Herzog's Antarctica

- a diver under the Antarctic ice

Those who know me know I like all things Antarctical, so when I saw that William has a post on film directors, it reminded me of one who often doesn't make the lists due to his uniqueness .... Werner Herzog. He has a new movie out - Encounters at the End of the World - a documentary about the people, animals and environment of Antarctica, especially at McMurdo Station. Here's a little about it from Wikipedia ....

Encounters at the End of the World is a documentary film by Werner Herzog completed in 2007. The film studies people and places in Antarctica. The film is dedicated to American critic Roger Ebert ..... The film was shot in Antarctica as part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The entire film crew consisted of Herzog, who recorded all production sound, and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger. The two went to Antarctica without any opportunity to plan filming locations or interview subjects, and had only seven weeks to conceive and shoot their footage. Herzog often met his interview subjects only minutes before he began shooting them ....

You can read Roger Ebert's review of the film here (he gave it four stars), but I thought I'd instead post some of what Ebert had to say about what a commentor (commentator?) to his blog, the art critic Daniel Quiles, had to say about Herzog and his Antarctica movie. A it turns out, Herzog made a comment to that post too. Here's a bit of Roger Ebert's blog post, and the Herzog comment ....

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Herzog and the forms of madness

[...] I received an intriguing communication from a reader, the art critic Daniel Quiles, about Werner Herzog .....

Quiles: First of all, no other director in history could turn a blizzard-safety exercise into an allegory for the extinction of human life on this planet. This is sheer mastery of the documentary form.

Two additional issues that interest me are the motif of language and Herzog's occasionally dismissive treatment of the day-workers at McMurdo. Apocalyptic as the film is, it is in equal measure profoundly optimistic about the myriad languages that persist even in Antarctica, both human and animal. While the scientific languages we encounter have to be translated for us to comprehend them, Herzog does his best to do justice to their different modes of understanding the universe and bringing it "into its magnificence," as the Bulgarian tractor-driver concludes the film. Language-- what facilitates any "encounter" and puts the non-sense of the universe into sense-- is the life-force that struggles against our ongoing demise.

Hence Herzog's outrage at the lapsed linguist who professes not to care that a language has died (though it obliterated his career and sent him to the middle of nowhere, so perhaps he did). Here, in a brief sequence, the film gets quite un-Herzogian. This man is one of two characters who the director does not allow to speak for themselves, using an interesting and hilarious trick of cutting them off via voice-over. To me this runs contradictory to Herzog's recent films, in which Treadwellesque characters are given center stage and allowed to run their mouths to their hearts' content. In "Encounters," it is the highly skilled masters of their languages (the scientists) who are idealized, while the professional adventurers of McMurdo, who labor in miserable conditions at high salaries to fund globetrotting excursions for the rest of the year, are bores and phonys, akin to the buffoon running around the world breaking Guinness Book records.

Remarkably, Herzog laments that adventure ended more than a century ago; these people never got the memo. Treadwell of "Grizzly Man" didn't get it, either, but he was mad enough to put himself in harm's way and film it (not unlike our dear director). Treadwell and Graham Dorrington in "The White Diamond" seem like two poles for Herzog now, mad outcast and mad scientist, with those in between them not proving interesting enough. In "Encounters," I get the sense that Herzog, like the old master that he is, is favoring the Dorrington side, that of the scientist, that of craft and virtuosity.

Ebert again. Quiles is right that Herzog has no interest in the in-between. Whether "mad outcast and mad scientist" represent the two poles of his work is open to question for this reason: Are they mad? ...... Quiles cites "The White Diamond," the film about a man who designed an airship to investigate the unknown eco-system that lives in the treetops of the Amazon, and has no contact with the ground. When you see Dorrington's teardrop airship and learn of its safety history, you may put him among the outcasts, but when he talks of uncounted species never seen by man, you can return him to the scientists. And what of Herzog himself? On the airship's maiden flight, he insists on handling the camera himself, because (1) he does not want to risk the life of his cinematographer, and (2) if there is only one flight, how else to obtain the footage? What is he here? Mad artist?

Not mad at all. Simply brave, and like all great directors, determined to get that footage. If the airship crashes, there may be no more Herzog but if he doesn't go, there will be no film. There is also a Herzog movie, "Lessons of Darkness," in which he put himself in the middle of the blazing oil wells of Kuwait. And one, shown at Telluride but not I believe widely released, in which he and his team were trapped on a mountaintop by a blizzard and nearly died. He grows a little annoyed as people cite some of these stories, because they make him seem reckless, and that he is not. He does what he must to get his film, calculating the situation, hoping not to be surprised.

He is annoyed when some writers (including me) have suggested he went hundreds of miles up the Amazon on a lark, seeking the "voodoo of location" for "Fitzcarraldo." In fact, as he corrected me, he had a perfectly sensible location, but it was burnt down in a border war, and he was forced to move to the only other place where two tributaries of the Amazon were close enough to pull a boat overland between them. (His determination to physically move a real boat raises other questions, but never mind.)

The phrase "voodoo of location" was first used by Herzog in my hearing when he explained that, for his "Nosferatu," he sought out and used as many of the same locations as he could from the silent classic by Murnau. In some sense the genius of Murnau would haunt the film. If I were a producer asked to finance the film, that would sound like madness, but as a film critic, it makes perfect sense to me.

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And here is Herzog's comment to the post ...

Dear Roger,

The producer of Grizzly Man and Encounters, Erik Nelson, forwarded me your conversation with an art critic (Quiles), and I have the feeling that these people do not have the ability to simply look straight at a movie any more.

If you find it useful, please introduce my remarks into this ongoing discourse (without giving my e-mail address away):

About the linguist: I intentionally steered the discourse with him into the terrain of dying languages. Both of us are deeply worried by the prospect of the future: about 90% of all of the roughly 6.500 spoken languages today will be extinct well before the end of this century. I am already in the planning stage to do a long-term documentary project on last speakers of a language.

It is a total misreading of the sequence that Bill Jirsa (the linguist) does not care that possibly during our conversation a language has died.

I had to cut him off and summarize his travails with academia, as this was a highly complex story which went on and on for about forty minutes. The next following sequence with the computer expert and traveler Karen Joyce I had to cut short as well, and give only some taste of her way of exploring the world, as she went on non-stop for about two hours - without ever making a full stop or a comma in her tales. There was literally no chance during editing to ever get out of her most wonderful stories. I love both of them dearly, and they have forgiven me that my film's total running time had to be under two hours.

No one is a phony in my film. They are most fascinating human beings, and I wish I could have them as friends forever, even though our encounters were so brief.

The pogo-stick man breaking Guiness book records was archival footage I found. I never met him, but his story and attitude makes a clear point.

Best,
Werner


- McMurdo Station