CINEMA: Encounters at the End of the World
At one time the best documentaries were those where the filmmakers remained totally objective and let their material do the talking. That changed forever with the rise of “celeb” documentary-makers like Michael Moore and now it is almost de rigeur for the documentary-maker to have some subjective role in the film. So, when you learn Encounters at the End of the World is made by left-of-centre director Werner Herzog, you expect him to put his own strange spin on things, and this he duly does.
Shot in the frozen wastes of Antarctica at the McMurdo Station, the headquarters of the National Science Foundation, Encounters explores the lost, the found, the eccentric and the plain deluded souls who wash up like detritus in this unforgiving landscape. “PHD’s washing dishes, linguists on a continent with no languages” intones Herzog himself on the voiceover, and to these we can add philosophers driving forklift trucks and penguins who have lost their internal compass and are on a foolhardy march not to the sea but to the frozen interior.
It’s odd, it’s very funny and yet it is also extraordinarily beautiful. Seekers of the metaphorical key to enlightenment couldn’t start at a better place.
Dee Pilgrim
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