Werner Herzog long ago smudged the boundaries between fiction films and documentaries — nowhere more visibly than in the incredibly haunting “Grizzly Man.”
The German filmmaker doesn’t respect global boundaries either, which explains how he ends up in Antarctica for his new nonfiction feature, “Encounters at the End of the World.” It plays like a small but entertaining travelogue with a really interesting guide.
Herzog does not appear on camera but narrates throughout in his heavy Germanic voice. He goes to the ice continent to talk to some of the people who wash up on its shores (and it takes a certain kind of person to wind up here), but also to train his camera on the surreal landscapes down there.
Some of this was inspired by the icy underwater photography Herzog used in his 2005 film “The Wild Blue Yonder,” where footage shot by Henry Kaiser revealed the world beneath the ice to be the domain of science fiction.
Herzog returns for more of this stuff in “Encounters,” and it’s just as hallucinatory as before.
Elsewhere, he treats scientists and truck drivers and random victims of wanderlust with the same quizzical sympathy. Some of the people who are working at the McMurdo research base seem to have run out of all the other far-flung places in the world.
Early on Herzog warns us that he isn’t going to make another fluffy documentary about penguins. But eventually he does talk to a penguin researcher, a guy who sounds as though he’s spent so much time observing penguins he doesn’t much need to speak any more.
And Herzog films a weird phenomenon, a penguin that detaches itself from the flock and heads out into the wild, all by itself. This is the answer to Herzog’s question, Do penguins go insane?
He comes up with all sorts of diverting questions in the course of this movie, such as wondering why, if chimpanzees are so sophisticated and evolved, they haven’t dominated lesser species, the way man has. You hear this stuff and you think, “Only Werner Herzog,” but then you find yourself still thinking about it days later. Once again, he’s made us look and wonder.
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