Frontierwatch

Someone [in McMurdo] Herzog dubs a philosopher tells us all about the universal consciousness, while lets another postulates on how awful life must be for a parasitc worm that lives in a sea urchin’s anus. “A terrible way to spend your life,” this philosopher declaims, pootishly. Pardon me, but how does he know? Maybe a sea urchin’s anus is the Carlyle Hotel of sea-creature anuses; maybe parasitic worms have struggled on the evolutionary ladder for eons working up to the sea urchin’s anus. Maybe the worms’ daddies are as proud as Pontius Pilate…such assertions would seem a random, silly bit of anthropomorphic nonsense if Herzog didn’t provoke similar hypotheses from everyone he interviews.

Link to The Brooklyn Rail

More Herzog reviews:

Here’s a review by Bill Jirsa, who is featured in Herzog’s documentary.

The New York Times

A video interview with Herzog about the movie: Row Three.com

Herzog dedicated the movie to Roger Ebert. Here’s Ebert’s review.

Also, here’s a brief critique from page 2 of the introduction to “Gender on Ice” by Lisa Bloom, Elena Glasberg, and Laura Kay:

Herzog begins his voiced-over narration complaining humorously of the NSF’s bureaucratic safety protocols that protected him well but also prevented his unrestrained access to the territory and thus to its heroic past. And indeed Herzog does seem to spend the entire film trying to get lost or blown up or caught in a natural disaster. He seems to need to experience Antarctica as still connected to heroic exploration. Yet even in his choice of historic footage from Shackleton’s days, particularly a promotional clip obviously shot on a soundstage in London, Herzog undercuts the authenticity of the very heroic past he yearns to experience himself. Unlike Aghion, who is content to see through the eyes of contemporary science as the major mode of engagement in Antarctica, Herzog engages agonistically both with Antarctic history and with the contemporary Antarctic, drained of the masculine ideal of those heroes.