Land of Silence and Darkness

Patiently observant, serene, and quietly devastating, Werner Herzog’s 1971 film, “Land of Silence and Darkness,” is one of the greatest of all documentaries. Herzog’s subject is the “Taub-blind” -- that is, people, like Helen Keller, who are both deaf and blind and his heroine is a formidable, middle-aged woman named Fini Straubinger. Frau Straubinger suffered a fall when she was a child and gradually lost her sight and hearing. Without self-pity, and in a strangely dispassionate way, she tells the filmmaker that she spent 30 years in bed, mostly abandoned and without visitors. Herzog’s film shows us inexplicable things and the director simulates the dark and enigmatic world of his heroine by avoiding facile explanations -- we are never told, for instance, how Fini Straubinger was awakened and what has caused her to become an apparently indefatigable advocate for the deaf-blind, people that she refers to in florid, archaic German as her “Schicksalsgeschwister,” (Destiny-siblings) or “Schicksalsgefaehrten” or ”-kameraden” (Destiny fellow-travelers and Destiny-comrades). An artifact of Herzog’s intense engagement with German romanticism, the movie borrows it’s title from Josef von Eichendorff’s iconic novella “Aus dem Leben des Taugenichts” (“Events in the life of a Ne’er-do-well”), a book contemporary with late Mozart and early Beethoven; Herzog’s picture is entitled “Aus dem Leben der Fini Straubinger” --”Events in the Life of Fini Straubinger”. Straubinger’s interlocutors communicate with her by spelling words on the palm of her hand; she senses the words and speaks them, using a laboriously clear and uninflected German. She speaks slowly, in simple but eloquent declarative sentences, expecting, it seems, that everything that she says will be carefully translated to the other Deaf-Blind people around her. Her language, peculiarly poetic and descriptive, is the dialect, we come to realize, that people spoke in the old days, a kind of Biedermeier German extinguished by two world wars -- her diction and sentence structure are frozen in time, the language that she heard spoken around her in rural Germany in the 20’s, presumably when she last could hear people’s words. Fini Straubinger’s heroic empathy, a little too aggressive and off-putting to be sure, seems excessive at first. She’s talkative, even a bit of a boor, a deaf-blind woman anxious to tell us what she sees and, of course, willing to speak at tedious length on any subject since it is impossible for anyone to interrupt her. But, as the film progresses, and Herzog calmly explores the horror of isolation intrinsic to being both deaf and blind, Frau Straubinger assumes Promethean dimensions, a woman who will not accept the vast solitude in which she is buried alive. Herzog’s obvious affection for this big, blustering woman is evident in the way he films her -- in one shot, Herzog mimics the last supper, showing Fini at the center of a table with her disciples, all of them bending toward one another to imprint signs on upturned palms, a kind of Christ among the deaf and blind. One old woman stands up and recites a sentimental poem while ”translators” feverishly sign the words into the hands of the listeners. The deaf-blind go to a greenhouse where they stroke cacti and a petting zoo where they embrace a squirming chimpanzee and pass a lamb from person to person, hugging the little creature that bleats in dismay. The film’s tone becomes increasingly disturbing when we see Fini among children who are born blind and deaf. The camera shows us the extraordinary effort required to teach these children to speak, a task that seems so impossibly difficult that the viewer despairs that it can be accomplished. We are shown a skinny teenage boy born sightless and deaf luxuriating in water dowsing him from a shower and the narrator reminds us that we have no way of knowing what he is thinking or how he experiences his world. Another young man, 22 years old, has never learned to speak or even stand -- he makes unearthly sounds and sometimes punches his lips and eyes. When he is handed a radio, he senses the vibrations from the speakers and clutches it to his heart. Even more frightening is the final scene, an encounter with a man who once could speak a little and see. The man has lost his vision, been shunned by everyone but his mother, and for a decade lived in a cow-stall. Now, he has lost all contact with the world of other human beings -- as Fini and the other old women jabber at one another, speaking and signing simultaneously, the old man wanders off and carefully, precisely, and with infinite tenderness strokes the branches and trunk of a tree. Some people have lost the ability to communicate because they speak German dialects that others can’t comprehend and no one knows how to make signs that they understand. One woman is confined in an asylum and has forgotten how to read braille -- she is also completely isolated and even Fini is unable to reach her. Herzog points the camera at the woman’s blank, handsomely pugnacious face -- she stares at the camera while a crazy woman behind her makes indescribably strange grimaces, gently caressing her own body. Straubinger’s courage shines all the brighter against this landscape of desperate loneliness. In the final title, Straubinger tells us that a world war could erupt and she “wouldn’t even notice” -- her world is without history, something that must be both horrifying and, yet, weirdly consoling to a German of Herzog’s generation. I saw this film when I was 20 years old and recall that I thought it was dull -- but certain scenes, particularly the image of the old farmer hugging his tree, have stayed with me for more than 35 years. I can’t conceive of the heartlessness and incomprehension that once caused me to think that this majestic film was boring. At my present age, I think it so moving that it is almost impossible for me to watch.