Herzog's 'Encounters at the End of the World'

The beauty of nature,
the ugliness of man

ROBERT ZALLER

The first shot you see seems to be of a smudged, yellow sky, of the sort Emil Nolde might have painted. It doesn’t look quite right, though. Then you realize it isn’t sky you’re looking at but the underside of ice. So, when are we coming up for air?

If you’re looking to breathe comfortably, the films of Werner Herzog aren’t for you. The veteran German director was born in 1942, and his earliest memory, he says, is of splintering glass as a skylight above his crib was shattered by an Allied bomb. Then again, biography and mythology have always tended to mix in Herzog. What is certain is that he has had a lifelong affinity for the difficult, the dangerous, and the bizarre. Encounters at the End of the World qualifies on all counts.

A trip to the Antarctic was a natural for Herzog. He had shot films on the other six continents, and Earth’s icy bottom alone remained. With little advance preparation and only seven weeks to film in the austral summer, Encounters is, like Herzog’s Grizzly Man, as much about the hazards of working in an extreme environment as about his ostensible subject; that is, about Herzog himself.

Herzog as abominable snowman

The director is never actually seen— as the Abominable Snowman of modern cinema, he leaves only his soundtrack— but his confiding, thickly accented voice-over is heard throughout, cozily matter-of-fact, reassuringly intimate, yet oddly off-kilter. Think of a National Geographic special narrated by an escaped inmate from the asylum.

This is not to say that Encounters is in any sense a travelogue. Herzog informs us early on that he is not making a film about penguins— the reference being, of course, to the wildly popular March of the Penguins, which portrayed the ice continent’s best-known denizens as heroic breeders. Herzog does show penguins, but only to focus on one who, his instincts gone awry, heads inland toward the South Pole (and certain death) instead of toward the coastal feeding grounds. This, you understand, is Herzog’s kind of penguin: solitary, wrong-headed, and suicidal.

What humans come here?

There is even a kind of etiquette among the human caretakers of Antarctica (though Antarctica seems to need caretaking only from humans themselves), who step aside politely for such specimens as they head toward doom. Oddity commands respect at the end of the world, for who but the very odd would be here in the first place?

The scientists and other workers who populate this land (including a cook who claims to be a lineal descendent of the Aztec royal family) volunteer this point themselves; as more than one observes, Antarctica is a catchment for all those who, unanchored in the world, have collected there by a kind of psychic gravity. They are indeed a strange though not ineloquent lot, doomsayers by temperament who seem to share a common conviction that humans, with their hypertrophied intellect, are nearing the end of their evolutionary line.

This seems to have led them to a quest for origins, both biological and cosmological, as though they represent the last chance for the universe to understand itself before the human mind is extinguished. Some ponder the primitive marine organisms that are our ultimate ancestors, while others float a research balloon, which resembles nothing so much as a billowing jellyfish, hoping to trace the most ubiquitous but elusive element in the cosmos, the neutrino.

Remnants of Shackleton’s expedition

The polar regions fascinated the Romantics (think of Frankenstein’s monster, sailing off alone among the Arctic ice floes to meet his end in Mary Shelley’s novel, very much like Herzog’s penguin). But Herzog himself is fascinated by the Antarctic explorers of the early 20th Century, racing each other to be the first to reach the South Pole. They too are like the penguin, he suggests, fixated on an arbitrary point, a symbolic conquest, an imperial thrust at the ultimate void.

Herzog visits the site where the British explorer Ernest Shackleton left the stores he would never return to use, and which still sit, neatly stacked as if in “an extinct supermarket.” The point we are invited to ponder is whether our civilization will leave anything more.

The first amphibious creatures

Herzog is no misanthropist, however; nor is he in any sense a sentimentalist. The desperate struggle for life he finds in the Antarctic oceans would have horrified Darwin, and he speculates that the first amphibious creatures undertook the arduous effort to thrive on land in order to escape the undersea nightmare. We ourselves are the end products of that half-billion-year cycle; in us, the world achieves its brief, blinkered awareness, before resuming its night. It’s a bleak vision, but not a hostile one. And what better, more inevitable place for it than in the bleakest and most inhospitable place on earth?

While Herzog’s cheery, jocular commentary invites us to consider our (probably) doomed condition, his camera roams over a still nearly pristine landscape, scraping the ocean floor, poking itself into the interior of an active volcano (Mt. Erebus, which must certainly be the strangest place on earth), and following giant icebergs as they calve northwards, bearing grim tidings for us. Without making the least concession to the picturesque, Herzog and his remarkable cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger, have captured some of the most beautiful footage ever filmed.

Not since Kubrick’s 2001

At the same time, he gives us a thorough tour of the American encampment at McMurdo Sound, with its surpassing ugliness. In the Antarctic, Herzog suggests, every consideration is necessarily utilitarian, and beauty is nature’s business alone. To perceive beauty, to appreciate it, it is necessary (at least here) to introduce ugliness, a distinctively human contribution to the cosmos. This, too, appears to be part of the price of consciousness. Is it too high a price? Is it, perhaps, a fatal one? These questions, too, Herzog invites us to consider in his irreverent fashion.

At any rate, I can’t think of a film that has attempted to pose such fundamental issues since Kubrick’s 2001 (a film Encounters occasionally recalls) and Tarkovsky’s Solaris. In the desert of commercial cinema— a wasteland far broader than the Antarctic— we are reminded here of film’s vast possibilities, and how few of them have lately been tapped.