Clouds of smoke darken the sky, an oil well burns brightly, black, viscous oil pours into the water. Lessons in Darkness presents apocalyptic images of terrible beauty, taken during the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraqi troops set fire to the oil fields during their retreat from Kuwait and opened the production facilities so that the “black gold” flowed into the Persian Gulf. Werner Herzog, however, withholds the exact circumstances of this man-made environmental catastrophe from the viewer. The ravaged landscape appears to be from another planet, the strange-looking human beings – masked American fire specialists, Iraqi women – stand speechless in the face of the inferno.