Encounters at the End of the World

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By L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / GZO

I can’t imagine any filmmaker other than Werner Herzog who could have made “Encounters at the End of the World,” a captivating documentary about Antarctica that manages to convey the eerie beauty of the icy continent at the South Pole while capturing the eccentric characters who work there and raising questions about the future of the human race.

German director Herzog has made both feature films and documentaries throughout his career, many of them dealing with the indifference of nature to man and people who follow their own muses regardless of how they are perceived by others.

That’s just what he captured when he took his camera to McMurdo Station and joined the 1,000 or so who live and work in Antarctica during its summer season from October to February.

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Werner Herzog captures the beauty and eccentricities of Antarctica in "Encounters at the End of the World." (Courtesy photo)

Werner Herzog captures the beauty and eccentricities of Antarctica in "Encounters at the End of the World." (Courtesy photo)

The beauty is captured in underwater photography of divers who are studying single-celled organisms and find themselves in what they call a “cathedral” when they go beneath the Ross Ice Shelf to gather their samples and observe the strange, beautiful sea creatures who have adapted themselves to live in the frigid water.

The eccentrics and visionaries include a philosophy-spouting heavy machine driver, a linguist on a continent with no language, a woman who has traveled the world in every conceivable manner and guitar-playing scientists who celebrate a discovery with an impromptu rooftop concert.

Others interviewed by Herzog include a plumber who claims to have Aztec ancestry, a scientist who has studied penguins for so long he’s nearly become non-verbal, an English volcanologist who dresses in tweed to pay tribute to his scientific forebears and a mechanic who escaped from communism before the fall of the Berlin Wall and keeps a bag packed so he can leave at any moment.

Herzog, who narrates the film from a first-person perspective rather than aiming for TV-style overarching storylines, gets his subjects to reveal not only what they do, but why they have found their way to Antarctica and what they find appealing there.

In doing so, he reiterates the conclusions of scientists that nature will eventually overwhelm the human race, wiping us from the planet in the same manner as the dinosaurs disappeared. At the same time, he lets the scientists warn that global warming is real while giving some idea of the value of their research.

Thankfully, Herzog doesn’t spend much time or footage on penguins, a subject that has been overdone to the extreme. But when he follows one of the birds walking into the continent to certain death, there’s a poignancy that extends beyond that scene and that penguin.

Among the views he does deliver are the undersea shots, a look into a large active volcano and the odd ice formations it creates and, on the ugly side, a look at the McMurdo Station, which resembles a remote mining camp.

“Encounters at the End of the World” was made in conjunction with the Discovery Channel, and it’s likely to be shown there soon. But you won’t get the same feeling from the picture on a TV screen from the big screen.

I was thoroughly captivated by Herzog’s journey to Antarctica and found his last documentary, “Grizzly Man,” to be just as engrossing. So when “Encounters” ended, I immediately wondered where the master of finding people at the extremes of the world  was going to go next, who he would find as his next documentary subject and when we’d get a chance to see it.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.