Encounters at the End of the World
SPOILER ALERT
I watched Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, an account of the filmmaker's journey to Antarctica. In it, he takes a similar approach to his other documentary efforts: using voice-over to identify and develop his exploration of various existential or philosophical questions; or, to borrow a term from one of his earlier films, the Poetic Truth of his subject. Sometime it works, and the resulting words and images are truly compelling; othertimes, all that prevents it from descending into abject pretentiousness is Herzog's apparent naïveté.

Formally, Herzog is a master of his craft. Encounters is smartly edited and perfectly paced, and there are many occasions across the film's ninety minutes during which everything comes together: in preparing for a dive, the scientists don't speak during their ritual, and are likened to priests preparing for mass, and Herzog, following suit, falls silent, and we all descend into the "cathedral" and spend several minutes exploring on our own, accompanied only by music, the strange and lush type with which Herzog always manages to endow his films.

From a documentary perspective, Herzog manages to discover an impressive variety of noteworthy people and events, and records them all in turn. The trouble is that his forced interpretation in terms of poetic reality often conflicts with, or even cheapens, the literal reality of what he apparently didn't plan on finding. Herzog did find a surprising number of truly fascinating people. In some cases he lets them speak for themselves, such as the Native American plumber who had been told that his fingers and "long rib cage" were physiological proof that he was descended from Aztec and Mayan royalty. Too often, however, Herzog takes it upon himself to summarize the tales he was told, justifying this at one point by saying that the story "went on forever". These are problems that could have been solved by proper interview conduct and editing, but by not being prepared to handle this type of material, Herzog damages his subjects. Indeed, he has already sabotaged his own efforts, as by the nature of his poetic truth approach, he cannot be trusted with the literal truth. In condensing the stories of his interview subjects, he has robbed them of their conviction. At points he seems to be tampering with reality by hitting his subjects with questions such as "is this a great moment?", or "you escaped [from behind the Iron Curtain]; how big a drama was that?" The low-point comes during an interview with a Marine Ecologist working closely with penguins, which Herzog had set up with the romantic notion that the scientist was "in his solitude not much into conversations with humans, anymore." Herzog then describes difficulty in getting this man to keep talking, but ends up asking him about gay penguins and penguin insanity, making both himself and the subject look foolish in the process.

Like his other documentaries, Encounters at the End of the World is worth watching. As a documentary, the film contains more than enough substance to hold interest. The flaw is that its maker cannot necessarily be taken at his word, which is, of course, a sticky situation when you're dealing with reality. I would urge you to remember this while watching, but Herzog generally manages to involuntarily remind the viewer of the nebulous nature of the reality that he tries to discover.