Desire, Incomprehensibility, and Despair in the Antarctic Vision of Werner Herzog // Deseo, incomprensibilidad y desesperación en la visión antártica de Werner Herzog

Abstract

Werner Herzog's 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World concerns human ideals of exploration in the extreme environment of the Antarctic. Throughout the film, Herzog and his characters enrol the Antarctic variously as a site of desire and as a site of incomprehensibility in self-told narratives about their own lives. Their ability to do so is a consequence of both popular myth that casts the Antarctic as a static and empty wasteland, and nationalistic modes of governance that promote science but squeeze other modes of knowing to the fringe. The characters in Herzog's film are thus doomed to a cycle of endless repetition: forced by myth to constantly revisit the moment of discovery, and constrained by modes of governance that deny formal expression of the heightened sensibility they experience when engaging with Antarctic space. Ultimately, this cycle generates despair and so the film bears witness to an inversion of frontier tropes: Instead of heroic white male coming to the aid of nature in distress we instead find the heroic white male in distress staring into an utterly hopeless void. In this way, Herzog's film becomes a parable about history constraining new forms of knowing. In an age of increasing environmental uncertainty, and with the Antarctic enrolled as both a litmus test for human impacts on the planet, and for gauging the future of the human race, Encounters asks us to reject history where history teaches us nothing new, and it asks us to find ways to renew the great experiment of living in the world.