Lights Out in Europe (1940, dir. Herbert Kline)
For those who cannot experience war at first hand, the next best thing is to see Lights Out in Europe.
It begins in England when war with Germany was only a weekly scare and not an hourly terror. It shows war overtaking children. The snout-nosed gas mask appears. For infants too small for the mask, there is the gasproof container. There are shots of a terrified baby being forced into a container, staring through its big glass pane in panic as he is sealed in. In their back yards people construct flimsy-looking air-raid shelters, decorate them with potted plants.
On Sept. 1, the Nazis invade Poland.
The Polish roads are crammed with the piled carts of fleeing peasants. They pass Polish cavalry going against German motorized forces, horses dragging anti-tank guns. Across the fields refugees run desperately carrying whatever they can. Desperately they pile on trains. Sometimes German planes machine-gun the trains. There are gruesome shots of a young Polish woman clutching the train seat in her death spasm, a father shot through chest and abdomen sitting helplessly between his hopeless wife and frightened, bewildered little girl.
Sometimes the peasants stand around their ruined homes. Pathetic shots show old peasant women futilely pouring buckets of water on mountainous heaps of lavalike embers, once their houses. Sometimes they stare at the burst carcasses of cattle burned alive. A woman stirs with her bare foot a half-burned sheep, then covers her eyes with her hands and weeps.
There are prayers in the open and upraised faces.
…Lights Out in Europe is as negative as all peace propaganda, which can never do more than repeat parrotwise what every adult knows—that war is horrible. But for Americans who wish to think with the utmost realism about Europe’s war, Lights Out in Europe is important because it lets them live through one hour of the real thing.
-Time Magazine, 1940
![Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, dir. Werner Herzog)
Q. Whenever I have presented this film to audiences, it has always made a tremendous impact. Why do you think the film strikes such a chord?
Werner Herzog: People generally respond so positively to it because it is a film about solitude, about the terrifying difficulties of being understood by others, something we have to deal with every single day of our lives. In the film one finds the most radical and absolute human dignity, human suffering stripped bare.
Land of Silence & Darkness is a film particularly close to my heart. If I had not made it there would be a great gap in my existence. Fini Straubinger, a 56-year-old deaf and blind woman, caused me to think about loneliness to an extent that I never had before.
In her case, loneliness is taken to unimaginable limits, and I have the distinct impression that anyone seeing the film asks, ‘Good God, what would be left of my life if I were blind and deaf? How could I live, overcome loneliness make myself understood?’ And the question of how we learn concepts, learn languages, learn communication is also there.
Q. Why did you want to include the children who had been born deaf and blind?
Herzog: I thought it was important to show a different side to the story. Fini went deaf and blind when she was a teen, which clearly makes a difference in the kind of contact she had with the outside world. We will never know what these other kids think about the world about them, for there is just no way to communicate with them, and contact rarely surpasses the very basic palpable essentials: ‘This is a book. This is heat. Do you need food?’
[Helen Keller], who was born deaf and blind and actually studied philosophy raises many questions about what these children think and feel about abstract concepts, to say nothing of innate human emotions.
It seems certain they do feel and understand emotions like anger and fear just like anyone else, but it is not possible for us to know how these children cope with the anonymous fears that are within and that can never be explained by the outside world. The children we filmed would have moments of deep fear that seemed to relate only to what was happening inside their own heads, which when you think about it is quite startling.
-2002, excerpted from Herzog on Herzog. In the above still, Fini Straubinger demonstrates how she communicates using a tactile language tapped out on the hand.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcha0syfO71qzdvhio1_r4_500.jpg)
