A new film called Antarctica: A Year On Ice chronicles a full year at the McMurdo Sound research station. It's a film with moments of great beauty and sometimes more than that.
From the look of Anthony Powell's documentary Antarctica: A Year On Ice, traveling to Antarctica is like being wrapped in a big chrysalis, like a worm ready to change into a moth that then emerges into its new and unexpected state. People heading to the research base at McMurdo Sound, fly from Christchurch, New Zealand in a big cargo plane stretched out on something like beds, burrowed into huge red hooded parkas with their faces covered. Hours later, they enter into a world that's mostly white, domed by the immense blue sky.
The base at McMurdo Sound is not beautiful. It's an artless pile of pre-fab windowless buildings and huge construction machines in a landscape of chewed up ice and dirt roads, like a mountain town in mud season. But not far away, there's literally awesome untouched wilderness – places no human beings have set foot on. Director Anthony Powell narrates his film and says that to understand the Antarctic, one must spend a full year there, and he does.
Some of what Powell shows looks familiar. The expanses are big – very, very big. It's of course cold; the wind blows; the people tend toward the eccentric. You may not expect the total silence in the wilderness, magnified by the expanse of the open natural spaces.
The film manages to show the look of isolation. The summer population is about 5000; in winter about 700. When the summer folk line up for the plane ride back to New Zealand, you can see that the light has begun to change; the sun is showing itself less and less each day. People wear the same red they wore on the way down, as if they've been put back in their packages for shipment and storage. A sense of abandonment grows as the line of departees snakes toward the plane. It feels like the place is emptying, and the faces of those wintering over wear looks of heavy concern – these people know they have a tough time ahead of them.
Director Anthony Powell comes to this film primarily as a still photographer. He's a clunky narrator; he's not good at putting together sequences of moving images, and he's far too fond of extended time-lapse sections to condense changes over time. Powell's inexperience also shows in interviews that don't cut deep. If you've seen Werner Herzog's film about the Antarctic, Encounters at the End of the World, you wonder why this picture doesn't enter the thrilling world under the ice. It makes the film seem a bit timid.
Yet Powell has a very good photographic eye. The eerie confrontation between white land and blue sky in the Antarctic twilight shivers your bones. You can't tell where Earth ends and heaven begins. It's like being inside a perfect egg, contained but at the same time infinite. The emptiness draws you in deeper and deeper, until it feels dangerous, as if just by looking you might lose yourself in this uncanny space.
The best parts of Antarctica: a Year on Ice come in the winter sequences. The wind hits over 200 miles an hour and any space with a crack to the outside becomes packed with ice. If the weather is dangerous enough, going outside is forbidden. Seals sometimes lose their way and freeze to death, and because the human beings are not allowed to interfere with nature, they're not allowed to help. The moon skitters across the horizon. The people fear the coming months of darkness, and when full darkness comes, they get strange, and they know it. A condition called T-3 sets in; people grow confused about time; one puts his shoes on the wrong feet.
Then, when the season changes and the plane brings in new people, life becomes a riot of color; the winter people gorge on fresh fruit, and the newcomers look like Martian invaders.
