The filmmaker travels to the South Pole to make what he says might be the deepest film of his career, 'Encounters at the End of the World.' His film crew consisting only of him and a cameraman.
“The only thing that becomes quite obvious in Antarctica," he said, “is that our presence on this planet, the human presence on the planet, is not really sustainable."
WERNER HERZOG says he should have known better. In 46 years of visionary filmmaking often devoted to life in extremis, the prolific director has never been one to toe the line. But on his latest work, the nonfiction feature “Encounters at the End of the World," he had a brief lapse: Against his better instincts, he followed instructions -- and found himself on the losing end of a tussle with an 800-pound snowmobile.
“Encounters," filmed over seven weeks in Antarctica, abounds with exhilarating and strange beauty, unforgettable characters both human and otherwise, and is often mordantly funny. Having now made features on all seven continents, Herzog discovered a landscape unlike anything he had previously explored. “The only thing that comes close would be the Sahara Desert, in just the expanse of it and the amount of solitude," he said recently.
But he's famous for moving between fiction and nonfiction -- sometimes within the same film -- and for dismissing the distinction between the two as arbitrary. Central to his 2005 sci-fi narrative “The Wild Blue Yonder" was documentary footage of Antarctic dives. That underwater imagery, by diver Henry Kaiser, led Herzog to the South Pole to make “Encounters."
Photo Credit
Robin Holland
