The Vexed Spirit

Sunlight infused the sky like Peking tea in a blue China cup. I watched the colours of the world steadily dissolve in time. A steely orange glow; the last remnant of today, skirted along the horizons edge - on either side threatened by the arc of encroaching velvet night; a velvet dimpled with starlight peeking through.

With rock as pillow and time my only boss, I watched the Milkyway mark trails on the surface of my eyeballs. Vast trails across my retina as the earth beneath me spun on its steady rhythmic course. The earth revolving unquestioningly - like a heartbeat. The wind rustled and shook the branches and even ruffled the stars causing them to blink. Did they stir? Did Newton's Laws vanish? My thoughts lay prone and my heart lay open: like winged solar panels to soak up the universe, gulp it in in-fact. If landscapes were canvases, they were conceived by a mind raised above the troubles that vex the human spirit. I'm just a living solar panel vexing in existence.

I ate by moonlight what would normally be described as a poor meal. A paupers dinner. Fit for an indigent king. Hunk of bread, olives and dried goat-milk curd for a palette deprived. Did I forget to mention coffee? A nasty brutish coffee - weak and feeble like Pluto the wench. This is the country that gave us the 'Kawa' and yet...

And yet the earth continues to revolve and I resolve to revolve too in my own 'e-centric' universe. I fall asleep to the murmur of stars and the steady blink-blink of the unimaginable. I dream of insects and trilobites and the steady tick tock of things untried in words or rhyme. I wake up dazed yet I saw no sun last night - only stars. And words. I must endeavour to write them down sometime.

Cape Comorin

Baruch de Spinoza - A tale

Step inside the eye of my mind

Step inside the eye of my mind

Don't you know you might find

A better place to play

________

Paradise Lost

This is an illustration for John Milton's epic poem 'Paradise Lost' by the French artiste Gustave Dore. It pictures Satan's flight to earth at the end of Book III. It's a wood engraving and was originally printed in 1866.

Gustave Dore was perhaps the most prolific of 18th century book illustrators and certainly the most brilliant. Take a look at this image. It depicts Satan in the guise of an intrepid cosmonaut. He has traversed on wing the hazardous realm of chaos in order to reach the world of creation. In this image Dore depicts Satan's final descent as the sphere of the earth swims into the view. What do I like about this image? I like Dores' romanticised image of a handsome, athletic-looking Satan. A far cry from the demonic hoofed-feet creation of yore. His bat like wings intimate the only signs of menace; and yet in my opinion they are also beautiful - notice how their line effortlessly mimics and reverses the curve of the approaching earth. The clouds part as Satan enters the atmosphere, bathing him in gorgeous star-flecked celestial light. His muscular physique, determined bearing, and the fluttering skirts of his classical Homeresque armour all suggest an heroic figure - stalwart in the face of His heavenly tyranny. The image has less in common with Renaissance art and more in common with modern science fiction. Without Milton we just might never have had the vivid imaginings of Satans travels in epics such as His Dark Materials.

That Satan with less toil, and now with ease

Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light

And like a weather-beaten vessel holds

Gladly the port, though shrouds and tackle torn;

Or in the emptier waste, resembling air,

Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold

Far off the empyreal heaven'

(Paradise Lost)

There is nothing better than to spend a very early Saturday morning; that is clad in thick grey clouds, like today, absorbed in the fantastic imaginings and world of Paradise Lost. Or, in the words of Milton himself, 'where the deep transported mind may soar - Above the wheeling poles, and at heaven's door - Look in'

Though my favourite line and the one that comes eagerly to mind, as I sit here is: 'better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven' - indeed!

______

Currently reading...The Inheritors (by William Golding)

Currently watching...Uzak ('Distant')

If ever a film was composed in a minor key, it is this beautiful and poignant movie from the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, which floats like a helium balloon above the middling mainstreamers of today. It attains a clarity and simplicity that lesser film-makers could strain every sinew trying to achieve without ever getting anywhere. Uzak is about loneliness and depression, and particularly the kind of depression suffered by men of a certain age who would cut their tongues out rather than admit they are depressed.

Yet the film itself is the opposite of depressing. It is gentle and deeply humane, and even ventures into an arena of delicate visual comedy with a shy adroitness. Watching it is like taking a deep draught of cold, clear water and oxygen.

