Werner Herzog’s first-person documentary about his visit to Antarctica is not only a jaundiced spin on nature travelogues but an oddly revealing distillation of his career-long nexus of obsessions. Arriving at the McMurdo base, he discovers such banal appurtenances as a bowling alley and A.T.M.s, and what he calls “abominations such as an aerobics studio and yoga classes,” and is seized with revulsion and a craving to get into the wilderness and experience the strangeness. His genre is the head trip, his worship of nature quasi-pagan, his chosen kin the adventurer élite, and his prejudice the dismissive lack of interest in everyone else. He is impressed by everything there that is overarching, awe-inspiring, intimidating, overpowering, crushingly colossal, or incomprehensibly strange, and his crabby, self-righteous misanthropy, which comes through in every frame, rises to apocalyptic dimensions: learning of the perils to polar ice caps posed by global warming, he foresees with barely repressed glee the extinction of humanity through climate change. Only the comedy latent in his own sour ironies distinguishes this film—and indeed many of the films in his career—from the grimly romantic antihumanism of Weimar-era mountain-climbing dramas.
The Film File
Encounters at the End of the World
(director: Werner Herzog; 2008)
by Richard Brody June 9, 2008
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