Antarctica: A Year on Ice

This film by Anthony Powell shows us what it is like to spend a year in Anarctica. The winters are killer! The temperature goes to -40 degrees and winds blow at 100 mph. The sun disappears for 4 months at McMurdo Station. This film is not about scientists. It is about the people who work at the base and keep it functional. We get inside their heads. There are folks who fell in love with the place and can't seem to get enough of it. There are others who wonder if they did the right thing by coming here. I actually found myself wanting to spend some time in Anarctica even while knowing it will never happen. The stars of the southern sky are compelling and, of course, everybody loves penguins!

Watching Antarctica: A Year on Ice, you'll run out of superlatives to describe the experience. Then you'll start using them all again, in combination, and you'll still be unable to adequately describe what you've seen.

This masterpiece of a film was made by Anthony Powell, a Satellite Communications Technician working out of McMurdo Base, the United States station in Antarctica. It's obvious that the film was born of a deep passion for the place, which he and his wife Christine have returned to, whenever possible, year after year.

How do you share your thoughts about a place which defies description - a place vital to our planet, but which the vast majority will never see? Powell began by taking photographs, recording video, documenting life on the base, the idiosyncrasies of those who work there, and the beauty of the landscape. Over the years, whenever not working on the communications equipment he is responsible for, he's been working on techniques for gathering images in unusual and hostile conditions, often refining or even creating his own gear in order to capture the experience of living in Antarctica for a year.

The result is brilliant; by turns funny, terrifying and heartbreaking - but always awe-inspiring. It's not about the cinematography, (although the photography is frequently top-notch, and some of the time-lapse sequences are stunning,) and other than a few matter-of-fact mentions, nor does Powell delve into political or environmental debate. His purpose here is showing the audience what Antarctica is LIKE: how it feels to work there, what it really looks like, what happens there. His success in this endeavour is as superlative as the film.

See Antartctica: A Year on Ice in the cinema - on the biggest screen you can - and then just wonder at it.

Documentaries are definitely not for everyone. It takes a certain patience, curiosity and contemplation to watch the world living its ordinary life, just like it's the case with soap operas or reality shows that try to imitate the real life in vitro. And i consider myself lucky to be able to enjoy the documentaries, since it really is a unique genre that offers some unique experience to a viewer.

Honestly, i didn't expect too much from this film. In my experience with nature documentaries, one has to be both really big and really professional to shoot a truly decent documentary, that is why i absolutely adore the BBC films with David Attenborough, moderately accept the Discovery and National Geographic products and am outright sceptical about everything else. And this movie had that amateur indie feeling that in 99 cases out of 100 means that the outcome is bound to be mediocre.

To my big (and pleasant) surprise, this was that very "1 out of 100" exception. Yes, the movie is basically made by a single man, a time lapse photography enthusiast who spent several years working on a polar base in Antarctica. But the fact that we are being introduced to that vast and secluded icy world by someone who's not a stranger to it himself makes it a different experience entirely. Anthony "Antz" Powell doesn't simply look for some "fancy stuff" to film and later present to us. He actually lives through all these moments, and we are allowed to witness them, which makes this film a rather intimate experience.

It may sound silly, but another great thing about this movie is that it's not just about Antarctica. Though it does share with us the amazing beauty of its pristine nature, it doesn't sell Antarctica as the main and only star. After all, this huge frozen world can be equally beautiful and depressing. Instead, we look at this continent and the life that managed to bind itself to it through the eyes of the fellow workers, people who spent months, or even years, there doing their job and whose impression of Antarctica and the way humans interact with it is the most honest and true.

It's probably not very groundbreaking, but illustrating life in Antarctica with simple people's lives and experiences makes this movie really heartfelt. It is a documentaty, but you invest yourself emotionally into it, you care about the people shown in it, follow their stories, connect to their problems, feelings and dreams. This removes restraints between you and the objects shown in the movie, making you more than just an impassive spectator, almost like a friend to those people. You do not simply consume facts or imagery, as the so-so documentaries offer you to do, you actually live through them.

Maybe i'm fooling myself, but 'Antarctica: A Year on Ice' gave me a bit of a feeling of actually spending a year there. And what it is if not a sign that the film did its job well?

A documentary made through the lenses of Anthony Powell, photographer who spent many years in Antarctica lead you to the incredible journey to the world we really don't know much. The author describe just a portion of this amazing place over one year of time, combining short interviews, wonderful time lapse photography and just a glimpses of ordinary life of the small population that works on Antarctica. The movie opened many fascinating phenomena, from the mighty storms and winds, cold, 4 months in constant daylight and than darkness and the ways people adapts to those conditions, (T3 Syndrome, for example) which can really be a separate topics for more than one documentary.

Although the movie is not perfect, by my opinion, as it lack some inside to the geography of the place and at least some facts about the conditions there, it basically opened many more questions form me. This movie and its amazing topic with conditions where it was filmed basically don't give you the space to moan about imperfection that surely exists. Instead, it make you wondering about all what is seen, with a feeling that you would like to see much more.

Powell's time-lapse cinematography, which seems to take up about half the running time, is astonishing - eerie, hypnotic and beautiful. This is a world very few will ever know firsthand - or want to - but Powell certainly reveals its beauties. The film is meant to be a chronicle, and there is no narrative per se. The last third of the film drags a bit here and there and some of the interviews get a tad repetitive. Those who like this will find Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World" an interesting contrast. Werner Herzog's focus is less on the place but the filmmaker's fascination with the people who go Antartica and their reasons for wanting to be there.