So what is it about? Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) has made a success of his life as a photographer living in an apartment in Istanbul, which he has furnished with a middle-aged bachelor's fastidiousness. Professionally bored and disillusioned, he is conducting a deeply unsatisfactory affair with a married woman and has been forced to confront the reality of his life choices with the news that his ex-wife is leaving for Canada with her new partner. Mahmut's walls are crammed with books and CDs, but he is hardly ever shown reading or listening to music, he mostly just watches TV, while glumly screening out calls from his family on the answering machine. There are long scenes in which Mahmut just, well, watches TV.

His life is disturbed by the deeply unwelcome arrival of Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), a dopey country-bumpkin of a cousin from the same village that he has left behind. Mahmut has promised his mother that he will let Yusuf stay in his pristine modern flat while he looks for work in the big city. It isn't long before Yusuf is getting on his nerves in a very big way, failing to find work, showing every indication of getting comfortable and permeating the carpet with cigarette smoke and fag ash. The realisation that Yusuf is the nearest thing Mahmut will now ever get to human companionship in the evening of his life is appallingly sad and funny.

Poor Yusuf is lonely too: though naturally communicating this to his prickly and disapproving host is out of the question. There are long scenes in which he does nothing but slope around Istanbul in the biting cold. Ceylan found a day to shoot in which the city is made breathtakingly, serendipitously beautiful in the snow, though forbidding and alienating at the same time.

There are sublimely funny moments. Mahmut watches an arty movie on late-night TV, longing for Yusuf to go to bed, so that he can watch porn instead. But, when Yusuf bumbles back into the front room, he must scramble to switch the filth off and get Tarkovsky back on. When a mouse is caught by one of the sticky strips that houseproud Mahmut has laid out, it is Yusuf who, with a residual sense of decency and a heartbreaking empathy with the poor twitching animal, takes it outside in a plastic bag and tries to despatch it humanely by bashing it against a wall, while Mahmut impassively looks on.

The cleverest sequence comes when Mahmut frostily asks if Yusuf has seen a silver pocket-watch that has gone missing. Yusuf is not so stupid that he does not understand the implied accusation and shrilly asks if Mahmut has not just misplaced it. A close-up then tells us that this is indeed the case, but Mahmut will not admit it to Yusuf: his loneliness, his inability to articulate an apology and his tacit, internal admission of defeated pride are disclosed to us in one effortlessly simple take.

Ceylan has superb compositions with a deep focus of beautifully realised, crystalline detail, particularly his opening, painterly shot of a wintry country landscape through which Yusuf is distantly trudging, as distant as a bird, until his great pudding face looms up, filling our field of vision. The movie is a series of these unhurried sequences, timed and managed to perfection. Uzak is about the distances that open up between us locked away in pride. It is about the past, the present and an unattainable future. Highly recommended *****

Fly - Run - Hurts - Sleep - Australia

[Cover version]

[Original version]

Danakil!

The Dankalia region of Ethiopia is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. It is, for the most part, wanting of flora and fauna and presents to the eye alternating scenes of desert flatlands and isolated mountain groups, sometimes interrupted by valleys mottled with thorny acacias. Goats roam in bands cropping the bristly stems of short grasses and kicking up loose dirt into little churning dust storms.

Moving inland, toward the Ethiopian highlands, a long depression extends itself reaching a depth of 120 meters below sea level. This section is one of the lowest and hottest places on earth and is known as Dallol (Danakil depression), where temperatures in the sun can reach 145°F (50°C).

The Danakil depression is an area along the Great Rift Valley (the cradle of mankind) where the earth’s crust is being stretched and thinned like sheets of heated plastic and the land has sunk, over much time, to a current depth of 371 feet below sea level. This is one of the lowest points on earth. Here the earth’s crust is so thin that new land is constantly being created by new lava jets that ooze upward. Water also seeps down, to be ejected back out again as angry steam bursts. Volcanic cones are an enchanting and common visual sight, as are deep cracks that line the earth. To be here is to feel the birth pains of the young earth many billions of years hence.

10,000 years ago the Danakil desert was part of the Red Sea when the earth’s crust collapsed and water flooded in. Many believe this localised geological event to be the origin of the Biblical Noah's flood story. This flood water; subjected for many years to a blazing sun, gradually evaporated leaving behind enormous salt pans and salt lakes. Lakes so salty that the density of the water is greater than the density of the human body - enabling one to float without paddling.

