Editing Lessons of Darkness (section)

==Reception==
''Lessons of Darkness'' won "Grand Prix" at the [[Melbourne International Film Festival]]. At the close of its screening at the [[Berlin Film Festival]], the audience reacted furiously to the film, rising to castigate Herzog with accusations that he had [[aestheticization of violence|aestheticised the horror of the war]]. The director waved his hands fiercely and protested "You're all wrong! You're all wrong!", and later maintained [[Hieronymous Bosch]] and [[Francisco Goya|Goya]] had done likewise in their art.<ref name=berlinale/><ref name=torbett/>

The ''Los Angeles Times''{{'}} end of year review for 1992 recognized the film as "the year's most memorable documentary", describing it as "Herzog's apocalyptic, ultimately ironic view of the Gulf War".<ref name=yearinreview/> Critic [[Janet Maslin]] remarked that the director "uses his gift for eloquent abstraction to create sobering, obscenely beautiful images of a natural world that has run amok";<ref name=maslin/> her colleague [[J. Hoberman]] called it "the culmination of Mr. Herzog's romantic doomsday worldview".<ref name=jhober/> Academic Rachel June Torbett hailed ''Lessons of Darkness'' as both "extraordinarily beautiful" and "deeply ambiguous", interpreting the decontextualization of the geopolitical background as an avoidance which meant that the intent of the work lacked clarity.<ref name=torbett/>

The technique of re-contextualizing documentary footage was also used in Herzog's later film ''[[The Wild Blue Yonder (2005 film)|The Wild Blue Yonder]]''.