Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction

In 1970 or ’71, Werner Herzog accompanied a pair of deaf-blind women on their first flight in an airplane. The outing was Herzog’s idea, a joyride in a little four-seat Cessna to celebrate one of the women’s birthdays but also to capture their reactions for a film he was making called The Land of Silence and Darkness. The footage from that afternoon displays many of what would become the hallmarks of Herzog’s style over the coming half-century: the daring gambit on the border of exploitation, the obsession with vision and existential loneliness, and the search for poetry at the extremes of human experience. It is an astonishing piece of filmmaking.