pileofcrowns’s review published on Letterboxd:
If there's one thing to be said about Herzog's view of nature, it's that it's at odds with the view of nature that most people (in my experience) share. I think most people view nature as beautiful and harmonious and giving, if a little dangerous. I don't share that view, and I doubt Herzog shares it either, even though he has a great affection for the natural world. His view of nature is not one of beauty, but one of chaos and murder:
"Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back. It just hits back that's all and that's grandiose about it and we have to accept that it is much stronger than we are. Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain."
"Taking a close look at what's around us there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment."
Thirty years before Encounters Herzog made a similar documentary film, a film called La Soufrière in which he traveled to Basse-Terre Island in the French Antilles where a volcano had just started to violently spew steam and ash into the air and threatened to erupt catastrophically and lay waste to the island. He found an island almost entirely deserted by humans, ghost towns left behind by residents who had hastily fled at the order to evacuate, against the backdrop of the still erupting mountain that peered down ominously over the empty streets. The one or two humans that remained seemed almost offended when Herzog asked them why they did not leave. Like Herzog, they had accepted the violence of nature as nature, as natural, as inevitable.
In that film Herzog captured both the grotesque violence of nature and the end of human existence in the same film, as the island found itself cast into a pre-apocalyptic event. It was almost as if Herzog was saying that the chaos and violence of nature that he sees is inescapable for us as a species even if we imagine ourselves immune to it, that it is certain that one day it will come to visit us, that we are completely powerless against it.
What is stunning about Encounters at the End of the World is that it's the same film as La Soufrière, but this time the violence and chaos of nature is not shown through terrifying images of molten rock and civilization in collapse, but through stunning imagery that enthralls the imagination. It's shown through shots of dazzlingly bioluminescent creatures that inhabit the waters under the antarctic ice. It's shown through the light of the sun filtering its way through the ice that shields life in the dark depths below it. It's shown through journeys into ice caverns opened up by steam that erupts spontaneously from the ground. It's shown in the actions of humans. What we see is nature: it's captivating, sublime, humbling, and awe-inspiring, but never beautiful. To think what we see in the film is beautiful is to mistake captivation for beauty. In the film nature is more like the Siren of Greek mythology: a seductive enchantresses who brings only death.
What is also stunning about the film is that the men and women he interviews for the film offer up views that agree with Herzog's, voluntarily: their wanderings have almost all lead to the same view of nature as chaotic and violent. One scientist and diver, Samuel S. Bowser, is taking his last ever dive of his life into the icy waters of the continent before moving on to other ventures. Despite it being such a seemingly historic day in his life he's completely unsentimental towards the frozen sea, like he can't wait to get out of there. Bowser talks of the ocean underneath the ice, comparing it to the horror of a 50s science fiction film:
"The creatures that are down there are like science fiction creatures. They range in the way that they would gobble you up from slime-type blobs, but creepier than classic science fiction blobs - these would have long tendrils that would ensnare you, and as you try to get away from them you just become more and more ensnared by your own actions. And then after you would be frustrated and exhausted, then this creature would start to move in and take you apart. So that's one example of one of the creatures, then there are other types of worm-type things with horrible mandibles and jaws and just bits to rend your flesh. It really is a violent, horribly violent world that is obscure to us because we're encased in neoprene, you know, and we're much larger than that world. So it doesn't really affect us, but if you were to shrink down, miniaturize into that world, it'd be a horrible place to be. Just horrible."
In a sense, the film is somewhat antithetic to the benign and uplifting view of nature popularized by people like David Attenborough, lacking happy encounters with friendly animals portrayed as majestic and humble and beautiful and wondrous, living in a harmonious system. But to reduce the film to this would be to seriously undersell it, partly because the people of the film also offer up their views and fears of what they see as an inevitable upcoming apocalypse caused by climate change. Thus the title takes on two meanings as we realize that just as in La Soufrière we are again witnessing a pre-apoclyptic event but one on a far vaster scale. Doug MacAyeal, a scientist who studies the movement of icebergs, icebergs that he sees moving north and melting in the warmer ocean waters, offers up a recurring dream:
"At night, I was laying in my bed here in McMurdo. I am again walking across the top of B-15. Might as well be on a piece of the South Pole but yet I'm actually adrift in the ocean, a vagabond floating in the ocean, and below my feet I can feel the rumble of the iceberg, I can feel the change, the cry of the iceberg, as it's screeching and as it's bouncing off the seabed, as it's steering the ocean currents, as it's beginning to move north. I can feel that sound coming up through the bottoms in the my feet and telling me that this iceberg is coming north. That's my dream."
It's a film of dreamers, as the poster's evocation of Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, implies. These dreamers, these wanderers, including Herzog himself, who makes his presence felt, have all found themselves at the end of the world, and many of them seem to see nature in the same way: they see the chaos and violence, sense a certain futility in dreaming that our current sliver of safety in a universe that is completely hostile to life is anything more than an accidental temporary condition, a condition that we cannot make permanent. Yet they dream.
The idea that nature is a thing of harmony and beauty that we can bring balance to and survive doesn't have much currency in the film. And the moments in the film where humans work against the inevitable, like a survival course, are almost dryly comical.
I feel Encounters at the End of the World is one of the greatest documentary films I've seen, but how much of my feeling toward the film is attributable to having a sentiment similar to Werner Herzog's, and how much is attributable to simple respect for his skill as a craftsman, I cannot say. But I feel this is a vastly better film than say Grizzly Man.
But I've said enough. I was planning on only watching 21st century films this year, but after seeing this I'm very strongly considering watching Fitzcarraldo, a film I feel I've viewed a million times in watching Herzog yet have never once seen for myself.