Filmstelle

In recent years, Werner Herzog has become an internet phenomenon, (re)igniting general audience interest in his varied oeuvre spanning seven decades (!) — and still counting. Encounters at the End of the World, released in 2007, sees Herzog traveling to Antarctica to interview the workers devoted, at least on the surface, to science in, on, and around this alien environment. We meet a veritable gallery of oddballs congregated at McMurdo station, some pulled there, others stranded, many seemingly at home, and at least one terrified of what he’s witnessed in the waters below the ice. Along the way, Herzog and crew capture harrowing and sublime footage of Antarctica’s subterranean ecosystem and sun-dappled plains of ice that will sear themselves into any viewer’s retina.

With Encounters, Herzog cements that the life he captures and his fictions are in equal measures strange. The working life depicted in this documentary encompasses everything from the mundane (fork-lifting) and the curious (diving for Lovecraftian horrors), to the arguably insane (repeatedly approaching Antarctic volcanoes in tweed). Delivering a characteristically opinionated voiceover sure to divide the audience, Herzog bends the line of his perspective and the parallel ones of the (non)human specimens he films into a circle: we all carry a beautiful kookiness in us and when we push to the edges of the known or conceivable, we might find a magic that cinema manages to briefly touch upon. Especially if we’re a Bavarian called Werner Herzog.

Shuting Ling