“The National Science Foundation had invited me to Antarctica
even though I left no doubt that I would not come up with another film
about penguins,” Werner Herzog narrates at the outset of his 2007
documentary Encounters at the End of the World. Interviewing
geneticists, divers, machinists, plumbers, and vulcanologists, Herzog
discovers what life is like at the South Pole—where people lose
and/or find themselves, discover alien life forms scuttling about
beneath shelves of ice, and watch lava lakes bubble up in the middle of
snowfields. Encounters is a beautiful thing, strange and lonely
and pensive, and watching it, one is reminded that Herzog is one of our
very best filmmakers.
The Northwest Film Center’s Herzog series, “A Quest for the
Sublime,” offers a solid survey of the Herzog canon, and though a few
films that would’ve been fun to see on the big screen are missing
(where’s Zak Penn’s trippy 2004 collaboration with Herzog, Incident
at Loch Ness?), the retrospective hits the high points: 2005’s
jarring doc Grizzly Man (screens Fri May 16-Sat May 17), 1992’s
look at a war-ravaged Kuwait, Lessons of Darkness (Mon May 4),
and, of course, the films in which Herzog teamed up with his wild-eyed
muse, Klaus Kinski: 1982’s Fitzcarraldo (Sat May 3), 1987’s
Cobra Verde (Fri May 9), 1972’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Sat May 10), and a 1979 remake of 1922’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (Thurs May 29). There’s more, too—including 2006’s Rescue
Dawn (Sat May 24) and the 1997 documentary that inspired it,
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Fri May 23-Sat May 24)—but
it’s hard to single out specific films when just about everything here
is worth watching.
“We flew into the unknown—a seemingly endless void,” Herzog
observes at the beginning of Encounters (where, despite his
earlier joke, he does end up shooting some surprisingly emotional
penguin footage). “Quest for the Sublime” is hardly as weird and
unfamiliar as Herzog’s Antarctic quest, but that doesn’t make it any
less exhilarating.
For more info, see Film Shorts on pg. 52, Movie Times on pg. 55,
and nwfilm.org.
