Herzog documentary finds charm at bottom of world

No penguins, vowed Werner Herzog. No fluffy waddling munchkins. No anthropomorphizing, and no sentimental slop in his documentary, "Encounters at the End of the World."

The National Science Foundation and the Discovery Channel may have paid the famously dour filmmaker to venture to McMurdo Station, a community of 1,100 somewhat eccentric scientists and researchers in Antarctica, but no one was going to tell him what to film at the bottom of the world when he got there.

His arrival elicits the customary bleak assessment: What a dump.

Herzog is appalled not only at the camp's unkempt appearance — that of "an ugly mining town" — but by the intrusion of such civilized-world "abominations" as an aerobics studio. "From the very first day," says Herzog, who also narrates, "all we wanted to do was get out of this place and into the field."

And so he does, to an assortment of satellite stations such as the one studying the active volcano of Mount Erebus, and under the ice with divers exploring the fauna of the Ross Sea. Yet there is something about this sprawling station on the floating island of the Ross Ice Shelf that soon insinuates itself into and undermines Herzog's skepticism about the place and its people — scientists and escapees from middlebrow dreariness who have "jumped off the margin."

For all their technical acumen and dedication to research — tracing the evolution of life to its earliest stages — they are individuals who, in the words of one, are "full-time travelers and professional dreamers," men and women who "fell to the bottom" of the world because they were not tied down to their countries of origin. And they regard the ice on which they dwell, with utter fascination, as a dynamic living entity.

Perhaps Herzog was highly selective in his interview subjects, for many with whom he talks on camera share his pessimism about humanity's future on a planet it continues to rape with mindless impunity. His kind of folks. "Behind every door," he knows, "there's someone with a story to tell." Some stranger than others. Nor does Herzog let us forget that, like many iconoclastic artists, he, too, is drawn to the ends of the world.

Footage with the station is rather routine. But cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger's underwater photography is dreamlike and captivating. And when he follows a researcher into the depths of a volcanic fumarole — one not contaminated with toxic gases — we enter a wonderland of elegant, if surreal, ice formations. The score (Henry Kaiser, David Lindley), however, is a bit much, funereal and overwrought in its quasi-religious tone.

Throughout, Herzog harks back to Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1914-16 expedition, a venture motivated more by hubris and nationalism than discovery, contrasted to those who work here, in relative comfort, today. But it does not alter his conclusions.

Herzog, who suffered a spasm of uncharacteristic hopefulness in last year's superb drama, "Rescue Dawn," here more resembles the filmmaker who made 1976's "Heart of Glass," a story of a village consumed by a single-minded obsession, or the more recent cautionary tale "Grizzly Man." His work always has been about human nature in conflict with Mother Nature. And it doesn't do to play fast and loose with her affections.

Reach Bill Thompson at 937-5707.