DVD Pick: Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog has directed both fiction films, notably Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), and nonfiction movies, including Grizzly Man (2005). In Encounters at the End of the World (2007), he adds yet another splendid film to his impressive body of work, and it is an Academy Award nominee for Best Feature Documentary.

Encounters is Herzog's report on his visit to Antarctica, and the movie is as much about people as it is about place. But the film has great resonance because it is used as a framework for philosophical discourse. It is complex, but also emotionally engaging.

Much of the movie takes place at the National Science Foundation's McMurdo Station, which resembles an ugly mining town with a population of about a thousand. At McMurdo we meet dreamers and adventurers who work as computer specialists, plumbers and the like. But Herzog also goes out into the field, which is starkly beautiful in an other-worldly sort of way. There he talks with scientists who are researching a variety of things, such as Weddell seals, an active volcano containing a lake of molten lava, and subatomic particles called neutrinos. One glaciologist is studying a humongous iceberg that he says is bigger than Northern Ireland.

Encounters doesn't linger on any one topic, and it doesn't try to explain much of anything. For Herzog, it's the search that matters. And although the film is entertaining — even funny at times — it is suffused with an air of melancholy. As he says at one point, "Human life is part of an endless chain of catastrophe."

For the cinephile, the best DVD extra is the interview of Werner Herzog by film director Jonathan Demme, best known for The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The interview took place in 2008 at New York's Museum of the Moving Image and lasts over an hour. The two men engage in a fascinating discussion of a wide range of topics, including Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog's film Rescue Dawn (2006), German cinema, music in movies, opera and YouTube. Herzog claims that a major influence on him in making Encounters at the End of the World was the Georgics by the Latin poet Virgil.

In addition, there are five featurettes on the DVD that have a total runtime of over an hour. Be warned that general audiences are likely to find these tedious. One contains 36 minutes of footage shot under the ice, while another has 10 minutes of footage shot from a helicopter. These two featurettes are accompanied only by music: there's no dialogue or narration. A third featurette contains an 18-minute discussion of diving that is probably of little interest to anyone other than scuba divers. And there's also the silly 12-minute "South Pole Excursion," which is amateur film of Antarctic workers acting out a faux ceremony purported to exorcise the demons from a large tunneling machine.

The DVD also provides a sometimes informative and occasionally interesting audio commentary for the feature film by Herzog, producer Henry Kaiser and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger. Incidentally, Kaiser is a well-known guitarist and composer in the San Francisco area, and he is the grandson of tycoon Henry J. Kaiser, father of modern American shipbuilding and cofounder of the Kaiser Permanente HMO.

Below I have listed all the details for DVD set containing Encounters at the End of the World.

Release Date: November 18, 2008
Number of Discs: 2
Feature Film Runtime: 1 hour 41 minutes
MPAA Rating: G
Widescreen (1.78:1), Color
English Dolby Digital 5.1
English Dolby Digital 2.0
English Captions for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Spanish Subtitles
Audio Commentary by Director, Producer and Cinematographer
Under the Ice (36 min.)
Over the Ice (10 min.)
Dive Locker Interview (18 min.)
Exorcism at the South Pole (12 min.)
Seals & Men (3 1/2 min.)
Jonathan Demme Interviews Werner Herzog (1 hr. 7 min.)
Theatrical Trailer