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encounters at the end of the world

Went with Matt to see Werner Herzog’s new film at the ICA. It’s been a very cultural weekend, what with a visit to the National Portrait Gallery too, and lots of Noah and the Whale.

In Encounters At The End Of The World, Herzog travels to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, an amazing 1,000-person grimy scientific settlement clinging to the vast expanses of the South Pole, his droll German voice narrating his encounters with this strange place.

He initially hates the mundanity of McMurdo Station, with its cash point, bowling alley and Frosty Boy ice cream machine, and is keen to take us out into the wilderness, giving a sense of the vast scale of Antarctica and the weirdness of the sea world beneath the ice. There are beautiful jellyfish, alien-like long-tentacled seafloor squid-creatures, and in one haunting sequence we listen to the noises that the charming Weddell seals make when they call underwater, an amazing symphony of futuristic Pink Floyd microcomputer beeps, booms and whirls.

Herzog spends lots of time with the people down in McMurdo Station, a real bunch of dreamers and travellers with stories to tell, who’ve all “fallen to the bottom of the world” as the man who tends the plants in the lush spaceship-style hydroponic greenhouse says. There’s the philosopher who drives a forklift truck who believes that humans dreaming in the Antarctic is speeding the awakening of the cosmic mind. There’s the woman who travelled from England to Uganda in a rubbish truck and whose party trick is to have herself zipped up in a holdall bag to the wild applause of her fellow scientists. There’s the diving scientist who is obsessed with the vicious micromarine world of tentacled and mandibled beasts savaging each other and has a bizarre theory that humans evolved out of the sea on to land to escape this watery battleground.

And there are penguins too, running along with their flipper arms outstretched in anthropomorphically comical fashion. At one point Herzog interviews a famously taciturn penguin specialist, struggling to make conversation with him. Herzog is prone to romantic conjectures which just didn’t work for the man’s dry scientific practical mind. At one point, Herzog asks why there are rogue penguins who suddenly head the wrong way, not towards the crowd or to the sea, but out into the icy wilderness where only death can await them.

You feel as if this might be the key to some greater point, some tragic mystery at the heart of the human as well as the penguin condition. But it is hilariously undercut by the innately comic nature of penguins.

He has an amazing shot of this rogue penguin moving away from the camera, all alone, arm flippers outstretched, waddle-running away from the sea, away from his fellow penguins, towards the icy mountains hundreds of miles in the distance. With masterful timing, Herzog’s voiceover demands “why?” as at that moment the penguin pauses, looking sideways in a way that makes us all laugh but also makes us all wonder “what is he thinking?” Then, decided, the penguin turns away from the camera again and goes waddle-running off again towards the mountains and certain death.