But otherwise, this looks great. Just another day in the life of Werner Herzog peering into the madness of the abyss and seeing what he finds.
As we wrote in our summer preview, about this doc, “Encounters At The End Of The World,”the documentarian and maverick nutcase’s eternal quest for “ecstatic truth” takes him to Antarctica to capture the life at the National Science Foundation where a thousand-plus scientists and people have it harder than any of his previous subjects (which range from foolish Grizzly Bear fanatics to Gulf War oil-firefighters). Expect Herzog to make the prosaic and mundane to become absurdly profound. This is a guy that could read the phone book aloud and make it sound like prophetic end-times.
Have you ever seen, “Lessons of Darkness,” the haunting, mostly silent documentary that Herzog made about the firefighters putting out the Iraqi oilfields from the first Gulf War? There’s a moment where the firefighters re-lit a fire they’ve put out in the film and surely they’re doing it for some sane reason. But Herzog in his beautiful Germanic absurdity assumes – like he pretty much assumes about every event on earth, including even going to a deli to buy a Snickers bar – that they been “consooomed by maaaadness.”
“Two figures are approaching an oil well. One of them holds a lighted torch. What are they up to? Are they going to rekindle the blaze? Is life without fire become unbearable for them?… Others, seized by madness, follow suit. Now they are content. Now there is something to extinguish again,” he intoned melodramatically.
It’s probably the single-most funniest moment in documentaries we’ve ever seen and seriously worth sitting through the entire doc for. Anyhow, the Antarc doc below. We’ll be there for it. It opens June 11 (and piss on the people that didn’t invite us).
