South

Until this showed up on TCM's recent documentary series I had no idea that this film existed. It is a truly remarkable document of Shackleton's expedition to the South Pole in 1914 that turned into a two year adventure on ice.

Save for some cute animal footage at the end that seems designed to pad the running time, this is a perfect film.

Using some originally shot footage from the expedition that started just as Europe went to war in 1914, this tells a fascinating story of human endeavour in the face of just about everything hostile that nature has in it's armoury. We see elements of their preparation, their voyage and of the treacherousness of their new environment as their ship struggles to make headway through the ever thickening ice - before ultimately ending up as glorified kindling! Unfortunately, though not unsurprisingly, there are no images as the majority of the crew are left on Elephant Island whilst Sir Ernest Shackleton and his small crew embark on an 800 mile journey to "neighbouring" South Georgia in an open boat to try and summon help from the whaling station there. The photography is great - we see many creatures from the Antarctic for the first time; have some fun with the penguins and the seals - and the weather, the adverse weather conditions just have you reaching for a duvet at each turn. This is a great story of endurance that demonstrates just what could be done with grit and determination, and without the aid of modern technology - and if you can see it on a bigger screen, then the whole scale of their adventure through this perilous terrain makes this quite a compelling watch.

This is a remarkable film, just in that Frank Hurley was there--surviving the harsh conditions and circumstances like the rest of Sir Ernest Shackleton's crew. Moreover, he didn't interfere, or invent a story, in the way other pioneer documentary filmmakers did, as with "In the Land of the Head Hunters" (1914), Flaherty's "Nanook of the North" (1922) or the films by Cooper and Schoedsack. He had an interesting and amazing story and only needed to record it. Hurley tells the adventure of Schackleton's Antarctic expedition largely by intertitles, but there is some interesting photography, nonetheless.

Film-making isn't a priority when lives are in peril, so the title cards, in addition to still photographs and some drawings help to tell the entire story. Most of the moving pictures are of the exotic animals they encountered and the many dogs they took with them to Antarctica. There's also the slow demise of their ship, Endurance. Two of the images that stood out to me, however, were the shadows of crosses upon the ice when the ship was battering through it and the shot of the ship charging full stern ahead, approaching the camera head on, a la the Lumière brothers' "Arrivée d'un train" (1895). Mostly, the motion pictures help illustrate a story told by intertitles, but it's quite a story. And, like its subjects, the film remarkably survived.

I have written often about how the rediscovery of films of the silent era has allowed us to re-tell the history of cinema, in a way that is generally much less US-centric and invariably less simplistic, but I have paid relatively little attention to documentary.

This is a grievous omission because documentary, far from being a peripheral part of cinema, is one of the real motors that has driven it, particularly in encouraging cinematographic experimentation and in enriching the visual vocabulary on which film-makers could draw.

Here too we are learning much, both in understanding how documentary like photoplays developed quite naturally out of the early "views" as the length of the films increased and in appreciating that documentary did not begin - or anything like it - with Nanook of the North.

Full-length films that reconstructed historical events (always docufictions of a kind) started at the same time as the epics and other full-length fictions in 1911 (the Russian Siege of Sevastopol and the Serbian biopic Karadjurdje). In the US The Truth about the Pole (not on IMDb) was a short dramatic reconstruction intended to vindicate the claims of Frederick Cooke but, with slides and lectures, ran, according to the adverts, anywhere between 45 minutes and two hours "as desired".

1912 (the year of the sinking of the Titanic) saw Pick's reconstruction Im Nacht und Eis (medium-length) and the same year brought the Italian film Viaggio in Congo (again medium-length), an account of a trip through the Belgian Congo, while the linked genres of biographical and historical reconstruction continued with the Romanian film, Independent Romania and the US film The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino (medium length).

In 1913 there is the German biopic Richard Wagner and Ince's lost reconstruction of The Battle of Gettysburg (US), the Russian medium-length Tercentenary of the Romanov Dynasty's Accession and the Russian full-length documentary Lives of the Jews in Palestine. While Universal's Traffic in Souls is very decidedly fiction, the same year's The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (originally longer than the surviving 30 minutes) was rather more in the nature of a docufiction.