The people living in the Afar region; a crumbling waste of brittle rock and broken lava flows are as tough and hostile as their environment. The Afar people are largely nomads and almost entirely Muslim by faith. It is here that some of the oldest humanoid fossils have been found, linking our ancestral tree's roots, firmly and suredly, in a African setting. A million years back we are all Africans.

Confused? Perplexed? Wanna know what it's all about?

Well, there's only one way to find out. Let's listen to the smartest man on earth. The voice of reason in an unreasonable world.

Ladies & Gentlemen,
I proudly, and with infinite cheer, present to you Professor Richard Dawkins! (cheers! clapping! whooping!)

Best bit : 3mins 36 secs into the video - 'Aren't you?' - classic!

Newsnight Review Special (originally broadcast on 11th Sept, 2009)

Enjoy!

My Book Review: The Greatest Show on Earth

Coming soon...

aDoseOfPhilosophy - On Child Wonder

Movie to watch!...'The Class'

The idealistic young teacher reaching out to a troubled class of underprivileged kids - it should be the dullest movie cliche imaginable. Yet French director Laurent Cantet does something miraculous with it in this fresh piece of humanist, realist, optimist cinema, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year.

The teacher is François Marin, a slim, boyish thirtysomething teacher of French language and literature. We are to encounter him in the classroom, the staff-room and in the schoolyard, but never at home. We never find out about his home life or his personal life. His sole moment of privacy is glimpsed at the very beginning of the film: having a cup of coffee before gearing himself up for the fray.

My favourite scene in the movie is at the end when the students are sitting in the class ready to break for summer term. The teacher is asking each of them what they learnt that year. One student says 'volcanoes' another 'combustion' and another 'reproduction'. Finally the camera settles on the trouble-maker of the class. A spotty faced-teen with braces in her teeth who the teacher had previously called a 'slut':

''I didn't learn anything' she says apologetically

'You can't spend nine months at school and not learn anything' says the teacher

'Well I'm the living proof' she replies

'You must have got something from the books you read in class?'

'Your books are shit' she replies

'What about a book you read yourself?'

'The books I read myself?...well there's The Republic. The book The Republic' she says

[The teacher stares at her not quite believing she read The Republic]

'By Plato?' he asks

[She nods her head]

'You read that?'

'Yes' she replies

'How come?' he asks (remember these are underprivileged school-kids from immigrant backgrounds)

'My big sister had it'

'She does philosophy?'

'No, law'

'So what's it about?'

'Well there's this guy. His names Socrates. He stops people in the street and he asks them, "Are you sure of thinking what you think? Are you sure of doing what you do?"

'What does he talk about?' the teacher asks

'Everything. Love, religion, God, people, everything'

'It's good you read it'

'I know. It's not a slut's book!'...

The sheer lucid force of The Class is compelling and exhilarating. Cantet's final tableau shots of the empty classroom, like a deserted battlefield, made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. There are very few films that can claim to make their audiences into happier and smarter people. I think this is definitely one. Highly recommended!

[Trailer]

Weird Adventures in Natural History

[Addendum]

And why, you are no doubt wondering, does the female eat the male in the first place? For a good meal that's why! It seems that once the male has made his contribution to the relationship; in this case his contribution being his sperm, it seems that there is no further use for his services so he is, er promptly eaten. Gives a whole new meaning to the term 'dominant relationship' if you ask me.

A Slice of Me

I was born to be a scribbler, scribe, pen-magician, blogger - call it what you will. I can write about (almost) anything whatsoever. One nostril on earth and the other sniffing out scents in a galaxy far far away. The canopy I sleep under has a dome whose diameter far exceedeth that of ordinary sniffing mortals. Wonder - that's what lies at the heart of me. Like that glowing thingy in the chest of Iron-Man - my kernal is Wonder. I was looking at myself in the mirror the other day (not because of vanity mind you) peering into those dark eyes...they say the eyes don't lie. What do mine say? I stared deep into their Liquid Crystal Display trying to read them, to get lost in them, to loose myself in a bewildering forest of prickly thorns and beaming flowers. Did they reveal my soul? Are my secrets that I hold so dear, my visions that I see sometimes, my inadequacies that I stow away - are they revealed through my eyes? I looked but couldn't recognise the man staring back. Who is he? And like a familiar word; that through prolonged staring looses its familiarity, the man in the mirror morphed into a stranger...the reality of things is revealed through the lens through which we see.

