Review of Encounters at the End of the World (2007) by Gerard E — 12 Sep 2009

You have to admire Werner Herzog's knack for tracking down daffy subjects. And here, in his first documentary to be nominated by Oscar, he reaffirms what we've known all along: camera in hand and one-man crew in tow, he'll journey to the extremities of the globe just to find them.

From the out, the sardonic, venerated German maverick makes one thing as clear as the pristine polar waters later captured by lenser Peter Zeitlinger: March of the Penguins this Antarctic-set venture absolutely, positively will not be. Encounters at the End of the World is Herzog's typically wry rumination on what inspires a collection of disparate souls to uproot and make tracks for the niveous otherworld floating at the foot of the map. "If you take everyone that?s not tied down," muses one interviewee, "they all fall down to the bottom of the planet." On this evidence, he mightn't be too far off the mark.

This medley of self-professed "professional dreamers" are an expectedly eccentric lot, though no one of them is as singularly car-crash fascinating as the tragic whose remarkable life/untimely demise informed Herzog's superior Grizzly Man. Collectively, however, when matched with the flippant wit of the filmmaker's narration and the uncanny beauty of their frozen surrounds, they're enough to make Encounters a cool prospect indeed. After all, where else will you find a plumber with claim to royal Aztec lineage, or a tech-savvy vagabond who moonlights as a contortionist?

Ironically, the most memorable moment ultimately arrives when Herzog aims his camera where he's vowed never to point it: amidst a colony of Adélie penguins. As he quizzes a reticent expert on the particulars of penguin prostitution, one lone bird secedes from the flock. Clearly deranged, the obstinate thing sets waddling off for a mountainous outcrop of distant horizon ? and, as Herzog portentously intones in his vampiric voice over, "certain death." He's the classically compulsive Herzogian madman/radical ? a tiny, two-toned and flippered Fitzcarraldo ? albeit one doomed by the vigour of his own dogged resolve.

There's something oddly affecting in watching his squat silhouette shuffling into the void.