Encounters at the End of the World
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to witness it, is there beauty in the destruction? The implication of “Encounters at the Edge of the World,” Werner Herzog’s new documentary, is that humankind, as the eyes and ears of the universe, is required for that perception.
In evolutionary terms, the onward march of exploration on the part of the human race may well be what we have been working toward, what differentiated us from our brother primates. In the beginning of the film, Herzog asks why other primates don’t utilize lower creatures, illustrating the point with an animation of a gorilla riding another animal. It’s a bigger question than it seems and Herzog spends the next 90 minutes showing the ways in which humans conquer worlds and chase down the minutiae of their surroundings. These efforts include attempts to corral single-celled creatures that provide a road map back to our simpler ancestors and neutrinos, the unseen but mathematically calculated particles without which the universe would not have been born.
Herzog’s film is purportedly a study of the Antarctic, of the crazy personalities that congregate there and the harsh nature they study. It is so much more. As one would expect, Herzog creates a collage of science, psychology and poetry, darting from one to the other but always providing a strong line between the stops. As Herzog travels from base station to outpost to glacier to cave to volcano, he is stalking the nature of humankind as much as any individual — the drive of a creature to push, push, push to certain death, to take and tame, to study and understand — all the while examining the individuals capable of taking on such work. They strive to understand the universe, but it’s debatable whether they understand themselves or their fellow men very much at all.
Herzog spends time with various explorers and what binds these characters are their rambling, eccentric pasts and isolated presents. These are people who didn’t fit in with the pack and it was this distance that allowed them to forge ahead to worlds unknown for that very pack. Even as they shake off the confines of human society — and tell tales of their reckless lives attempting to function within it — they do the great work of conquest. They require a frontier in order to make sense.
In investigating this relationship between man and nature, Herzog does spend a lot of time on the nature, even though he sarcastically proclaims in the beginning that his movie about the Antarctic is not going to be about penguins. Those creatures do figure into it, as do all kinds of underwater oddities and seals, but the questions Herzog has are not simple ones designed to uncover their singular place within the great kingdom of nature. Rather, Herzog’s questions grapple with their proximity to mankind — and the wonder with which we behold them. While Herzog moans about the manmade base he must stay in, generally exhibiting disgust for these monuments to man’s presence in the Antarctic — that is, man’s conceit — he seems to see mankind as integral when it comes to the nature. Seeing a barren landscape is fine, but seeing a barren landscape with one guy on it sparks his imagination.
Among the stops Herzog makes are with a diver who explores under the ice and through whom the strangest worlds and creatures show up; a hermit-like researcher who explains degenerate and deranged behavior in penguins even as he seems out of synch with the idea of talking to other human beings; and a scientist in a tweed coat who regularly takes his life into his own hands by studying a volcano that hurls out fireballs to take out over-ambitious researchers.
Often Herzog invokes the end of humankind, as well as a universe that will pay no attention to our demise. Humankind, in Herzog’s presentation, is just part of a whole, not separate from it, and the idea is that nature — and the universe itself — will continue long after humans are gone, much like a person can live on after they’ve lost a toenail. But the question remains — if humans are not there to witness nature, will the universe be able to acknowledge itself.
Rather than being toes, are human beings the eyes? Will the universe go blind at our passing? It’s a question Herzog largely leaves hanging, but the real achievement is in posing it at all. He takes us down a peg — we are not the children of the divine, elevated from common nature — while still elevating us to the level of the universe’s soul.
