We went to see Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World on Saturday night. I thought it was really good, and I recommend that it be seen on the big screen. At times he seems to take his Teutonic pessimism a bit too far in the narration, but it ends up being so funny that it all works. Needless to say, he side steps the normal documentary cliches and he doesn't seem to feel any need to shoe horn every encounter into some tight narrative arc.
I just found out that Werner Herzog's new documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, is opening today in Buffalo. I'm excited to see it. Lately, I've been watching a lot of nature documentaries as I mull over some ideas for future projects. I find Herzog's attitude towards nature a refreshing counter to the pseudo religious cliches about harmony that one finds in most nature documentaries. The best example of it is the clip below (from a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo), where he talks about the "obscenity" and "overwhelming collective murder" of the jungle. After spending a year plus looking at the nightmarish world of spiders, I'm sympathetic to his characterization of nature. He starts talking at the 36 second mark.
We went to see Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World on Saturday night. I thought it was really good, and I recommend that it be seen on the big screen. At times he seems to take his Teutonic pessimism a bit too far in the narration, but it ends up being so funny that it all works. Needless to say, he side steps the normal documentary cliches and he doesn't seem to feel any need to shoe horn every encounter into some tight narrative arc.
