FILM CHALLENGE: 142) Encounters At The End Of The World

142) Encounters At The End Of The World

Director: Werner Herzog

Year: 2007

Plot Summary: Filmmaker Werner Herzog travels to Antarctica to capture its landscape's rarely seen beauty on film and where we meet the odd men and women who have dedicated their lives to furthering the cause of science in treacherous conditions.

Encounters At The End Of The World is one of the very few documentaries that has ever offered us a glimpse of Antarctica's rarely seen beauty. The shots that Werner Herzog is able to capture at the South Pole are among the most breathtaking in cinematic history whether it's the underwater shots that feel like something from another world or the everlasting terrains of ice that provoke wonder and amazement.

However, Werner Herzog, typical to his nature as a human being as well as a filmmakers, is far more interested in just the seals, the penguins, the volcano's and the enormous icebergs. He instead turns his focus on the remarkable human beings who have chose to live in the incredible place and what drew them to the land at the end of the world. This, after all, is a place where philosophers drive the trucks and where plumbers claim that their oddly shaped fingers brand them as Aztec royalty. Each interview he conducts, in the fashion of all of Herzog's work, gives a stunning insight into the human psyche and into our own humanity. Therefore, he somehow transforms a simple nature documentary into psychologically complex piece of work.

Not only that, but Encounters At The End Of The World is also an extremely philosophical one. Herzog should be highly praised here for not asking the traditional journalistic questions that would usually confront the scientists, volcanologists and biologists who work in such a unique place as he challenges them on subjects like the nature of the universe, humanity, our future and what is in store for our planet. It's becomes, at times, almost too intelligent, but never once loses its fascination.

Even in the most conventional of scenes, in which we see groups of penguins and the scientists who study them, Herzog doesn't find any interest in their appearance or behaviour, but instead asks about their psychological make up alluding to whether penguins can go insane or if there can be homosexuality between them. His camera, moreover, doesn't follow the group of penguins in way that anyone else would film the sequence, but rather focuses on one single penguin who breaks away and heads towards the mountains hundreds of miles away.

It's an overwhelming experience, but one that is certainly profound. Of course, it's not something you could easily return to or something that is fantastically structured or engrossing, but it's a documentary that stands out from many others nonetheless.

3/5

By Daniel Sarath with 1 comment