Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds

 Co-directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer, Fireball:  Visitors from Darker Worlds is a bit like an essay by Montaigne.  The ostensible topic of the documentary, meteors and meteorites (called "meteoroids" often in the film) quickly is absorbed into a larger, discursive context that strays, as in a stream of consciousness, far afield.  The structure of the movie is associative -- one thing leads to another.  Ultimately, the picture ends on an ecstatic and somber note:  the subject seems to be death and man's accommodation to that fact.  Here death is viewed both individually as well as collectively, that is, the fate of each of us and the fate of the world as well.  The movie is Wunderkammer filmed as rhapsody, with lush and ominous choral music and astonishing visuals.

Herzog met Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist, in Antarctica when he shot a documentary in that place.  In this film, Oppenheimer stands in for Herzog as interviewer and enraptured witness to the various things on display.  Herzog contributes, off-screen, his characteristically dead-pan, acerbic, and witty narration and, in one instance, his voice is heard off-camera making a mild joke -- something about being from Bavaria (I didn't exactly catch it).  The movie begins with indigenous people in Mexico juggling balls of fire for a Day of the Dead ritual, then, shows us a dash-cam footage of a fireball blazing across the skies somewhere in Russia -- the fireball bleaches the screen white and yellow.  We see pictures of a woman actually hit by a meteoroid -- it left a loaf-sized bruise on her upper thigh.  In the black-and-white photographs we see her staring in a baffled way at the camera.  There is a Norwegian jazz musician (we meet him strumming his guitar on the roof of a stadium amphitheater where he collects micro-meteorites with a magnet in the sandy detritus in the gutters.  Viewed under magnification, the micro-meteorites are beautiful, like collages of stained glass.  There are meteoroids stored in cabinets in Arizona -- I've seen the display in Tucson of some of these objects.  (The barren wastes of deserts are good places to collect meteorites.) Various talking heads opine and Herzog lingers on their faces after they have ceased talking for uncomfortable lengths of time -- it's as if the camera is seeking the essence of the person speaking in some transcendental way.  (This technique is typical of all of Herzog's documentaries dating back, at least, to Brother Huey's Sermon).  Herzog and company travel to a place in the Yucatan where an immense meteor blew open the Caribbean Sea, created the Gulf of Mexico, and, incidentally, slaughtered the dinosaurs making room in the world for the small, gnawing rodents that then existed. (The town marking the location of the surmised meteor impact is so "forlorn it makes you want to cry", Herzog says, showing us a desolate set of scarcely inhabited ruins on a desolate stretch of beach.  There are two mangy dogs sniffing a third that may be dead but is probably just sleeping:  Herzog says the "dogs are too stupid to understand what happened here."  In Australia, Herzog's drone flies over a huge, sinister impact crater, the hole at Wolf Creek, and, then, we meet an indigenous woman who is an artist and who features the crater, although in a highly abstract way, in her paintings.   Meteors are both the destroyers and givers of life:  Herzog reviews the "panspermia" thesis that meteoroids "seeded" life on earth.  He tours a temple in India where a meteor fell although no one knew this until recently -- the temple is sacred to Shiva.  He reproduces footage of a scrum of pilgrims in Mecca at the Kaaba, fighting one another to plant their lips on plexiglass over a black meteor in the corner of the house-high square monument.  In Antarctica, Oppenheimer and five men march in a line across the level ice of a high plateau looking for rocks fallen from the sky.  Oppenheimer finds a large meteoroid, about the size of his fist and the Japanese leader of the expedition goes into an ecstasy of joy, falling onto the snow and flailing around -- this is the sort of ecstatic image that motivates Herzog's documentary movies.  We see children painted as eerie skeletons marching in a parade for the Day of the Dead, clips from Deep Impact that Herzog praises as "very well done" showing a meteor smashing into the sea and raising a tsunami two-thousand feet high and the picture ends on a beach in Papua or some island in Oceania where indigenous men are relearning an ancient ritual to release the souls of the dead.  They beat torches together while dancing and intoning a song and the sparks, which represent dead people's souls, burst upward into the sky, the whole thing filmed at the golden hour with the sun elegiacally setting into the sea.  

The movie is as good as documentaries get.  It's the sort of film that you mourn a little when the closing titles appear.