The Pledge + Encounters At The End Of The World (2007)

Rather than sustain this blog ad hoc I've decided, abruptly and right this very minute, to make a pledge and write a film review every single day. This might probably a foolish promise to make busy because I'm pretty busy - studying and that - and failure is likely; nonetheless it's a good habit to get into if one wants to get into writing. Besides even if I fail there's no one really reading this blog anyway... so I'll only be a failure in mine own eyes. There won't be any particular chronology or reason for movie selections, they will be chosen arbitrarily. Also due to varying availability of time the length of reviews will no doubt probably fluctuate significantly.

With that in mind I shall begin with the Werner Herzog documentary Encounters At The End Of The World. Herzog is invited by the Council of Scientists (or something) to film the McMurdo American Research Facility Unit, how they live, how they entertain themselves in the tundra deserts of Antarctica. And it's beautiful, truly beautiful and moving on so many levels - zoologically, anthropologically, naturally, landscapes. It's an auteur work with Herzogian gravitas stamped throughout - perhaps more apparent than usual because, with his wizened German delivery, he narrates the whole way through.

He focusses on the people and their work, following them like a spectre ghosting in and out of their jovial, weather-beaten faces. This is a unique society, comprised of individuals who have built their lives on travel and scientific exploration; these are a people who have fascinating, sometimes frightening, stories to tell; a group whom fate has seen fit to throw together, to build an isolated culture of social expediency and relativist humour. But Herzog is careful not to depict McMurdo as a Utopia - as he says himself, this isn't a place where humans and 'the fluffy penguins live in perfect harmony'. Its an ugly almost industrial place of work in tough environmental surroundings. Indeed though McMurdo may be free of many of the aesthetic frivolities of their western homes - no such things as 'fashion', or meticulous self-grooming, cultural knowledge - it's still a slave to some of the stultifying bureaucracy of the mainlands, like health and safety.

Although Herzog switches between face to face interviews and that fly-on-the-wall documentarial style, there is a greater ontological message of what it means for humanity to inhabit the Earth. The message is that, ultimately, no matter what mankind can build with its technologies and clever thoughts they (we) will be defeated by the relentless cycle of mature and evolution: a crashed helicopter submerged in snow drifts is cited as the symbol of that futility. This underlying message is not as nihilistic as one might think though. It inspires us to acknowledge and recognise the flawless beauty of the world whilst we have the opportunity. This message is often couched in idiosyncratic metaphors but Herzog's implications are made clearer by his extended use of underwater film photography, showcasing the unorthodox yet exquisite bounties of nature: fish, crustaceans, penguins, seals, volcanoes, and of course people. The issue of climate change is the subtle everpresent, though it's rarely mentioned in overt terms. Encounters seems to act as a kind of lament that climate change has been pushed out of the intellectual court and into the stagnant arena of politics, where it stews and simmers in those endless bureaucracies. But this is no tree-hugging (whale-hugging) propaganda film - indeed at one point Herzog questions why so much cultural effort should be expended on the curation of animal life and almost none on the maintenance of dying human languages and customs.

Present throughout Encounters' is the glorious soundtrack. Particularly noticeable on the underwater sequences beneath the ceilings of ice, the music is a voluptuous juxtaposition of awe-infusing choral (that's 'choral' not 'coral', and no pun was intended) and the emotionally resonant atonal screechings of modernist composers. In truth the music renders those underwater scenes the most memorable sequences in the film, an opinion which should not (and does not) slight the anthropological conclusions that Herzog draws elsewhere.

The legend of Werner Herzog can turn his elder hand to any format of film and make it visually spectacular and morally intriguing.