Dir. Werner Herzog, US, 2007, 99 mins
Narrated by Werner Herzog
Review by Mike Bartlett
“I sink into bliss”
Werner Herzog always was on the search for “ecstatic truth” but I bet even he didn't expect to find it engraved on the wall of an Antarctic outpost. The graffiti quoted above is just one sign of the passionate life bubbling underneath the ugly surface of McMurdo, a group of huts and industrial hangers that passes for the largest settlement on the continent. Herzog was invited there by the US National Science Foundation to document their research. But he was really inspired by the extraordinary underwater footage taken under the ice floes and, characteristically, the film finds him being sidetracked into meeting the dreamers and vagabonds who have drifted down to this no-man's-land and unpicking their peculiar philosophies.
Normally, Herzog's tales of eccentrics and mad geniuses — pulling boats through Amazon rainforests or living with wild bears or God knows what — strike me as a case of “less than meets the eye”. They're massively entertaining for sure, but aren't these tales of solitary Fausts a way of avoiding saying something about the rest of us? Workaday life may bore Herzog but it's the reality that most of humanity faces. At one point in this latest venture, he bemoans the end of “adventurism” that the exploration of the South Pole — the last frontier — signalled. Now, he feels, we are reduced to ludicrous stunts for the Guinness Book of World Records. But it's a fine line between those and his own favoured exploits.
But here in this free-form Discovery Channel-style documentary Herzog weds his wayward sensibility with straightforward observation. The result is a report from the world's most hostile environment that manages to be an oblique essay on the whole of mankind's current position. Structurally, it's merely a chain of interviews with people that catch the filmmaker's eye, the movie equivalent of “Herzog's Holiday Snaps”. But they're so infused with his gentle, absurdist humour and a genuine affection for their subjects that together they offer a total vision that is more than the sum of their parts.
As ever with documentary, the art lies in the decisions. Wary of the cosy platitudes of the natural history film and the way March of the Penguins was co-opted into Intelligent Design theory, he instead concentrates on the man studying them, whose enforced isolation has made him taciturn and wary. Rather than give us lots of pretty pictures of seals, he focuses on the scientists listening to their beeps and squeals underwater, caught in their rapture like humans making first contact with aliens. He abjures the sentimentality of environmentalism by bringing in the messy concreteness of McMurdo itself and, while the undersea footage is indeed impressive, it's offset by the beautiful choice of choral music that gives the shots a spiritual, rather than sensual, euphoria.
But most importantly, he refuses to stick to the agenda at hand, preferring to use his findings as the basis for digressions on topics as diverse as the British Empire , the disappearance of local languages, modern academia and climate change. The film becomes a mini “epic”, in the classical sense of the word, a Renaissance man's opining on the totality of human experience. Specifically, he concentrates on man's chances for survival and technology's part to play in that, both positive and negative.
For, paradoxically, Herzog sees our status as “technological beings” as a fatal flaw in coping with the changing physical landscape, but at the same time, the scientists he meets are, for him, the true descendants of early explorers like Scott and Shackleton in their desperate drive to discover a modern form of “adventurism”. Over the closing credits, Herzog merges a male voice choir with the sound of the seals — two forms of beauty in duet with each other. He may have gone to the end of the world but the result is the glimmerings of a new philosophy.
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