Encounters At The End Of The World

[April 30th, 2008]

[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Should we take Werner Herzog seriously anymore? More to the point, does Werner Herzog take Werner Herzog seriously anymore? More than any other prominent director, the genius who made Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man is willing to poke fun at his persona in other people’s movies, without ever betraying a hint of self-awareness in his own projects. In fact, I dare you to figure out which of the following Herzog quotes is a joke, and which is sincere: “Las Vegas is a place with no irony. You just win or you lose, and you’re a giant or you’re a midget.” Or: “To me, it is a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization where tree-huggers and whale-huggers in their weirdness are acceptable, while no one embraces the last speakers of a language.”

Give up? The first quote is in jest—it’s from Zak Penn’s comedy The Grand, in which Herzog plays a card shark who kills fluffy animals to feel alive—and the second is a wholly earnest digression in Herzog’s new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World. Is it quibbling for me to point out that this is a movie about Antarctica, a continent that has no indigenous languages? No matter: Herzog is not a man to be dissuaded from his fixations, which in this movie once again include the ruination of cute, helpless creatures. “I had left no doubt that I would not come up with another film about penguins,” he begins his narration, and goes on to take several more thinly veiled jabs at the hit 2005 doc March of the Penguins. Later he asks a biologist, with great hope in his voice, whether penguins ever go insane.

It is probably not a wise idea to insult March of the Penguins when you are making a documentary with less painstaking research than exists in Happy Feet. But that’s what Herzog has done. Encounters at the End of the World is principally a collection of Herzog’s Antarctic vacation pictures; the movie feels like an episode of Travels with Rick Steves if the show were hosted by a perpetually gloomy German.

But the truth is that I would Tivo such a program faithfully, and Encounters is just as wonderful: Herzog discovers the planet’s southernmost ATM, sends his camera on dives into waters filled with icky, unnerving creatures, and chats with all the peripatetic scientists who study seals and volcanoes off the Ross Ice Shelf. Their findings of climate change kindle Herzog’s warmest ruminations, about how “the end of human life on this earth is assured.” The only sensible response to this sort of thing is to admit that it’s probably true but, on the other hand, we’re still alive. So is Werner Herzog—and while it may be hard to listen to him with a straight face, it’s equally difficult to imagine the globe without his morose presence.