- Location: Landmark E-Street Cinema
- Several people interviewed in Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World give similar comical accounts of how people end up in Antarctica, detailing adventurers leaping off the margins of maps or falling until they meet where the lines of longitude intersect. In fact, the regular dwellers at McMurdo Station are an eccentric enough bunch that one might need to invoke a strange pattern of self-selection to explain them. After all, what sane person would decide to spend a significant fraction of their time near the South Pole? Fortunately, Herzog (who fits in with this group perfectly, I might add) is interested in exactly this sort of question and understands that the best way to find out is to allow these people to tell their crazy and fascinating stories. Some of the highlights include discussions of a plumber's royal Aztec lineage, a computer expert's trips across South America in a sewer pipe, and a vulcanologist's strategy for dodging fireballs.
- Of course, not all of the encounters described are with eccentric explorers and wild-eyed scientists. Herzog appropriately devotes roughly equal time to humanity's stories, past and present, and the natural stories that emerge from this strange and uniquely beautiful continent. He makes it perfectly clear that he is not making another "penguin movie" and grants as much camera time to alien-looking sea stars and jellyfish as to the more photogenic local fauna. In characteristic Herzog fashion, he is most interested in those penguins that suicidally make for the hills, and it doesn't take much extrapolation to connect those lost souls with their human neighbors at McMurdo and, in the director's mind, humanity in general.
- Although I didn't find Herzog's occasional philosophical pronouncements about the end of the world particularly enlightening, I can say that I was tremendously impressed with the remainder of his presentation. Herzog uses a combination of music and natural sounds very effectively to emphasize the other-worldliness of this vastly under-explored continent. Although much of the scenery would be impressive in any context, Herzog does well to explore a variety of locales, taking us swimming under the ice, walking atop a steaming volcano, and spelunking in ice caves. Most interestingly, though, Herzog doesn't restrict his stories to the non-human polar residents. The overall experience is so impressive that I almost feel crazy enough to visit Antarctica myself.
- The film was devoted to Roger Ebert.
