Where'd You Go, Werner?

I may have mentioned that Ms. Spenser likes movies set in the polar regions, so of course she requested Werner Herzog's Antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World (2007).

The story is, Herzog was invited by the National Science Foundation to go to Antarctica to make a film - and that's pretty much it. He interviews several people and finds that they are often interesting, accomplished and intense people who had a burning need to go where few others had. So you wind up with theoretical physicists doing dishes, and refugee aid workers driving the bus. 

There is a certain amount of fluffy penguin footage, although he wants to know if penguins ever go insane - and we meet one of the crazy ones, taking of in the wrong direction, away from the sea, probably to starve and die. But perhaps the central scene is some underwater photography. Under the ice cap, "the frozen sky" is full of strange animals (although some are microscopic, or almost). Herzog's narration drops out here, and he uses a haunting. almost atonal women's choir from Georgia set the mood.

Music also comes into play when two of the scientists break out their electric guitars and jam out on the roof of a hut at 1:00 AM. Because they are so close to the pole, it is daylight around the clock, so it looks like late afternoon.

The background music is in general lovely guitar, which gives you a clue to some of the minds behind the scenes. It is Henry Kaiser and David Lindley playing, and it turns out that Kaiser is one of those people who wind up in Antarctica. Grandson of a Santa Cruz philanthropist and cult-famous free-form guitarist, he is also an arctic diver. Herzog saw some of his underwater footage, and that's where the idea for the movie came from. 

Herzog's narration is mostly factual, but sometimes dryly humorous - at least I think he's being humorous. He can be grumpy - he laments the all-day sun, which he "loathes" for it's effect on his skin and his celluloid. Some of his voice-over is so stereotypically "nature documentary" that I assume he is being ironic. Hard to tell with the old German.

It's funny how the theme of "encounters" is mirrored in Where'd You Go, Bernadette. She was an architect who works as a mechanic at MacMurdo, just so she can stay down there. Must be the kind of thing people notice.