The Anthony Powell who made this documentary is not one of the famous artists by that name, not the great costume designer nor the author of the classic novels "Dance to the Music of Time". He's just another member of this generation's "me generation" followup, one of the millions of believers that the most trivial "human" story is intrinsically interesting. This pointless feature is not, it's just dull footage.
As a kid living in Cleveland I enjoyed watching our local TV series Jim Doney's "Adventure Road", in which guests would narrate silent films they shot on world travels, just like the travelogue documentaries that still played as movies in film houses of the day. They provided an eye on the outside world, uneventful slices of life or distant places, pointless but handy time-killers.
Powell tells us this took him 10 years to make and he fails to bring to the project an offbeat or even original point-of-view (what our greatest contemporary documentarist Werner Herzog always tries to do), just giving a banal slice of life of folks who choose to live out the long, dark winter of living on the Antarctic continent. No sense of adventure or even danger/dramatics intrudes on the calm, tedious progression of scenes. In common with fiction cinema there is a story credit, but no actual story.
I have always felt that documentaries need to be taken off their pedestal and judged by the same (or at least roughly analogous) parameters as fiction features, since the illusion and pretense of objectivity is a myth. Whether fact or fiction the filmmaker puts his or her personal stamp on what the feature is trying to say, and most docs are scripted, either beforehand or in post-production.
In the wake of the revolutionary Godfrey Reggio films like "Koyaanisqatsi", a philosophical bent has permeated many docs, but this one is frankly stupid - the final line during the film proper is by a young misogynist who compares the "square world" (that means us, in the audience) to cattle -not the Hitchcockian view of those necessary evils, his actors, but rather as the guy voices over "just moving from place to place". At this point, Powell ends the show not with a striking vista of the Antarctic continent's steely beauty, but rather another of many cornball time-lapse shots of a frenetic metropolis at night, the sort of image that typifies "Koyaanisqatsi". Yes, we poor humans are in a rut, scurrying around in a pointless existence. No more pointless than the self-shut-ins who revel in living out the endless night of Antarctic winter in lonely fashion, even complaining (as we see in the film underlined) when new folk arrive sporting dreaded sun tans yet, to invade their privacy and solitude.
With such dull stuff to watch my mind wandered and I thought of a movie (fiction for now but someday documentary in nature) about life in an expatriate Earth colony on Mars or perhaps a moon of Jupiter, as presented by some earnest fellow like Powell. If it was a sci-fi entertainment there would be drama and an inevitable existential crisis threatening the colony with extinction, or even bug-eyed monsters attacking. But in "Antartica" nothing happens, and because it is cloaked in the form of a documentary it passes the low-low bar as quasi- entertainment or educational content. Even the most minimalist of fiction directors (think of Lonergan and the stupid "award-winning" Manchester by the Sea) would have trouble getting away with that.
As a kid living in Cleveland I enjoyed watching our local TV series Jim Doney's "Adventure Road", in which guests would narrate silent films they shot on world travels, just like the travelogue documentaries that still played as movies in film houses of the day. They provided an eye on the outside world, uneventful slices of life or distant places, pointless but handy time-killers.
Powell tells us this took him 10 years to make and he fails to bring to the project an offbeat or even original point-of-view (what our greatest contemporary documentarist Werner Herzog always tries to do), just giving a banal slice of life of folks who choose to live out the long, dark winter of living on the Antarctic continent. No sense of adventure or even danger/dramatics intrudes on the calm, tedious progression of scenes. In common with fiction cinema there is a story credit, but no actual story.
I have always felt that documentaries need to be taken off their pedestal and judged by the same (or at least roughly analogous) parameters as fiction features, since the illusion and pretense of objectivity is a myth. Whether fact or fiction the filmmaker puts his or her personal stamp on what the feature is trying to say, and most docs are scripted, either beforehand or in post-production.
In the wake of the revolutionary Godfrey Reggio films like "Koyaanisqatsi", a philosophical bent has permeated many docs, but this one is frankly stupid - the final line during the film proper is by a young misogynist who compares the "square world" (that means us, in the audience) to cattle -not the Hitchcockian view of those necessary evils, his actors, but rather as the guy voices over "just moving from place to place". At this point, Powell ends the show not with a striking vista of the Antarctic continent's steely beauty, but rather another of many cornball time-lapse shots of a frenetic metropolis at night, the sort of image that typifies "Koyaanisqatsi". Yes, we poor humans are in a rut, scurrying around in a pointless existence. No more pointless than the self-shut-ins who revel in living out the endless night of Antarctic winter in lonely fashion, even complaining (as we see in the film underlined) when new folk arrive sporting dreaded sun tans yet, to invade their privacy and solitude.
With such dull stuff to watch my mind wandered and I thought of a movie (fiction for now but someday documentary in nature) about life in an expatriate Earth colony on Mars or perhaps a moon of Jupiter, as presented by some earnest fellow like Powell. If it was a sci-fi entertainment there would be drama and an inevitable existential crisis threatening the colony with extinction, or even bug-eyed monsters attacking. But in "Antartica" nothing happens, and because it is cloaked in the form of a documentary it passes the low-low bar as quasi- entertainment or educational content. Even the most minimalist of fiction directors (think of Lonergan and the stupid "award-winning" Manchester by the Sea) would have trouble getting away with that.