For a misanthrope who claims to be horrified by the indifference of nature, Werner Herzog is incredibly captivated by both the human soul and the wilderness. Encounters at the End of the World bears many of the hallmarks of Herzog’s work (bears—Ha!); the brutal landscape; the driven, eccentric people who are drawn there; the narrator’s perpetual gloominess. But I often think Herzog protests too much. If he did not feel awe at the immensity and beauty of the Antarctic landscape, or empathy with its curious (in both senses) inhabitants, he could never make a film with as much power, and—dare I say it—love as Encounters. On this continent where humans have a tenuous and necessarily temporary toehold, Herzog freely indulges in doomsday scenarios, describing half with dread and half with glee a World Without Us post-human Earth and all the various ways in which we’re blundering toward an apocalypse. But he includes, at the end of the film as if in summation, a driver and philosopher who quotes the sentiment, “Through our eyes, the universe perceives its own glory.” What comes through Herzog’s images, if not his narration, is pure awe, both his own and of the people he films.
There is a delightful shot of red-parka-clad scientists slowly lowering their faces to the expanse of sea ice to listen to the trilling and buzzing of seals calling to each other in the sea below. We follow a vulcanologist (who looks adorably like ’70s Dr. Who, scarf and all) into an ice fumarole, and at the end of the navigable part of the tunnel, Herzog films him there, encased in Caribbean-blue ice, utterly isolated from the rest of humanity, sitting in meditative stillness. A glaciologist describes his dreams, in which he can physically sense, through the bottom of his feet, the movement of the nation-sized icebergs he studies as they chug their way north. Herzog’s favorite shots seem to be those taken by expert divers who explore the waters under the sea ice—perhaps the only people in the world who can capture these images. They film the ethereal grace of jellyfish, the mercury-like running of exhaled bubbles on the underside of the ice, the otherworldly cliffs of a glacier where it meets the ocean under water. Herzog, on the surface, films the divers as they silently don their formidable protective gear, speaking not a word. He likens it to Mass. Though Herzog often takes the point of view that both people and nature are antagonists, the most resonant moments of his films are those when people and nature commune, when there is an almost religious respect and love for the natural world and its ability to move us. It just so happens that these moments are most likely to occur when one person is isolated from all others, when he (it’s almost always he) has to struggle against the natural world and accept his submission to it. Herzog spends much of Encounters at the End of the World, and indeed much of his career, chasing this elusive wonder. On his trip to Antarctica, he beautifully captures it.
by Katherine Follett | Source: 35 mm print
27 Jun 2008 1:38 PM | Submit Comment