Close Encounters

Werner Herzog documents the weird and wonderful at the End of the World.

by Cindy Fuchs

OF ICE AND MEN: In the deep blue waters of Antarctica, says Herzog, "Space and time acquire a strange new dimension." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"Is there such thing as insanity in penguins?" As he puts this question to marine biologist David Ainley, Werner Herzog looks out on a lone penguin, trundling across a vast snowscape. Together, the image and query are simultaneously breathtaking and disturbing, like much of Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog's record of his journey to Antarctica. "I don't mean a penguin might believe he or she is Lenin or Napoleon Bonaparte," the filmmaker explains, "but could they just go crazy because they've had enough of their colony?"

Herzog finds an array of souls seeking respite, truth and adventure in the world's nether region, all making Encounters a film experience unlike any other. It is certainly, as he promises at the start, not "another film about penguins." Instead, it is about people — explorers and eccentrics, rebels and artists, individuals whose ideas and ambitions have been shaped by unlikely experiences. "Who were the people I was going to meet in Antarctica, at the end of the world?" he asks as he rides a gigantic plane full of researchers and equipment. "What were their dreams?"

Encounters provides a number of answers, none definitive, all improbably enchanting. Arriving at McMurdo Station, Herzog begins interviewing scientists who devote long years to the study of glaciers or seals, and also "full-time travelers and part-time workers," like Stefan Pashov, identified here as "Philosopher, Forklift Driver," and Ryan A. Evans, "Filmmaker, Cook." Pashov says his route to the South Pole began with his grandmother, who read to him from The Iliad: "I fell in love with the world," he smiles.

It's exactly the place Herzog needs to be, documenting extreme possibilities of life and thought. As soon as he gets to McMurdo, he asserts, he wants to get out of the "climate-controlled housing facilities," with radio station and bowling alley, and, he notes, "abominations such as an aerobics studio and yoga classes." Before he can get out into the field, he and his crew must undergo survival training, a seeming serious business that turns antic and odd here, an assortment of newbies with buckets on their heads (to simulate whiteout conditions), tied together and wandering off-course, the faces painted on their buckets making them resemble bizarre clowns staggering across the tundra.

Many researchers, notes Herzog, "express grave doubts about our long-ranging presence on this planet. Nature, they predict, will regulate us." Reminding us of our impermanence, the camera pans over a shrine to Shackleton, a collection of the canned goods he and his crew brought with them during their failed efforts to attain the South Pole: stewed kidneys, cod roes, Irish stew and Moir's Mutton Cutlets in Tomato Sauce. "It all looks now like an extinct supermarket," says Herzog.

Still, thriving life and almost indescribably deep blue waters appear in footage taken by divers beneath the ice. Here "space and time acquire a strange new dimension," narrates Herzog. "Those few who have experienced the world under the frozen sky often speak of it as going down into the cathedral." The film also notes patently silly efforts to make marks: "Human adventure in the original sense lost its meaning," laments Herzog, and "became an issue for the Guinness Book of World Records." To illustrate, Ashrita Furman, "Multiple World Record Holder," describes his next ambition, to pogo-stick his way into Antarctica.

More noble pursuits, the film suggests, comprise reverent communions, as in the case of Dr. Ainley. Living among the penguins at Cape Royds, he's long since lost interest in trivial discussions with uninformed people. To answer Herzog's question, he points out that penguins can become "disoriented" and lose their sense of the collective. "One of them caught our eye," notes Herzog, watching that solo penguin heading off away from the group, some 5,000 kilometers ahead of him." Watching him waddle, so tiny against the horizon, Herzog adds, "He's heading toward certain death." Even if the penguin can't know this, it's hard not to feel sad seeing him go, at once dauntless, disquieting and beautiful.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Encounters at the End of the World | Directed and written by Werner Herzog | A ThinkFilm release | Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse