The Justice

Herzog discussed his films Tuesday afternoon. David Sheppard-Brick/the Justice.

When director Werner Herzog screened his new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, at the Wasserman Cinematheque last Monday, he took the audience to a continent void of language yet populated by linguists, a place where Ph.D.s work as dishwashers and a former banker drives the world's largest land vehicle, called Ivan the Terra Bus-He took us to Antarctica.

This film-a Discovery Channel project that will have a limited theater release before going directly to DVD-wonderfully combines beautiful imagery, humor and pessimism to leave the viewer out of breath from laughter, an influx of knowledge and an odd tinge of despair. In it, Herzog travels to Antarctica not, in his words, "to make a movie about cute fluffy penguins," but to explore the world and its many questions.

The movie begins underwater. An enormous sheet of ice hangs overhead, and a diver silently moves with the slow deliberation of an astronaut. This image, almost extraterrestrial, begins a long string of parallels to being in another world. Herzog travels to the barren moonlike research town of McMurdo, where scientists watch sci-fi films about world destruction and real sea creatures look like something out of The Langoliers.

Herzog makes it clear, however, that this movie and all its implications apply very much to our own world: Global warming threatens to send icebergs the size of U.S. states to careen into other continents. In his foreboding German accent, Herzog warns that scientists believe we are the next great species to become extinct-that our demise is inevitable.

Unlike An Inconvenient Truth, however, Herzog does not simply bombard the viewer with scientific proof for eventual global termination; this is not just another global warming movie. Instead of a movie about facts, Herzog says he aimed to make a movie about truth. When he talked after the screening, he spoke exactly about this point.

"Something filled with millions of facts does not necessarily speak to a higher truth," he said. "The New York phone directory is filled with facts, but it doesn't speak to a deeper truth."

Herzog spoke of trying to achieve an "ecstatic truth," to which one audience member, Oscar-winning filmmaker and friend of Herzog, Errol Morris said, "With all due respect, Werner, but I think what you are trying to achieve, instead of ecstatic truth, is ecstatic absurdity."

Continued...

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