Antarctica is considered to be one of the final places where maps are not completely adequate and survival is not a given. Even still, a physical monument to the “South Pole” marking its location negates some of these ideas about the continent — in Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World” he rejects Antarctica being like the moon as some have said, it is something else, with its own entity and meaning for the human race.
Herzog sets out to discover the continent’s secrets. What plays out in the documentary is an absurdist character study of Antarctica. The camera moves from character to character, those surviving on research bases and out in the wilderness, each with their own oddities and philosophies. Though the film takes place over a stretch of time, it appears to last the course of a day with a sun that never sets, due to the latitude and longitude in relation to the sun.
Herzog visits a camp of scientists who watch old science fiction movies. For them, Antarctica is as real as these monster movies, with the included artifice of the end of the world which the scientists stationed there are certain is going to come from some kind of reaction from Nature. Or is this another kind of fear in the form of submission — the horrors of their isolation and transience of human life force them to allow themselves to be assimilated by a larger entity which they cannot hope to understand. Just like the Antarctica scientific outpost in John Carpenter’s “The Thing” the fear is that the individual will be absorbed by an alien being, thus not existing anymore as a unique tent pole (like to desire to lay down the physical South Pole at its location) against the backdrop of the blank environment of white snow.
The movie’s core character is Ernest Shackleton, a man who explored Antarctica in the early eighteenth century and whose now primitive tent remains preserved near McMurdo Station. Keeping in Herzog’s obsession with the theme of the Pride of Man as their downfall, he compares Shackleton hubris to a man living almost alone with only penguins for company. When one of the penguins irrationally leaves the group to wander inland into “certain death”, the viewer is supposed to be reminded of Shackleton’s similar lapses in logic. Why would anyone want to pursue such a path? From the juxtaposition of a defiant American electric guitar against the barren land, to a man who escaped certain death at the hands of a corrupt government—the point of the documentary is to show these human being’s psychological relationship with the land and their fluctuating identity within it.
The ice is described by researchers and scientists there as constantly moving, evolving, making cracking noises as if communicating. One physicist interviewed, described the neutrino particles surrounding him to be an almost god-like presence, passing through the matter of Antarctica and himself. The complex psyches at McMurdo Station trickle into the ice, mingling with whatever presence is there. One man who studies glaciers has a dream where he stood on one and could “feel” the ice, sensing it had a hidden purpose not yet clear to him. Many of those interviewed and even Herzog himself believe that Antarctica attracts. A biologist-diver that he interviews has just discovered a new organism that has to be viewed under a microscope, but can pull other, smaller objects into itself. It seems as though Antarctica is not a being in and of itself but a composite, as in the parts make up the body.
All this leads up to the implied suggestion that Antarctica and possibly all the land is a spiritual point. This is seen when the divers are filmed swimming through an underwater structure resembling an abstract cathedral set to stirring, transcendental choral pieces and in the South Pole station where there is a “shrine” made up of memories in the form of pictures and words placed in the solid snow walls. When first arriving, newcomers must take survival training and have to wear buckets on their heads while in a line of rope, feeling blinding for the right direction and calling out to the leader. This line of fools is intended by the way it is filmed to resemble images of the Danse Macabre (dance of death) like in the “Seventh Seal”, a connection between life and death and man’s pointless struggle to understand eternity on a seemingly infinite landscape where the land’s sentience only makes sense to those initiated into its esoteric rituals. The Catholic Church believes nature to be a reflection of God, and so what is Antarctica but a bright, white mirror? Werner Herzog seems to be pursuing evidence of this, but in the actions of human beings, in their dreams, where maps fail and are no longer useful.