There is a little game you can play to mimic a change of lens. Close your eyes for five minutes and shut away your thoughts. Stow away your memories. Plug your ears. Block your nose. Relax your muscles till there is nothing left but the cold blackness of nothingness. Journey back to the moment before your birth...and then slowly, carefully...open your eyes, and look out of the box in which you've arrived - and view the scene as if you've woken up fresh into the world. It's like a tonic! I play this game often. In fact I played it on the bus yesterday and it gave me a horrid shock. A big burly fat man had seated himself next to me...and the shock of it, the shock of seeing this tubby tub of lard, inspired me to write a little diatribe:

fat man, fat man, on the bus
wheezing - wheezing, on the huff
skinny me, skinny me, next to he
squishy - squashy - wishing death to thee

Now, notwithstanding the puerile nature of this ditty, what strikes me most is its wish for death to reign down and strike this fat man. Can I use the word fat? Anyway, so I was wishing death on someone I barely knew. It's the lens effect you see. Well inspiration must gush from somewhere I suppose - even if it is the asshole of vainglory.

So give me a topic and I'll scrape you a few morsels from my soul. Give me a subject and I'll dredge the seas of Aldoran. Give me love and you'll never see me again. Give me a moment and I'll show you eternity.

A visiting vagabond amongst the human race. That's me. Not here to stay. But to Wonder.

_____

Go Girl Power! / Afghani Elections

Oppression is the bastard of human nightmares - My heart glows with mirth amidst such scenes - Ignorance and bigotry stifle the voice of many - The bearded ones I scorn the most - Flimsy is their stock of reason - wealthy their store of guilt - hidden under their Khlashnikovs - I hope for hope - for there is nothing in the ruins - but pieces - Do you care world? - Are people selfish? - All hypocrites

Coming soon...Unweaving the rainbow

aDoseOfPhilosophy - on death & dysentery

aDoseOfPhilosophy - on reading

Where do thoughts exist?

The Word

Chasing The Monsoon (Part II)

Under a wan and lukewarm morning sun Kolkata's 270 grimy square miles of living space looked cleansed, polished and refreshed. It was as if the city had gone to the barbers and had a facial. It's pored cleansed and breathing. The Monsoon rains had sluiced the streets, washed away the grime on the walls, and swept away (albeit temporarily) the grubby pavement dwellers. Suddenly flashes of greenery; previously begrimed in a thick coat of Kolkata dust, were springing up everywhere. Green shoots and pulsing flowers quivered bravely under dark-grey skies, their struggling stalks squinting through the cracks on the roads and pavements. Nature was reclaiming what was rightfully hers. The city now sparkled as if brand new; a veritable garden city I spied from atop the rooftops. A far cry from the 'surfeited muck-heap' that Rudyard Kipling had described. But as I walked through the centre; following the receding flood waters, the old Kolkata began to reassert itself again. Traffic lights had broken down, straggling gangs of pavement dwellers and gaunt cattle appeared looking dazed under the sun (as if they'd been hiding underground).

The people in Kolkata are different to the other people I'd seen in India. There is a gaiety about them, as though teetering on the edge of the apocalypse, they want to squeeze as much out of a single day as possible. Living on a day to day basis does that to people. Tomorrow is far too distant to worry about today. But with this helpless poverty comes another feeling which I was beginning to imagine. A feeling I had identified and caught and was now grappling with in my mind: relief. A relief that comes from the realisation that you have reached rock-bottom. That you are scraping the very bottom, nay the very dredges of the world's barrel, and yet here you are - still alive! It ain't so bad after all - and what's more: you can take it. Life is distilled. It is reduced simply to a matter of survival. One is no longer concerned with the accoutrements of civilisation and its lofty ideals such as education, work, promotion, envy, fashion, the rat-race, love and books. All of life, your thoughts and dreams and aspirations are condensed into a little space the size of your fist: your stomach. Life is reduced to your stomach and its satiation. It is then, and only then, that one realises what it really means to be human. And this realisaton, as the Noble Prizewinner Albert Camus once remarked, underlies its comedic Monty Pythonesque absurdity. Kolkata is the earthly incarnation of the Myth of Sisyphus. Albert Camus, if he'd ever visited, would have loved it. Just like I do. So strong is the city's hold on me, so bewitching the curse, that even in my dreams I feel the urge to hug the citizens that prowl the streets. To grab their heads and kiss them full and say in a soothing voice: 'It is ok. It will be fine' - and then they shake their ravaged faces happy in the thought that somebody has noticed. There is comfort to be had in knowing that your suffering has been acknowledged. There is nothing worse than it being swallowed whole by times maw. I have suffered but it makes me feel better that you have seen it. And in a way this writing and fotografing, amongst many things, is a living-epitaph. An evolving organic monument, to the many faces; happy and sad, of the human condition.

