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Land of Silence and Darkness
Directed by	Werner Herzog
Written by	Werner Herzog
Starring	Fini Straubinger
Cinematography	Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein
Editing by	Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Release date(s)	1971
Running time	85 min
Language	German, German Sign Language
IMDb profile

Land of Silence and Darkness (Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit) is a 1971 documentary film by German director Werner Herzog. Produced by Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

In telling the story of Fini Straubinger a deaf-blind German woman, Herzog delves beyond the sort of heart warming human story such documentaries lend themselves to and investigates the nature of human thought and communication. Herzog follows Fini Straubinger to numerous events as she visits with other people in the deaf-blind community, discussing their struggle to live in the modern world with their disabilities. He reveals their communication with each other through a sort of sign language of strokes and taps on the other person's palm. Perhaps, the three most important scenes in the film for its philospohical pretensions involve a home for people, who unlike Ms. Straubinger and her friends, were born deaf-blind, an airplane ride, and a man hugging a tree.

At the home a charitable group helps boys, who were born deaf blind. The boys have therefore experienced the world only through taste, smell and touch. Herzog provokes the viewer to ponder what the world would be like, what indeed thought would be like for someone who had no concept of speech or sight. He shows how an act so simple as showering can be an alien and horrifying thing for someone who has no idea what a shower is and no way for it to be explained to him. This scene, perhaps, evokes best the profound sense of loneliness and isolation present in the film.

A more optimistic scene occurs when Ms. Straubinger and her friends take a flight in plane. Many of them are experiencing flight for the first time, and, unable to see or hear, the viewer is led to ponder the wonders present even in the mundane.

Perhaps the most important image in the film is the final image. In fact, Herzog says that the whole film is a preparation for the final image. In this final shot, one of the deaf-blind approaches a tree and embraces it in a gesture which expresses a “fanatic materialism: it would be difficult to imagine a more stripped-down, economical illustration of what Heidegger calls Dasein, existential being in a ‘senseless’ world” (Hoberman, J.).

Herzog's film is therefore a moving story about a group of seriously disabled people. He also, however, uses that story to delve into questions of being, knowledge and communication that philosophers have been asking for centuries.

• Gene Walsh, Images at the Horizon: a workshop with Werner Herzog / conducted by Roger Ebert (Chicago: Facets Multimedia Center, 1979) 22.
• J. Hoberman, Alien Landscapes, V. 26 (New York: “Village Voice”, 23/29 December 1981) 66.

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