It's telling that the title of Werner Herzog’s third documentary, LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS (1971, Prime, Tubi, Plex, YouTube), is a misnomer. In this documentary on the lives of people who are blind and deaf, the primary subject, Fini Straubinger, explains that she’s never in total darkness or silence. Though she cannot experience the world around her visually or aurally, she sees colors and hears different noises — hums, drones, crackling. This may be the result of her having lost her vision at 15 and her hearing at 18. At one point, she recalls watching a skiing competition in her youth. Herzog shows skiers in mid-jump and then cuts to blackness. It’s a visual correlative for her life, but again, it’s not meant to be totally accurate.
The film is just as deceptive. It seems simple and even disorganized, but it goes much deeper than that. It opens with Straubinger with friends who lost their hearing and sight in childhood or after. They fly in a small plane together, visit a botanical garden and a zoo and even recite poetry their companions touch spell in their hands. It’s a loving picture of the human need for connection, with continuing images of friends reaching out to each other so they can speak through their fingers. It’s touching and almost cute. It may even seem condescending. But as Straubinger travels around Germany advocating for the deaf-and-blind, Herzog moves to more disturbing stories — children who were born deaf and blind and are only slowly learning to communicate, a woman kicked out of a home for the blind when she lost her hearing and committed to an institution for people with mental illness or cognitive disabilities, a blind man whose family forced him to live in the barn when he lost his hearing. As Straubinger discusses his situation with the mother he lives with in an elder care facility, Herzog captures him as he tentatively feels and then embraces a tree. He no longer recognizes his siblings, his mother says, but he still needs to connect with something. It’s a powerful image repeated when Straubinger is left alone for a moment and reaches out to another tree, and it’s utterly devastating.
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