Encounters At the End of the World, the new Werner Herzog documentary film about the community of American scientists in Antarctica, is coming to Pittsburgh. Roger Ebert gives the film four stars, saying:

It is a poem of oddness and beauty. Herzog is like no other filmmaker, and to return to him is to be welcomed into a world vastly larger and more peculiar than the one around us.

Here, the film is showing alongside, but sadly not a part of, “Life on Mars: New Perspectives”, a series of films every Sunday during August co-sponsored by the Carnegie Museum of Art. The series of movies “explores similar themes of alienation, dystopia, and new ways of seeing the world,” themes begging to be explored in a film covering the world’s largest desert. And though Encounters is ostensibly about the people living in that cold world, it is ultimately about the cold world itself.

Over the course of Herzog’s journey, nature-in-the wild shares equal time with human nature. His encounters are alternately surreal, absurd, profound and sometimes, all of the above.

Hopefully, Herzog takes us through not only the beauty of Antarctica, but also the unflinching desolation lying just below a thin, cracking layer of ice, or in the midst of a blinding snowstorm. That thick mix, hardly separated from one moment to the next, is where Antarctica’s real wonder comes from.

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