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Werner Herzog

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• Rescue Dawn (2007)
• Tokyo-Ga (1985)
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Encounters at the End of the World

If you've never seen one of Werner Herzog's documentaries, or if you have and know what's good for you, do yourself a favor and check out Encounters at the End of the World, a Discovery Channel production about Antarctica that breaks the mold with Herzog's eccentric musings and auteur's eye.

The title refers to the continent known as the end of the world, but also the signs of probable human extinction. And yet it's not really depressing and not so much a nature film, as Herzog focuses on the "encounters" of the title, conversations with scientists (a glaciologist, a vulcanologist, a nutritional ecologist, a physicist) and service personnel at McMurdo Station, the erstwhile territory of Amundsen, Scott, and Shackleton.

The men of yore and today are "professional dreamers" all, as Herzog puts it, in stark contrast to the so-called achievers who go after the more absurd and pointless records found in Guinness. The dedicated scientists and blissful world travellers found at McMurdo invest thought into their pursuits, self-reflective thought and big thinking on behalf of the planet. A self-styled poet of ecstatic cinema, Herzog happily meanders around the end of the world and assembles a record of his own viewpoint on it—though he remains off camera, he's at one with his subjects. In spirit, he is one of them.

His is the dismay of curiosity, concerned but somehow serene. Of the scientists, he narates, "Nature, they predict, will regulate us." Attention must be paid to the future, but Herzog also knows well enough to live in the present and investigate the past. He's as interested in what brought people to McMurdo and what keeps them there (including the "Frosty Boy" fro-yo machine in the cafeteria) as he is in the single-celled organisms being studied in the icy deep. Herzog takes us through a number of bite-sized fascinations, including questions of how one measures the invisible, why some penguins become deranged, and why a chimp doesn't "straddle a goat and ride into the sunset." The answers are seldom forthcoming, but the fun is in the pondering.