Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Land of Silence and Darkness
1971 · Werner Herzog · Land of Silence and Darkness on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how long the camera holds on each hand touching skin. (camera)
Schmidt-Reitwein rarely cuts away from these tactile exchanges, letting shots run long instead of jumping between reactions the way most documentaries do.
Payoff: The patience keeps you watching an exchange you cannot fully understand instead of cutting past it.
Listen for birdsong and traffic the subjects cannot hear. (sound)
Herzog fills the soundtrack with ordinary ambient noise throughout, never commenting on the fact that not one person on screen can perceive any of it.
Payoff: The gap between what you hear and what they hear becomes its own kind of instruction. In the reading: heautonomy. Deleuze calls this heautonomy: image and sound each form a separate whole that only speaks across the gap between them.
Notice each visit growing harder to watch than the last. (structure)
The film moves person to person, arranging its subjects from the most connected to the most isolated, so the difficulty builds without anyone announcing it.
Payoff: The order is doing the work a narrator would normally do in another documentary.
Watch Straubinger's hands teach the Lorm alphabet to strangers. (performance)
She spells letters onto a stranger's palm with the same matter-of-fact calm each time, never rushing and never performing distress for the camera.
Payoff: Her steadiness is the film's real center, not a subject observed but a guide teaching you a new sense. In the reading: voyant. Deleuze's voyant watches and endures rather than acting to fix things, which is exactly Straubinger's stance throughout.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Put your palm flat on any surface for a moment. Everything Straubinger reaches the world through starts that small.