1914 brought the US/Canadian film In the Land of the Head-Humters and the US historical reconstruction Ireland a Nation (both medium length) and 1915 the Italian biopic Silvio Pellico (medium length), the Russian historico-political Lilya Belgii (medium length) and a full-length biopic of Ivan he Great as well as the US historico-political All for Ireland. In 1916 there was the British war documentary, The Battle of the Somme while in the US Benjamin Brodsky released his feature-length travelogue, A Trip Through China.

In 1917 Dutch documentarist Willy Mullens produces the medium-length Holland Neutraal and the Germans produced their own film of The Battle of the Somme. There was the Mexican historical reconstruction Tepeyec and the Russian medium length Delo Beilisa (the Russian "Dreyfus Affair") and more British war films (The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks and German Retreat and the Battle of Arras). In 1918 the Dutch produced a compilation of footage about the East Indes (Onze Oost) while the Germans shoot a medium-length film about their war hero Von Richthofen. Beethoven was the subject of a (heavily fictionslised) Austrian biopic while the US produces its war documentary, America Goes Over as well as the fictional propaganda film Hearts of the World and Brodsky produced his second feature-length travelogue, Beautiful Japan.

It is true that I have mixed documentary with historical and biographical dramas (to give a clearer picture of how these genres develop together) and that I have included medium-length films (c. 32-45 minutes) along with "full-length" films (the distinction between them seems to me rather spurious) but what is clear is that documentary film-making (even if the word did not yet exist) was making strides in absolute parallel to its fictional counterparts several years before Flaherty's Nanook.

And this film, beautifully shot and skilfully narrated, is evidence of just how good those documentaries could be. I agree with the reviewer who sees it as in some ways the antithesis of Flaherty's Nanook in its faithful recording of events as they happen and this would remain an important distinction (and often point of contention) between the British documentary school as it developed (associated with the Scot John Grierson) and its US counterpart (which tended to follow Flaherty) and is, for the matter, at the heart of all debates about the nature of documentary ever since.

The late twenties/early thirties was really the golden age both of fictional and documentary films and saw some extraordinary forms of convergence between the two. Interesting, for instance, to compare this film not only with later documentaries like The Great White Silence (1924) but also with fictions like Der Ruf des Nordens (1929) and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933).

Another major element in this film is Hurley's awareness of the relationship between naturalistic photography and abstract design (the ghost ship at night and the patterns of frost, for instance) which also foreshadows developments in the late twenties in the work of Walter Ruttmann or Joris Ivens and for that matter all the many documentary film/abstract art cross-overs that have succeeded and that have proved to be the mainstay quite as much of the advertising industry as of so-called experimental cinema. It is also this aspect of the film no doubt that inspired the curious 1993 fantasy by Dutch "found footage" specialist Peter Delpeut, The Forbidden Quest, dedicated to Hurley and making use primarily of footage from this wonderful film.

A brief word, finally, in defence of Cooper and Schoedsack. While it is true that once they got to see the work of Flaherty, they were immediately corrupted by it and Chang is a deplorable piece of fakery but their very first documentary Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925) is a superbly genuine piece of work.

This film has recently been shown with the title "SOUTH Sir Ernest Shackleton's glorious epic of the Antarctic". Considering what cinematographer Frank Hurley had to work with as equipment and the hardships under which he was working, it really is an amazing film. Think, too, that probably most of his footage and still photographs had to be abandoned as the 28 men fought just to stay alive after their ship "Endurance" was crushed by the ice and sank. Shackleton hoped to land on the coast of Antarctica and cross the continent using dog sleds, then be picked up on the other coast by his ship. Alas, the winter of 1914-1915 turned out to be one of worst in the known history of the frozen continent to that time, and their ship was ice bound and destroyed before they ever reached the shore south of Elephant Island and the farther north island of South Georgia. What we are shown here is mostly the earlier part of the saga before the conditions grew really bad. The latter part is covered mostly by still pics and some artists drawings, pieced out by movies of bird and seal life around South Georgia. This last may prove tedious for some, but the rest is very interesting. For a really detailed account of Shackleton's adventure consult ENDURANCE: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing (McGraw-Hill, 1959) which I imagine many libraries will have.