On Werner Herzog’s film “Encounters at the End of the World”
Antarctica is probably the closest thing to a genuine frontier that I might experience in my lifetime. And I’ve long admired by Werner Herzog, particularly for the tenacity featured both on and off the screen in his film “Fitzcarraldo”.
A few years ago, the National Science Foundation sent Herzog and a cinematographer to Antarctica for six weeks, despite his promise that he would not come back with another cute penguin story. He emerged from this experience with a hybrid: gorgeous sequences of natural beauty paired with the close harmonies of Eastern Orthodox choral music, interspersed with a kind of anthropological study of a land without natives — human natives, anyway.
There are, in fact penguins in this film, but only briefly. While many reviewers seem to focus on Herzog’s attempt to interview a misanthropic penguin expert, I was more interested in the question implied by a single penguin, a question at the core of all our explorations:
What makes us set off for the hills, on a path perpendicular to our known comforts?
Herzog wisely sidesteps any attempts to answer such questions, and simply presents us with the image of this lone penguin headed for the horizon. Headed for “certain death”, he narrates, as though that distinguishes this penguin from any other.
This trailer tries to cram dozens of stunning image into less than two minutes. Don’t let its frenetic jump-cut editing discourage you from seeing Herzog’s actual film, which unfolds at an expansive and contemplative pace.
In between shots of the vast landscapes and languid underwater sequences, we are introduced to a linguist who operates the green houses which provide fresh fruits and vegetables, a climatologist studying icebergs the size of England as they dance across a computer screen, and single-celled organisms that are able to sort sand particles by size to build tree-like shells. We meet an émigré from Eastern Europe who still keeps a bag ready for instant departure at any moment, a pensive cell biologist making his last dive in Antarctica, and watch scientists in those ubiquitous, bulky red parkas, bending slowly to the ground — like performers in a modern dance piece — to press their ears against the ice, and hear the seals below.
These scientists have a perspective of the Long Now, of the ephemeral nature of human civilization, and yet they also have a zest for life, and an enthusiasm for what they are doing that is truly inspiring.
