Werner Herzog
United States | 2007 | 99 min
Language : English
Subtitle : French
During the austral summer, when the sun never sets, Werner Herzog heads to the South Pole to film the places as well as the people that have chosen to live there. Fascinated by the footage a diver shot there, he is, on arrival, disappointed by the nature of the site he discovers: McMurdo, the largest American base there is, seems to hesitate between the appearance of a mining operation and the banality of prosaic infrastructures made available for scientists. Moving away from the classic motifs of documentary to subject them to a resolutely ironic perspective and inveterate pessimism, Herzog encounters an eccentric gallery of volcanologists, ecologists, glaciologists, who have fled civilisation to study nature and its probable and forthcoming extinction. The beauty of the Antarctic is thereupon met with the profound, surreal and sometimes absurd knowledge and experiments of the scientists, which the filmmaker seems to joyously disrupt, without ever losing his composure.
Emilie Bujès
