works — Murakami Yuka

Metrograph At Home: Fata Morgana

2025

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Widely regarded as idiosyncratically apart from the nonfiction oeuvre of Herzog’s filmography, Fata Morgana is a mesmerizing, photographic foray into the Sahara, marked by an insistent making of a mirage. Its visual commitment together with Lotte Eisner’s narration of the Mayan creation text, Popol Vuh, summons a reckoning with the primordial that descends into moments of dystopia, oddity, and charm. Transfixing, existential, austere, and defeating, the film sustains the inherent qualities of a myth in relating this telluric survey, full of ambivalence and contradiction.