'Encounters at the End of the World': Living in Antarctica
Werner Herzog profiles the brave few living in Antarctica
One of the great and snotty East Coast jokes about California is that “it isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from there.”
Antarctica is the literal end of the world, not the metaphorical one. And Werner Herzog’s film about it is an amazing and brilliant portrait of the poets and dreamers and truth-hunters who live and work there. Who but a filmmaker who once had his film’s cast hypnotized to convey a trance onscreen (“Heart of Glass”) would understand a former banker who came to Antarctica to drive a giant bus; or a Native American master plumber who insists his greatly outsized middle fingers indicate his lineage to Mayan and Incan royalty?
If there’s an ounce of poetry or dream or truth-seeking anywhere within you, you will marvel at these people, not laugh at them. These are the descendants of the adventurer organisms that, as one scientist explains, first fled the terrible marauding micro- creatures of the sea onto dry land.
These, implies Herzog, recognizing his spiritual kin, are the extremists essential to all human triumph, whether scientific or artistic. He pretends not to understand why traveler and adventurer Karen Joyce amuses others by having herself zipped into carry-on luggage but, believe me, Werner Herzog knows all about it.
There have been two Werner Herzogs in movies, I think. The first, and greater, one was the Euro-existential Gothic storyteller who gave us “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” “Woyzeck,” “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Stroszek” and “Fitzcarraldo.” The second is the one we’ve had in the last 15 years when the poet and essayist has taken over, even in a film like “Rescue Dawn,” which is, essentially, Herzog’s re-enactment of a “true story.”
It is that one who has been giving us amazing documentary films about our place in a hostile physical universe — “Grizzly Man,” and now this gorgeous portrait of Antarctica’s scientists and laborers and their work.
Herzog pointedly tells us that this is no film about fluffy penguins. He’s a man who deplores sunlight — on film and on his skin, he says. When he finally shows us some penguins, the story of one of them is hauntingly unlike anything in “March of the Penguins.” And during his interview with a resident Antarctic Penguin expert, marine ecologist David Ainley, his own cruelty comes out. He can’t resist telling us how maladjusted Ainley’s penguin researches have made him. He cruelly asks him questions about penguin sex perversion, not caring
that his savage swipes at the hit movie are also brutalizing a real human being whose only sin is to be like all of the rest of Antarctica’s apocalyptic investigators and revellers, only more so.
Cruelty, too, is part of the dark poetry of Werner Herzog’s personality.
He was drawn to Antarctica by the incredible undersea photography of his friend Henry Kaiser. By the time he’s finished, he has shown us volcanoes and the “etiquette” of volcanologists during an eruption; people learning about whiteouts by placing buckets on their heads; and people who are trying, despite deepening pessimism, to gauge the odds of human survival on this planet.
And his “talking head” ending is as beautiful and memorable as any I’ve seen in a very long time. Stefan Paskov, who operates a forklift but whom Herzog quite properly labels a philosopher, explains the whole society of Antarctica and, in doing so, touches on hope for our species.
“Mankind” he says, quoting Alan Watts, “is the instrument the universe uses to perceive its own magnificence.” I don’t know about you, but that aphorism is now with me for life.•
ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD ★★★4
STARRING: Werner Herzog and various scientists, computer experts and laborers in Antartica
DIRECTOR: Werner Herzog
RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes
RATING: G
THE LOWDOWN: Great filmmaker Werner Herzog travels to Antartica and discovers a society of extreme seekers and adventurers much like himself.
