Film and the Age of Adventure:
More on Werner Herzog

December 18, 2008

Werner Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World returns obsessively to Ernest Shackleton and his Antarctic explorations in the early part of the 20th century. Right off the bat, on the way to McMurdo Station after getting off the airplane, Herzog films the bus driver pointing out the original cabin built by Shackleton and his men.. and three times in the course of the documentary Herzog adds footage taken by Shackleton.

He first uses Shackleton to point out the immense changes in the human experience of Antarctica.

One hundred years ago the human presence here was the result of genuinely heroic efforts. Now visitors are treated to climate controlled dorm rooms, a cafeteria serving ice cream, and even a yoga studio. Herzog can't wait to get out of McMurdo Station..

Later in the film Herzog returns to this comparison of the early explorers with modern adventures.. and his answer provides an insight into his rationale for making films:

One thing about the early explorers does not feel right: the obsession to be the first one to set foot on the South Pole. It was for personal fame and the glory of the British Empire... But in a way from the South Pole onwards there was no further expansion possible and the empire started to fade into the abyss of history...

Herzog appears to be saying that while he admires the spirit of adventure, these explorers were compromised by a fixation on being "first".. something meaningful only in terms of fame and political capital. The unaffiliated and plain human value of their effort was being lost in this obsession.

Herzog continues:

On the cultural level it meant the end of adventure. Exposing the last unknown spots of this earth was irreversible, but it feels sad that the South Pole or Mt. Everest were not left in peace in their dignity. It may be a futile wish to keep a few white spots on our maps, but human adventure in its original sense lost its meaning, became an issue for the Guinness Book of World Records. Scott and Amundsen were clearly early protagonists and from there on it generated into absurd quests. A Frenchman crossed the Sahara desert in his car set in reverse gear. I am waiting for the first barefoot runner on the summit of Mt. Everest, or the first one hopping to the South Pole on a pogo stick.

So adventure has fallen onto hard times. Explorers of Antarctica like Shackleton were the last of their kind; they filled in the last blank spaces. After them adventure became defined by repeating something in an odd way.. and it's at this point that Herzog breaks of to give us the only footage of the entire film set outside Antarctica: he interviews a man who sets weird records that only Guinness could find interest in documenting.

It is a humorous sequence, but Herzog is getting at something serious: adventure and exploration hit a dead end about the time that the South Pole was reached. The big question is Now What? Collectively we have filled that space with meaningless pursuits.. of which world record pogo-sticking is only a colorful example.

It is surely a happy coincidence for Herzog that the beginning of documentary filmmaking corresponds with the last real explorers. He gives us a glimpse of Shackleton standing on a set trying to re-create his experience in the far south:

The maker of Little Dieter Needs to Fly is not going to throw stones at anyone attempting to later re-create an experience! We sense appreciation from Herzog.. and acknowledgment that his work in film represents one form of continuation from the efforts of these men. He will not fall into the trap of "being the first".. but will find his theme in the genuine human struggle with the world. He finds a cue in the work of Shackleton.

A central search throughout the work of Herzog is to locate images that are not empty.. that can speak to our unprecedented time. This search is clear early in his career in Fata Morgana (1971), whose central images mirror what we find in Encounters at the End of the World:

In the audio commentary that comes with the most recent release of this film (from Anchor Bay), Herzog says:

I have been sick and tired of the images that are surrounding us, the posters, the ads in the magazines, and whatever you see on TV. It's so worn out, those antiquated images, images that are not really adequate to our civilization anymore. And that's a dangerous thing.. to have something like that. It's dangerous if a civilization doesn't find an adequate language... I think a quest for new images is something essential.

That is a parallel way of saying what he said above about explorers: We have collectively reached a point at which the old images and symbols have become meaningless, and the only way to respond to this state is to throw it all away and look at the world for ourselves. This loss of meaning can be understood as the same general malaise evident as human beings began to look at a world with no blank spaces.. and to invent little absurd quests for themselves. Film for Herzog is a way of answering that malaise.. and of identifying a new human sense of adventure.