South
In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton, veteran of two previous expeditions to the Antarctic, set out on a third–an ill-fated trip that would become a famous exemplar of heroism. Amundsen had reached the south pole in 1911, so Shackleton undertook “the first crossing of the Antarctic continent, from sea to sea via the Pole,” as he wrote in his prospectus for the trip. He left Britain on the Endurance, a ship “especially constructed for Polar work,” which was supposed to bring him to the continent’s coast; another ship was to meet his party on the other side. One of his 28 crew members was photographer and filmmaker Frank Hurley, a young Australian who’d already made a film of an Antarctic expedition and who came equipped with still and movie cameras. Indeed, funds were raised for the expedition on the promise of revenues from the film, making Shackleton’s expedition an early example of the kind of media-driven outing so common today.
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In 1919 Shackleton showed Hurley’s completed film–which included stills from the glass negatives he’d rescued–in fund-raising lectures in London, narrating it himself to half-full houses; 75 years later the British Film Institute restored it, making judgments based on different surviving versions and approximating the original hand-tinting in the new prints. Six years later, the Film Center is giving the restoration its local premiere, beginning Friday and continuing through Thursday, January 27.
Hurley expressed his awe through the simplest of cinematic means. On several occasions he uses multiple pans to try to encompass a scene, as in an image of the glacier on South Georgia that Shackleton and two others crossed on foot, seeking help. Presumably his tripod allowed only such lateral or vertical movement, but the shots look almost like choreographed attempts to depict a scene too awesome to be easily encompassed. Earlier, when the icebound Endurance had begun to list–a sign of its coming destruction–Hurley pans across and up it, a sequence of similar images in which he seems to be gazing incredulously at the spectacle of the ship’s ruin. To be sure, Hurley’s film is solidly within the tradition of early travel films (and of the 19th-century paintings, photographs, and panoramas that preceded them), offering grand presentations of remote corners of the globe. But even the color tinting, intended in other silent films to distinguish night from day or to enhance the emotions of a scene, is less an attempt to provide meaning here than a way of adding visual pleasure to an otherwise monotonous landscape of white.
This latter hypothesis might also explain the film’s many excisions, which border on misrepresentation. Shackleton’s book makes it clear that the crew’s time on the ice was one of grave difficulty. Splitting floes posed a constant danger, and killer whales surfaced all around them. At one point a floe split directly under a man’s tent, and Shackleton, spotting him still in his sleeping bag in the water, managed to lift him out just before the ice closed up again. They came to dread warm weather because this often meant sinking waist-deep in slush. Usually there was no sun, so it was nearly impossible to get one’s clothes or sleeping bag dry–Shackleton describes walking about for days in wet socks and boots. Since each wore a single set of clothes for months, many developed severe skin rashes. Others were frostbitten, and the crew’s youngest member eventually lost toes. A number had what we would now call nervous breakdowns, whether from psychological or physical causes or both, and became near invalids. Almost none of this is in the film.
The print of South that I saw in preview had no sound track, but Neil Brand’s piano score has been added to video copies of the film, and the Film Center will play it along with their gorgeous print. Unfortunately I found this track rather irritating when I watched the video: by smoothing over discontinuities, it lessened the images’ power. The worst moments come in the scenes on South Georgia, when the music often imitates the animals’ movements in a cloyingly cliched manner. But even with the music the film remains a fascinating and seductive paean to nature’s splendors. It’s also a glorification of human mastery over them, and in that sense, perhaps, the music is appropriate, making animals seem to dance to human tunes.
