Monday, December 8, 2008

Encounters at the End of the World (2007)--4/5

Leave it to Werner Herzog to make travel diary footage this entertaining. Of course, it helps that he’s an iconoclastic genius and his trip is to Antarctica. “Encounters at the End of the World” further documents Herzog’s kinship with those who willingly endure the extremes of the world.

Although initially mesmerized by the stark beauty of under-the-ice stock footage, Herzog’s interests gravitate towards the inhabitants of Antarctica. In the ugly, industrial McMurdo Station,* he meets a “philosopher/forklift driver.” This man’s imagery of people falling to the bottom of the world (“How did you end up in Antarctica?”) is repeated often by others.

The shots of “fluffy penguins” in “Encounters” are not about the beauty of nature. With a straight face, Herzog asks the resident penguin-communer whether he’s witnessed insanity in the birds. He says no, but Herzog’s not so sure. He finds a lone penguin marching towards certain death in the mountains. Any attempt to correct its course, says the expert, would be futile.

Did the early Antarctic explorers—Shackleton and Scott, in particular—have an affinity with this penguin? In the broadest sense, yes. They all traveled an irregular path to encounter hardship or death. However, the penguin does it out of confusion or misfiring synapses. The humans willingly took on the journey. Herzog, while fascinated with the impulse, derides it as a hubristic exercise. Can no part of the globe be unsullied by people?, he asks.

I think Herzog would be the first to admit that he is unable to fight this impulse; it’s a foundational part of his being. Only age has tamped down his wildest exploits.

In "Encounters,” he travels only to “safe” places already inhabited by humans. Legendary, though, are Herzog’s past exploits in film. The 1969 documentary/tone poem “Fata Morgana” follows him through the African desert. In “Fitzcarraldo,” he tells the story of a man who moved a boat over a Peruvian mountain by…moving a boat over a Peruvian mountain. A loopy woman at McMurdo tells of a similar past, including dangerous transits through Africa (in a garbage truck) and South America (in a strapped-down sewer pipe). Wherever he vacations, Werner Herzog quickly finds his soul mates.


*It has the “abominations” of aerobics and yoga classes.


An archetypal Herzog monologue from "Burden of Dreams."

No comments: