In 2007, the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion invited leg­endary film­maker and doc­u­men­tar­ian Werner Her­zog to make a film about Antarc­tica. With only seven weeks to plan and shoot, and with an aus­tere crew of exactly two (Her­zog him­self and cin­e­matog­ra­pher Peter Zeitlinger), he pro­duced the stun­ningly beau­ti­ful film Encoun­ters at the End of the World.

Right away, Her­zog declares he is not a “tree-hugger” or “whale-hugger.” Instead, he won­ders why civ­i­liza­tion is more con­cerned about endan­gered species than it is about its own dis­ap­pear­ing lan­guages and cul­tures. He made it clear to his spon­sors that he had no inter­est in mak­ing “another pen­guin movie,” of course a back­handed ref­er­ence to the smash hit doc­u­men­tary March of the Pen­guins. For a brief period around 2005, it seemed every­one was obsessed with the pecu­liar life­cy­cle of pen­guins, find­ing in them metaphors for every­thing from the sanc­tity of mar­riage to evi­dence of homo­sex­u­al­ity in nature. But it turns out even Her­zog couldn’t resist the pathos inher­ent in the pen­guin lifestyle. He became fas­ci­nated by the reg­u­lar occur­rence of indi­vid­ual pen­guins becom­ing dis­ori­ented, and deter­minedly march­ing off alone to cer­tain star­va­tion and death. His cam­era catches one hap­pily scoot­ing off towards the moun­tains, away from the rel­a­tive safety of the ocean and his comrades.

Some of the oth­er­worldly under­wa­ter footage by Henry Kaiser the inspired Her­zog to inves­ti­gate Antarctica

But Her­zog is mostly inter­ested more in the humans that migrate to Anar­c­tica. As is his cus­tom, he nar­rates the film him­self and openly won­ders whom he will find there. Some of the unusual char­ac­ters he encoun­ters are a philoso­pher oper­at­ing a fork­lift, a human­i­tar­ian dri­ving a bus (the continent’s sin­gle largest vehi­cle), a lin­guist tend­ing plants on a con­ti­nent with no lan­guages, and a jour­ney­man plumber descended from Aztec roy­alty. Most Herzog-ian of all is an East­ern Euro­pean man unable to speak of his trau­matic escape from “behind the iron cur­tain.” He keeps a large back­pack full of sur­vival gear, every­thing he would need should he have to leave at any moment. He puts it as being “in search of adven­ture,” but it seems he has left many places before he came to this one, so he is most likely doing more escap­ing than adven­tur­ing. He is not unlike Dieter Den­gler, the sub­ject of Herzog’s Lit­tle Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), who keeps a cache of food­stuffs in his home long after escap­ing a Laot­ian prison camp in 1966.

Werner Her­zog & Peter Zeitlinger

Antarc­tica rep­re­sents “the end of adven­ture.” There are no more “white spaces on the map.” But most of the peo­ple Her­zog finds there are sci­en­tists, mak­ing it clear that there are many dis­cov­er­ies left to be made. Of inter­est to Her­zog is not only the research itself, but why it is being con­ducted in one of the most inhos­pitable places on earth. Zool­o­gists study nat­u­rally tame seals, espe­cially enjoy­ing their truly bizarre under­wa­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion that one likens to Pink Floyd. Geol­o­gists flock to Mount Ere­bus, one of the the earth’s only three sta­ble open vol­canos, whose “lava lake” is essen­tially the Earth’s exposed man­tle. The world’s only two other open vol­ca­noes are both located in polit­i­cally unsta­ble coun­tries, it being prefer­able for sci­en­tists to risk being pelted by explod­ing bombs of molten rock in sub­zero tem­per­a­tures than to be shot by bul­lets in hot­ter climes. In a sep­a­rate exper­i­ment, The Uni­ver­sity of Hawaii is attempt­ing to detect neu­tri­nos. These sub­atomic par­ti­cles are omnipresent in abun­dance, but are almost impos­si­ble to observe directly. The rea­son to come to Antarc­tica is to escape the dis­tort­ing back­ground radi­a­tion of civ­i­liza­tion, a metaphor if I’ve ever heard one.

Her­zog ded­i­cated Encoun­ters at the End of the World to critic and long­time advo­cate Roger Ebert. It was nom­i­nated for an Acad­emy Award for Best Doc­u­men­tary, his only nom­i­na­tion to date. How the Acad­emy could over­look the sub­lime and haunt­ing Griz­zly Man (2005) is beyond belief.

Offi­cial movie site: encountersfilm.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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