Encounters at the End of the World
Bleak, immense, and eternally mesmerizing, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. The documentary received an Academy Award nomination in 2008 and stands as a stark and dispassionate glimpse at life, humanity, and the decisiveness of our condition on this planet.
Herzog’s magic as a filmmaker is in his pursuit of legitimacy. He avoids conventions, staggeringly straying for common reliance on showpieces or exploitations in order to tell a story. In Grizzly Man, he does not expose us to “the tape” but rather his reactions to it. In his other films, his more fictional works, Herzog avoids violence and sexuality in the ostentatious sense of Hollywood blockbusters. His version of the world is free of special effects and manipulative elements, like music and camera angles. Indeed, Herzog is one of modern cinema’s foremost truth-tellers.
And nowhere is the truth more austere and more wounding than in his Encounters at the End of the World. In many ways, this motion picture feels like Herzog is returning from some far-off land with tales of the people and the sights there. With this film, the far-off land is Antarctica and the people are indeed compelling and interesting. His tale describes the people who live and work there, the land, the wildlife, the desolation, the inevitability of existence at the end of the world.
Herzog, along with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, head to McMurdo Station. McMurdo is an American research station located on the southern tip of Ross Island in Antarctica. It is also largest community in Antarctica, supporting a population of up to 1200 or so residents. As Herzog discovers, most of the people that come to McMurdo have decided to “fall off the map” and have come to the bottom of the planet.
Herzog’s discovery of the people of Antarctica is pure and engaging. His unflinching camera takes us to meet maintenance workers, iceberg geologists, zoologists, biologists, volcanologists, and a penguin scientist whose solitude makes him subdued company. These are the people of McMurdo; they are diverse, intelligent, aware, and ultimately pessimistic about our sustainability on this planet. Herzog joins the chorus in his barren German tones, narrating the film with rawness and an odd sense of boredom.
It’s not that dear Werner doesn’t care about his subject matter. It is, I believe, more that Herzog is buckling under the pressure of the desolation. It is hard to match up the line between truth and fiction in his pieces of art, but Encounters at the End of the World finds us with a filmmaker learning about how bleak things really are on this planet. Global warming or climate change, whatever one would like to call it for easier understanding, is real and it is having an impact on our world. But Herzog isn’t here to make a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.
His truth is more lyrical.
Through the images and sounds of Encounters at the End of the World, we learn about our planet’s very soul. We learn about penguins getting lost and going the wrong direction, marching to their deaths far from where they ought to be. We learn about neutrinos, frozen trinkets and mementos, fumaroles, and the human psyche under the immense weight of natural responsibility.
With unforgettable imagery, strange sounds, and the bold crush of time’s ticking clock on this planet, Encounters at the End of the World might, for some, seem like a series of vacation slides from Hell. For others, such as myself, it will prove to be one of the most exciting and engrossing film experiences in recent memory. This is not a cuddly penguin movie, I assure you.
Trailer:
