[portable] - Encounters At The End Of The World

Encounters at the End of the World [DVD] : Movies & TV - Amazon.com Amazon.com

The heart of the film lies in its interviews with the scientists, mechanics, and linguists who call Antarctica home. Herzog is fascinated by why people choose to leave society for a place that is actively hostile to human life. He finds:

"Understood."

An iconic scene depicts a lone penguin heading away from the colony toward the interior of the continent, described by Herzog as a journey toward "certain death". Production Context

The "cast" includes a forklift operator who quotes Alan Watts and considers himself a philosopher; a journeyman plumber who holds his oddly shaped hands to the camera as evidence of his royal Mayan ancestry; a linguist studying the unique accents of McMurdo's workers; and a woman who has a party trick of folding herself into a suitcase and an incredible story of hitchhiking from the USA to Africa inside a sewer pipe. Then there are the scientists: the penguin researcher David Ainley, the cell biologist Samuel Bowser, and the iceberg geologist Douglas MacAyeal, among others. Encounters at the End of the World

The journey begins not with a map, but with a question. In Encounters at the End of the World , Werner Herzog does not travel to the Antarctic to capture the majesty of penguins or the heroism of explorers; he goes to find the edge of the human experience, a place where the normal rules of civilization have dissolved into a surreal, blinding whiteness. The film opens with a hypnotic, terrifying image: diver Henry Kaiser, submerged under the thick ice of the Ross Sea, is caught in a current so powerful it pins him against the ceiling of ice, his regulator screaming a mechanical, high-pitched squeal. It is the sound of a human intruder in a hostile, alien cathedral.

Critics praised the film for its philosophical depth and stunning visuals, earning a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes . Reviewers from sites like The Guardian and Roger Ebert highlighted its "hauntingly beautiful" imagery and subtle apocalyptic undertones regarding the melting ice caps. Encounters at the End of the World [DVD]

“Encounters at the End of the World” (2007) is Herzog’s singular documentary about Antarctica and the astonishing array of people who choose to live there. It is not a nature documentary. It is not a travelogue. It is a poem of oddness and beauty — a film that gazes into the abyss of ice, volcano, and unfathomable ocean depths, and finds itself gazing back at the glorious, strange, and often heartbreaking spectacle of human yearning. At the 81st Academy Awards, the film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature — Herzog‘s first and to date only Oscar nomination.

He recalls the words of Martin Luther: when asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, Luther replied, “I would plant an apple tree.” It is a beautiful, stubborn, absurdly human response — and it perfectly captures the spirit of the film. The end may be coming, but human beings plant apple trees anyway. They study volcanoes and descend into ice tunnels and watch deranged penguins walk to their deaths. They do these things because they cannot help themselves. Production Context The "cast" includes a forklift operator

But like all of Herzog’s best promises, this one is broken beautifully. Penguins do appear — and in the most unforgettable, heartbreaking sequence in the entire film. Herzog visits a penguin colony and asks a biologist, almost as a joke, whether penguins ever go insane. The biologist replies, matter-of-factly, that yes, sometimes a penguin will simply break away from the colony and walk inland — toward the mountains, toward certain death, because the continent is 5,000 kilometers wide and there is no water, no food, no colony, nothing but ice and eventual oblivion. Herzog then trains his camera on a lone penguin, waddling resolutely away from the sea, away from its companions, toward the far-off mountains. It is a “disoriented or deranged” penguin, as the Yale Film Notes later described it — a tragic, solitary figure making a suicide march into the vast interior.