90° South

This compelling footage from the Antarctic explorations of the British in 1911 is a must see if: You are a fan of early documentaries. Period. Just watch it, you won't be disappointed.

You love penguins... the footage of the Adelie penguins had me rolling on the floor. There are scenes when the dauntless explorers try to 'herd' the penguins, with absolutely hilarious results.

You love beauty ... when the documentarian describes and shows the beauty and starkness of the ice mountains, Mt. Erebus, and icebergs, you really see it, and the footage is, even in black and white, simply gorgeous.

You like Irish step dancing or Russian folk dancing. There's about 2 minutes of footage that will amaze you. (The crew entertaining themselves on the voyage). I have a horrible urge to grab that footage and put it on youtube with a really inappropriate soundtrack. Like rap, or C&W or Bollywood.

You are a fan of polar or any kind of extreme exploration.

You wish to get some notion of just how hard the British had it on the return trek from the pole. Classic, and tragic, until you realize that if Scott hadn't been such a self-righteous wackdoodle they might have all survived.

You like seals. The mommy and baby seal footage is really cute, and shows something of seal behavior which I hadn't known before.

You just love jingoistic nonsense about how great the Brits are. Hate to break it to ya folks, but Amundsen got there first! Anyway, I watched this while halfway through "The Last Place on Earth", the 1985 BBC mini-series, and it really added to my understanding of the expedition.

Parts of this documentary are extremely offensive to modern tastes. The expedition cat was black, and so gets named the N word. Try to take it in context; in a hundred years a lot of the crap we do currently is going to look mighty strange - and offensive - to our descendants.

The "first incarnation" of this film did not appear in 1933, it appeared in 1924 and was entitled The Great White Silence,a very wonderful. This was simply a "sound" remake with a commentary added and new music, neither of which frankly greatly improve the film. There is apparently one shot and one shot only that does not appear in the original (a wall being buttressed) but Ponting did make additional use of his collection of "stills". This includes, according to the BFI a shot of the polar party when they stopped for a day to collect rock samples at the head of the Beardmore Glacier. "This was significant not only because they were a day's march from the food depot when they died, but also because the rocks and fossils that they collected have, ironically, been their most enduring scientific legacy, and have contributed to our understanding of plate tectonics" (Bryony Dixon for BFI).

Considering the conditions which Herbert Ponting carried out all his photography work in the Antarctic and that all his plates had to be transported home, this film is worthy of the highest accolades for the fact that it exists at all.

The film is about Scott's actual journey, which in a way is a shame because Ponting, although not in the party who ventured South, took infinitely more film and photographs than were shown.

The documentary failed to mention that the party who set out to store replies for the return journey ("One Ton Base") created the store 11 miles short of the the planned location due to bad weather. Scott's return party perished 11 miles short of the the store.

Although now superceded as the 'definitive' version of Herbert Ponting's silent record of the Scott expedition by the restoration of his original 'The Great White Silence' of 1924, this sound reissue works well on its own terms as a straight runthrough of that famous calamity; especially as it is personally narrated on the soundtrack by Ponting himself, who actually appears at the start rather stiffly addressing us in evening dress (confirming that Clive Morton managed a reasonable likeness of him in 'Scott of the Antarctic' fifteen years later).

I can imagine that this film would have been quite remarkable in 1933 when the first incarnation appeared. It still serves as a fantastic tale of humanities quest for the unknown and his perseverance in the face of the worst conditions that the earth can produce. Yet, as a viewer of the film in the 21st century, I found the film to be somewhat dull. The development of the characters, even the stalwart Captain, are not very well explained. The amount of drive and obsession that the people that would be willing to take such a journey is simply explained away as British Nationalism,and to a calloused modern viewer such as myself, this simply was not sufficient explanation. Yet, as a historical document, this film is well worth the hour and ten minutes of viewing time, and some of the early footage of the Antartic is truly amazing.