OUR CONTINENT THIS WEEK: Antarctica
OUR FILM: Encounters at the End of the World
There are no indigenous films from Antarctica, because there are no indigenous people from Antarctica, but the next best thing is a film from Werner Herzog - perhaps the most widely traveled of contemporary filmmakers. Encounters at the End of the World is a film of spectacular landscapes, fascinating science, and eccentric characters. And by “eccentric” I mean people who have chosen to live off the beaten track - at the far end of earth, seeking adventure, seeking knowledge, perhaps seeking to escape.
Here’s the trailer:
And here’s my introduction:
HOW TO WATCH
ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
CLICK HERE TO WATCH ON AMAZON, from $3.99, OR PASTE THE FOLLOWING LINK INTO YOUR BROWSER https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.2ca9f7a1-be3e-23c1-ed7c-17c134ecc0c7?autoplay=1
CLICK HERE TO WATCH ON YOUTUBE, from $3.99, OR PASTE THE FOLLOWING LINK INTO YOUR BROWSER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZFnEeegxvU
CLICK HERE TO WATCH ON ITUNES, from $3.99, OR PASTE THE FOLLOWING LINK INTO YOUR BROWSER https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/encounters-at-the-end-of-the-world/id346795033
REFLECTIONS ON
ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Werner Herzog has been making films for nearly sixty years - and what a gift to follow his career. I remember the first Herzog film I saw Aguirre, Wrath of God, a movie of whose title I had been aware but unsure how to pronounce. Like some treasure buried in a jungle temple, before the widespread availability of movies to watch at home, Aguirre called to me. People talked about it in hushed tones, and finally, late on a Friday night, at Belfast’s Queen’s Film Theatre, it unfolded. Opening with a long unbroken take, from a deep distance, dozens of people walking - climbing - a mist-shrouded mountain. Music that might deserve to be called the very definition of mysterious, the camera appearing to be fixed somewhere in the sky. A film whose opening beckons the question Where are we? What is going on here? What year is it? What century?
Aguirre was not Herzog’s first film, but it’s the one I most often show folk to introduce him. For not only is it a film of extraordinary power in its own right, it contains or at least alludes to all the themes and challenges that would characterize the rest of Herzog’s films. Adventure into the hidden dark, the results of unresolved ego projected onto the community, nature’s inscrutability, why people do the things they do. Interpreting Aguirre, which tells the terrible story of conquistadorial abuse of vulnerable people, and the megalomania of its protagonist, cannot be divorced from the fact that its director is German, and the film was made with three decades of the end of Hitler. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but Aguirre is definitely a metaphor.
And so, in some respects, is Encounters at the End of the World - at one level a simple and simply delightful documentary about the folk who live at McMurdo Station, on the bottom of the planet, the eccentricities they embody, and the landscapes that dwarf them. And at another level, Encounters at the End of the World is about the whole planet and the whole of nature and the whole human race. We’re all on a quest, just like these scientist-‘B’movie curators and philosopher-forklift operators. We all have the tendency to feel a bit lost amidst the sheer scale of both mountains and other people’s feelings (or the feelings we feel that other people are feeling). We may each also know the more or less gentle, more or less obsessive pull to go somewhere far away to find ourselves again. We’re already lost, and yet we may want to get more lost.
When I watch Encounters at the End of the World, I’m struck by the way Herzog treats his “characters” as so profoundly worthwhile. The folk who live at McMurdo are the inhabitants of the only continent that has no indigenous population, so there’s a delicious irony: they are the most famous people on an entire continent. But Herzog has zero interest in celebrity; to Herzog the face of an ordinary fella who doesn’t want to talk about his past is worth a thousand magazine covers. (That scene in particular stands out - recognizing some secret pain, he tells one of his subjects “You don’t have to talk about it”, and the man’s relief is palpable. There’s also a question here, about the power of the famous man with the camera to induce the pressure to tell an uncomfortable story in the first place. Herzog, unlike some of us, knows his place; knows that his equipment and skill allow him to tell stories that help us understand ourselves better, but also that the camera can be a weapon.
Herzog famously says that “a poet must not avert their eyes”, which helps account for why his filmography includes a documentary about his love-hate relationship with an actor, a long interview with a man days away from his own execution, an exquisite film about the oldest cave paintings known to humanity, a cop thriller that’s more about the inner life of the cop and the possibility of his own recovery, and a vampire film where the vampire is more sad than scary. (If you’d like to take a deep dive into his films, you could spend many profitable hours doing so while reading Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, one of the most educational and entertaining books about cinema.)
I think my favorite - and the one most similar to Encounters at the End of the World is Grizzly Man, constructed from home movies made by the environmentalist Timothy Treadwell, about his life among bears in Alaska, and ultimately his death at the hands of one of them. The reason it’s a good companion piece to Encounters is that Grizzly Man is about a human going into the wilderness because it’s where he feels most at home. He died because he couldn’t find a way to be at home in industrial society. The folk in Encounters at least have a community to sustain them. When Werner Herzog moved to the United States a while back, he brought only a toothbrush. When he finishes a book he likes, he gives it to a friend. When his friend and teacher Lotte Eisner fell seriously ill, Herzog decided on an unexpected form of healing prayer - he would walk from Munich to Paris, for “It was clear to me that if I did, she would not die.” During an interview with the BBC, standing on a hill overlooking Los Angeles, he was literally shot in the stomach, by accident or design we do not know. But his response, captured on camera, was so unique that we could, perhaps must, only call it Herzogian. It encapsulates the spirit of his films, of his mind and heart, and inspires the kind of life-transforming action we see in his films. The kind that helps people sustain their sanity while kidnapped, or stimulates people to devote their lives to protecting ancient cave paintings for the good of humanity, or that leads people to abandon everything to move near to the South Pole
It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
1: What did you notice the most?
2: What moved you?
3: What challenged you, or what questions arose for you?
4: After watching, did you want to change anything about your life, or the world?
FOR FURTHER VIEWING
Of course there aren’t too many films from Antarctica, so we can’t recommend a lot of further viewing - but here’s two that you might enjoy:
ANTARCTICA (1983) - A Japanese film, some of which was filmed in Antarctica, and currently available to watch for free on YouTube. Click here to watch it, or past the following link into your browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNaV3CHCs6g
THE THING (1982) - Not filmed in Antarctica, but set there, and one of the great horror-science fiction movies. Not if you’re in a faint of heart mood, but lots of fun if you want to be scared in the snow!