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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

End of the World

Mrs. D's a long time Werner Herzog fan, so we decided that his new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, playing at the Carolina Theatre, would be a more entertaining way to spend a Monday than either a City Council meeting or watching Bob Costas' toupee on the TV.

It's a fascinating movie, made in conjunction with experimental/noise guitarist Henry Kaiser, who, it turns out, spends a good deal of his time diving below the ice shelf and photographing the almost alien world at the bottom of the earth. Kaiser also did the music for the documentary, which some reviewers thought the best part, but i have to say i found distracting and obtrusive at times.

Herzog made it to Antarctica on a National Science Foundation grant. Scanning through the list of other grant recipients, there's only one other filmmaker, so it'll be interesting to compare "Encounters" with Anne Aghion's Ice People. Herzog focuses, if you can use that word about this documentary, on the oddest things in his environment. Interviewing a scientist who's spent 20 years observing penguins, and who is supposedly renown for his reticence, Herzog asks if he's ever seen any penguins go insane. (Later in the documentary he actually finds one.) The underwater scenes, and the audio of the seals singing below the ice are spectacular, but as at least one other reviewer noted, at the end of the movie you probably have gotten a better understanding of Werner Herzog than of Antarctica.

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