged by Herzog in an ill-thought attempt to inject some light 'comedy relief' into a subject that audiences might find deeply depressing.

I made a point of identifying this film as a documentary, meaning it's non-fiction. Indeed, Fini Straubinger is a real person: her blindness, her deafness, and (more importantly) her work with the deaf-blind are all real, all true. At one point in this film, Straubinger tells us that her most vivid sensory memory -- before the darkness and silence closed in -- is an image of the rapturous faces of ski jumpers as they leap into the sky. After this film was released, Herzog admitted in an interview that Straubinger had never seen a ski jumper: Herzog wrote those lines for her, because he felt that ski jumpers provided the visual symbol (I refuse to misuse the word 'metaphor') which would simultaneously represent sensory rapture and Straubinger's own isolation.

I reluctantly concede that this sort of fictionalisation is a valid device in documentary films. Those of us who are fortunate to see and hear cannot truly experience the dark silent world of Fini Straubinger and her colleagues. (Unless we too are conscripted into that realm, by accidents or illness.) Since this film can never truly put us into the mind of a deaf-blind person -- especially one who has been both deaf and blind since birth, like most of the people encountered here -- some degree of invention is necessary. I recall an anecdote told by Albert Einstein (too long to repeat here; send me an email if you want the details) concerning his attempt to explain milk to a blind man: this incident never actually occurred, but Einstein told the story to prove a point about his theory of relativity.

'Land of Silence and the Darkness' is a fascinating film about a fascinating human being. My rating: 8 out of 10.

... this Werner Herzog film - as powerful today as when it was made, introduces us to Fini, deaf and blind, and the empathetic things she does to help those similarly affected.

Herzog's documentary is a stunning revelation of what it means to be human. When we first see the profoundly disabled people on the screen, we shy away from them, disturbed to consider that these creatures might be people like ourselves. But through the love of the woman whose work Herzog captures here, we discover them as precisely what they -- and we -- are: human brothers and sisters endowed by God with both the need for love and an unimpaired (despite physical handicaps) capacity to love. Watching this movie some 20 years ago, I found this remarkable film one of the most exhilarating cinematic experiences of my life (and I'm now 55 and a veteran of many, many movies, and this film retains its wondrous place in my memory), a testament to the unity of the universal human family told with the artist's -- Herzog's -- aesthetic objectivity, yet clearly giving voice to a passionate embrace and advocacy of life, no matter how physically disabled.