“Encounters at the End of the World” is the latest concoction from acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog, but it is so different from anything that Herzog has ever done—such a bold deviation from his stereotypical oeuvre—that to witness the ambivalent reactions of New York art house crowds is a curious experience. There are those who dismiss “Encounters” as a banal travelogue of a grumpy German; there are some who exalt it as a fascinating visual experience that lacks a worthy story. One wonders if such critics are seeing a different cut of the film.
Herzog’s immersive journey to the South Pole is anything but boring or one-dimensional. It is a complex story about extraordinary people in an extraordinary place, a study of extremes that is as bold and breathtaking as any film Herzog has made. There are few filmmakers working today as fascinated by human eccentricities as Herzog, and while his movies have always been occupied by people existing at the extremes, he subtly alters his formula in “Encounters at the End of the World.”
In most of his fictional creations, Herzog is fascinated by the extremes of the human mind, but in the non-fictional “Encounters,” he has found a group of like-minded nomads who have found a way of physically surrounding themselves with this need for excitement. They have traveled here, to the southernmost part of the globe, to commune at the brink. “Encounters” is much more about them than it is about Antarctica itself. This is the tale of Herzog’s recent journey to the icy continent, filmed with a simple handheld digital camera and incorporating the filmmaker’s omnipresent, first-person narration.
From the outset, Herzog says he has no intention of making a “fluffy” film composed of penguins and poetry. Instead, he has decided to migrate south in hopes of encountering people, animals, and images that defy his knowledge of this planet. And he finds it. Here, in Antarctica, he witnesses both a landscape and a population that are at odds with modern suburban existence. This is the most Herzogian place on Earth, and we sense that excitement, that state of reverence, in Herzog’s account of his journey. Appropriately enough, Herzog’s anti-tourist tour spends a third of the film not out in the rough, but gawking with interest at McMurdo Station, the coastal scientific outpost that couldn’t look more out of place amid the vast, monochrome whiteness of the continent. Here, amid dirty snow and the trappings of a suburban existence—ATM machines, Yoga classes—Herzog seems genuinely fascinated by the bubble of banality that has sprung up at the edge of this frontier.
Looking around, he seems amazed by the shops and stores at McMurdo, intrigued by the vehicles, astonished at the routine social atmosphere of this city in the middle of nowhere (population 1,000). Herzog seems particularly amused by the training that adventure travelers get before venturing inland to more turbulent terrain. He films their survival exercises on how to navigate a blizzard and sees the first of many contradictions: Men trying to train each other in the most formidable environment imaginable, how to outwit nature—all to no avail.
His film finds its poetry in the thoughts and sentiments of McMurdo’s permanent residents. Who is it, Herzog wonders, driving the daily shuttles back and forth from the scientific research station to the air strip made of ice? Who is preparing the food? Who is building the houses? Who shovels? Turning his camera on these blue-collar workers, he finds stories of bankers who abandoned their jobs to explore the world, of everyday philosophers who theorize that Antarctica is the place where all great travelers end up. Unattached to society and untethered to a single place, one man suggests that this is where the world’s adventurers wind up, falling to the bottom of the globe.
Sure enough, Herzog finds himself talking to people who had previously worked in Africa, South America, Russia and even Wall Street. Herzog contrasts this urban existence with the scientists who have come here not for adventure but for ultimate academic freedom. He conducts something of an interrogation with a penguin scientist, barraging him with questions until he offers the stunning admission that he has seen signs of prostitution within the penguin community. Shortly thereafter, Herzog tries to counter the anthropomorphic softness of “March of the Penguins” by offering an image of a penguin migrating in the wrong direction—heading inland due to some misfire in the animal’s internal radar. Herzog shows one lone penguin waddling off to sure death—a most unsettling image of nature taking its course.
Herzog interviews scientists but asks them provocative questions that get them to talk about more than their research. He meets the underwater experts who seem nonplussed that they discover new species almost every day. In fact, they must collectively watch old sci-fi movies to stave off the day’s boredom.
An ever-present question in “Encounters” is: What would it be like if you lived in the most amazing place on Earth? Would it cease being unique? It’s a question he never bothers answering, perhaps because there is no answer. What he does instead is present the contradictions. He comes across scientists who are seeing the daily impact of global warming, who are concerned for the fate of the world’s population all while living out their days in near isolation. He finds a diver on the day before his retirement, who is grappling with the reality that this is his last day of underwater research, and that he will no longer be immersed in the otherworldly wonders of Antarctica. And then Herzog’s camera plunges down into the depths with this man, to the underwater cathedral during this diver’s last mass.
Above all, Herzog is here for the visuals. Three years ago, the director incorporated underwater footage from Antarctica in his science-fiction fantasy “The Wild Blue Yonder.” Those images, taken by Henry Kaiser from beneath a ceiling of ice, are what drew him here. As Herzog travels inland, he finds similar wonders. He treks through ice caves, across snow plains, into a research station on the frozen ocean where the workers are lulled to sleep by the transcendent sounds of singing seals below.
The film is endlessly beautiful, as are all Herzog films, but it’s also relentlessly curious about how such a place can function. In numerous Herzog classics—think “Aguirre: The Wrath of God,” or “Fitzcarraldo”—there is the sense that the filmmaker is somehow intimate with the darker side of human nature. But in “Encounters at the End of the World,” in Antarctica, Herzog discovers something completely different: A place free of human greed or malice, a post-apocalyptic Eden, a land as surreal as anything he has ever imagined, littered with personalities as eccentric as any character he has ever captured. For the director who has spent his days witnessing man at war with nature, here he finds a realm where nature is unchallenged, and invincible. Yet people continue to come. It’s a vision of a Werner Herzog landscape, filled with Werner Herzogs; for perhaps the one and only time, the filmmaker is bemused by the prospect that he might be out of his element.
-By S. James Snyder
Tags: Antarctica, Werner Herzog