______

Chasing The Monsoon

At 5.50pm, announced by deafening thunder-claps, the Monsoon finally rode into Cochin. Like those Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns with the 'man with no name' it blew the trees into a frenzy; it lashed down in a hanging curtain of mist as opaque as the hill fog of Darjeeling. In the coffee shop the waiters rushed to the windows, clapping and yelling and laughing, their customers forgotten amidst the hoo-haa. One waiter, emerging from the kitchen, glimpsed the magniloquent spectacle outside, and slamming his coffee-pot down onto the table, joined in the jubilation crying 'Ho! Ho! Ho!'

Women with bright sari's jiggy in the rain with a look of sublime happiness on their faces. The school children are dispatched home early. They carry the smiles of children who know school will be closed for the remainder of the week. Their smiles reach up to the skies, snatching at the rain, grasping at the wind, pulling it down with invisible ropes; beckoning the billows that skud in from the sea. The sea looks awesome; framed by a dark mass of purple cloud it seethes as if a boiling cauldron. I watch the darkness as it nears; the roar is deafening as the rain pelts the tin roof. I can barely hear my thoughts. I am happy. Back in the coffee shop there's a bustle of mops, buckets, plastic sheeting and old bedspreads. These are tucked into the gaps between the windows to stop them from leaking. It feels as if I am onboard a foundering ship; with the sea leaking in. Water is now lapping my slippers. I throw away my haughty self and help the waiters to seal off the problem areas. A wave of good-natured joviality washes over us as we work together to keep the coffee-shop afloat. Later we enjoy a drink on the house. We are saved.

Currently absorbed in: William Blake

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake (1757–1827)



Poem animation...





Poem explanation...





Contemporary poem rendition...

'Tiger in the night' (Katie Melua)

You are the tiger burning bright
Deep in the forest of my night
You are the one who keeps me strong in this world

You sleep by the silent cooling streams
Down in the darkness of my dreams
All of my life I never knew
You were the dream I'd see come true
You are the tiger burning bright

I was the one who looked so hard I could not see.
Now I could never live without the love you give to me.

I lived like a wild and lonely soul,
Lost in a dream beyond control.
You were the one who brought me home down to earth.

For you are the tiger burning bright
Deep in the forest of my night
All of my life I never knew
You were the dream I'd see come true
You are the tiger burning bright

______

The Pilgrim

'On the edge of the desert; in the gap between sun and iris, I fell through. She caught me between wing-tips and then she said to me (in an almost whisper): 'Go fly'. So I flew. I miss her always'

(A poet)

'Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the world...and I saw, what many men have dreamed they saw'

(Moby-Dick or, The Whale)

'You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No Sir, when a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford'

(Samuel Johnson)

'

When the pilgrim is done with travelling; when he returns home from his voyagings with staff in hand and soles toughened; he realises that he has travelled no great distance at all - merely from himself to himself'

(Wasim Shafi - Filosopher, Fotografer, Professeur, Accountant, Pilgrim)

______

Currently watching...The Black Album (A new play by Haneif Kureishi)

Unguarded Moments

Desert skies...Ethiopia

He calls himself the Vagabond - he does, he does, he does

This two legged original of the sands - you see, you see, you see

His foot-prints heavy on the grains - they walk, they walk, they walk

Zephyrs erase like bedouin feints - the prints, the prints, the prints

They say he has no home to go - they do, they do, they do

They say he tramps the world for love - ti's true, ti's true, ti's true

_______

Coming soon...The odd journals of a Naturalist on earth

Currently watching...

