by Samuel Hunt
The visionary German director, Werner Herzog, explores the Antarctic in his latest documentary. Herzog’s characteristic fatalism and focus on the fragility of human existence is set against the uncompromising vista of the tundra. We are immediately introduced to a continent of indefinite horizons, white panoramas and McMurdo Sound, home to a community of eccentric vagrants and prophetic scientists.
McMurdo is a frozen melting pot of drifters, philosophers and professional thinkers; a fringe society on the fringe of the world. One local describes how the inhabitants of McMurdo seem to have fallen off the edge of the world and ended up at the bottom of it. It is an apt description and Herzog’s ability to reveal these characters is one of the great strengths of the film. Despite their apparent eccentricity, it is easy to warm to the cast and perhaps it is Herzog’s own affinity with them that sparks this. There is a welder claiming royal Aztec lineage, a linguist with a penchant for botany and a computer expert who puts herself in a bag, taking ‘hand luggage’ to a most literal definition.
The host of characters provides an excellent sounding board for Herzog’s existential musings and fundamental questions. We learn of biblical sized icebergs, a continent so quiet it wakes you up and doomsday messages of humanity’s unsustainable future on the planet. Yet the film does not lapse into an ‘Inconvenient Truth’ style lecture on our imminent demise: the images speak for themselves and are all the more profound for it.
Of these images, none are as mesmerising and visually stunning as the sequence of life under the ice. In the anniversary year of the Apollo landings the world under the Antarctic appears more alien than any lunar landscape. It is a world of violent Darwinian conflict on a single cell scale. Samuel Bowser, Cell Biologist (and guitar player) explains how we did well to make an evolutionary escape from the abyss, only to reassure us that the murky watered inhabitants are the most successful species on the planet and will inevitably outlast us. Bowser, one of many PHD-owning Nostradamus’, delivers our apocalyptic destiny with a disturbing melancholy etched across his face. He and his compatriots appear as dry suited Monks, boatmen to the underworld, preaching psalms from an inverted cathedral beneath the ice.
In short it is an unrivalled sequence of natural history and it is no wonder it was Herzog’s inspiration for the film. Those at Planet Earth will feel they missed a trick after seeing Herzog’s footage. All of which is set to a pitch perfect score; the baritone Bulgarian choir drone over the cavernous spaces beneath the ice, along with the seals, who sing ungodly underwater incantations, conversing in a kind of stellar Morse code.
Throughout the film, Herzog cumulatively combines, humour and character study with a grim hypothesis of the future, all of which symbolised by a novel take on March of the Penguins. Having asked if Penguins are insane, a solitary bird inexplicably breaks from his companions and trudges off into the vast expanse of white like an undignified Captain Oates wobbling off to certain death. It is a deeply comic moment filled with pathos and one of the standout images of the film. It represents the balance Herzog achieves; offsetting grim fatalism with his own wry humour and ensemble cast of comic eccentrics.
The result is Herzog at his most informative and poetic, Encounters is as visually stunning as it is philosophically confounding. As the film ends a forklift-driving philosopher casually quotes Alan Watts: "We are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its own magnificence." If that is the case, Herzog is our most astute witness and through his films, should continue to give testimony.
Dir. Werner Herzog, USA 2008, 99 mins
Encounters at the End of the World is released in cinemas nationwide on the 24th April. Check local listings for details.
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