Encoun­ters at the End of the World

If you saw 2005’s The Wild Blue Yon­der, per­haps you’re won­der­ing why Wern­er Her­zog is return­ing to Antarc­ti­ca. That film was a stark­ly inven­tive syn­the­sis of fact and fic­tion that saw Brad Dou­rif star as an alien from Androm­e­da. It fea­tures an intrigu­ing inter­play between pre­vi­ous­ly unseen footage shot by NASA astro­nauts, and stun­ning under­wa­ter pho­tog­ra­phy from McMur­do Sound in Antarc­ti­ca (stand­ing in for Dourif’s homeworld).

But clear­ly, Her­zog wasn’t sat­is­fied. While the Antarc­tic scenes from The Wild Blue Yon­der were shot by DP Hen­ry Kaiser, this time the direc­tor has made his own way to the ​‘End of the World’, eager to explore the con­ti­nent for himself.

This being Her­zog, how­ev­er, Encoun­ters at the End of the World isn’t your aver­age Antarc­tic doc­u­men­tary. Where most film­mak­ers come look­ing for shots of cute ani­mals, ​“my ques­tions about nature,” he tells us, ​“were dif­fer­ent.” He’s not kidding.

In a voiceover that sets the tone for the film’s odd mix of black com­e­dy and poignant inquiry, Her­zog explains that he wants to know why mon­keys don’t sad­dle up gazelles and ride off into the sun­set; or whether pen­guins can lose their mind. This intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty was enough to secure him a spot on a research plane, though quite what the boffins in charge made of his ques­tions, we nev­er find out.

What fol­lows is a per­son­al take on the Antarc­tic wilder­ness. Land­ing in McMur­do, the main research sta­tion for assort­ed sci­en­tists, dream­ers and exis­ten­tial drifters, Her­zog is ini­tial­ly dis­ap­point­ed with what he finds. McMur­do is an ugly blot on the land­scape – the worst bits of the West served cold – but he soon escapes to the hin­ter­land; dis­ap­pear­ing down caves, div­ing through sink holes, and trekking up the side of active volcanoes.

Along with reg­u­lar DP Peter Zeitlinger, Her­zog has cap­tured some arrest­ing images, espe­cial­ly under­wa­ter. We see thou­sands of clams arrayed in silent wor­ship at the foot of an ice­berg; seals swim­ming against a shim­mer­ing sun­lit back­drop of neon blue; and pre­his­toric crea­tures emerg­ing out of mid­night waters. Though the orig­i­nal score from Hen­ry Kaiser tries a bit too hard to induce a sense of won­der, when Her­zog switch­es to an echo­ing sound­track of seal cries like alien sonar, the effect is indeed awe-inspiring.

After Griz­zly Man, The Wild Blue Yon­der and even Res­cue Dawn, Her­zog again explores the cal­lous real­i­ty of nature, and the way it both threat­ens and enrich­es our lives. Though his nar­ra­tion often reach­es for the poet­ic, he has an unsen­ti­men­tal per­spec­tive of nature’s cru­el­ty. In the film’s most poignant moment, he lingers on a pen­guin walk­ing away from the sea. The pen­guin is almost com­ic in its deter­mi­na­tion to defy the laws of nature, until Her­zog reminds us that it walks to cer­tain death. The silence that fol­lows is as still and cold as an Antarc­tic dawn.

And yet… Maybe we’ve been spoiled by the BBC’s peer­less Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Unit, but any­body who’s seen Plan­et Earth will find plen­ty that’s famil­iar in the land­scapes of Encoun­ters. What real­ly makes the film unique, then, is its cast of bizarre and beguil­ing char­ac­ters. If Antarc­ti­ca is at the bot­tom of the world, it’s the place where all the peo­ple who’ve fall­en through the cracks inevitably collect.

There’s Libor Zicha, the util­i­ty mechan­ic who was once impris­oned and now keeps a ruck­sack packed (com­plete with inflat­able dinghy), ready to hit the road. There’s Ste­fan Pashkov, fork­lift philoso­pher; David Pacheco, a plumber descend­ed, he tells us, from Incan kings; and William Jir­sa, the lin­guis­tic genius who burned his Ph D and head­ed south.

It’s their lives and sto­ries that bring mean­ing to an unknow­able place, although the pic­ture is com­pli­cat­ed by Herzog’s odd­ly aggres­sive atti­tude. He talks con­temp­tu­ous­ly of ​‘absurd quests’ (this from the direc­tor of Fitz­car­ral­do) and ​‘tree hug­gers’, which seems a strange prej­u­dice to take to the ground zero of envi­ron­men­tal activism.

But maybe that is a tes­ta­ment to Herzog’s own freeform spir­it of inquiry. He has jour­neyed, lit­er­al­ly, to the ends of the earth for the sim­ple plea­sure of see­ing what’s there. That is itself a quest, but as Encoun­ters proves, it’s far from absurd.