Currently wearing...

Clothes were invented to keep the elements at bay. To keep our insides protected from the outsides. Function over Form. Nowadays things are in reverse order. Clothes advertise. They are a billboard sign that says: 'This Is Who I Am'. Sometimes clothes scream. But it is better if they whisper. Style is important. Through the medium of fashion you advertise who you are - what you're about, what's going in that head of yours (if anything is going in that head of yours), the sort of women you go for (or men), what you're like in bed (an insatiable tiger Grrrrrhhh! or a pussy cat Meeeoooow!). Clothes can also reveal what you do for a living - are you a rockstar, artiste, musician, professuer, evolutionary biologist, or (god forbid) an accountant. Clothes also speak how much money you make, the sort of friends you hang out with, if you have a girlfriend, whether you're a member of the 'Electricity Pylon of the Month Fan Club'. The cut of your jacket and the shoes you wear say more about you then your CV.

The most important thing when it comes to clothes is the 'fit'. If the clothes you wear look as if they were tailored to your particular and unique body proportions, if they look as if they will fit you and only you in the whole wide world, then you will be in sartorial heaven. For example there is nothing like a blazer that fits perfectly. It's length, when arms are dangling on the side, should not go beyond the middle knuckle of your thumb. It should give you a shape and not make you look like a homogeneous cylinder. It can be combined with a white shirt and trousers for a smart look, or with jeans and a printed t-shirt, as casual attire. There is fun to be had in fashion. It's a kind of pretend and play. A play with who you are. A play with who you wanna be.

Thereare365daysperyear.com

Youcanbewhoyouwanttobe.com

Whoshallibetoday.com

(above items from 'AllSaints' clothing)

_____

Lecture to go to / brain cells to exercise / Jurassic park to roam

(Shhh!)...A secret: some of the best stuff to do in London...is totally free! Oh yes. It cost nothing. Not a squid. Not a penny. Not a cheese cracker. Not even a potatoe. Nothingo. Zilch. ££Nil. Consider the above seminar at Imperial College for example: Free! And it's on Dinosaurs. Everybody loves Dinosaurs. And there's plenty more like it where it came from...Lectures on 'cloaking devices', the latest on Brazillian 'deforestation', 'bacterial sex dynamics' and how early earth meteorite bombardment may have contributed to making earth habitable to life. And there's tea and biscuits too. 'Refreshments' they call it. To refresh your mind after a hard hours concentration. You can take notes and ask pertinent questions and pretend you're back at university as an undergraduate - dreaming of changing the world - again.

Look if you really want to impress that lovely girlfriend of yours, you know show her how much you care and what a totally radical dude you are, what better way then to take her, for example, to the 'Royal College of Mines Annual Keynote Lecture on Explosive Hydrogen Sulphide Gaseous Pond Emissions' - It'll be a blast. She'll love you to the ends of the earth (literally). If she has a tantrum and starts throwing a mighty stink, you can blame the Hydrogen Sulphide...

What I watched today...at my local 'Rio' cinema in Hackney

Almost every film Werner Herzog makes is savage and incisive. Encounters at the End of the World is no different. Far-out and unforgettable, it is set at McMurdo Station, a settlement in Antarctica populated by professional dreamers masquerading as scientists, one of whom is a woman whose party trick is to have herself zipped up in a luggage bag...

Like much of Herzog's previous work, this film is about crazies, freak-shows and restless pioneers in search of new horizons who are tempted to try and tame wild incorrigible nature. There is much to like here: like the scene where he asks a shy but brilliant penguin expert whether, in his twenty year career of studying them, he has ever encountered insanity amongst penguins! There is a brief moment when the expert pauses to think : then follows a shot of a lone penguin separating and wandering off from the flock and heading, on its own, towards the mountains. Why? Who knows? But one thing is certain: it will die. It is these wanderers, be they penguin or human, that Herzog is attracted to.

He prefers to see Antarctica as an endless void, an inhuman space. He offers image after image whose beauty is so strange as to seem extra-terrestrial. Composer Henry Kaiser creates a sound design whose eeriness is merely amplified by the sound of underwater seals and Herzog's own idiosyncratic direction. Fabulously weird and wonderful! Essential viewing.