UK 140m Dir: Herbert Ponting
Documentary
In the early 1910s a British expedition team led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott attempted to be the first people to travel to the South Pole, racing against a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen. Though only a small team attempted to reach the pole a sizeable group of men sailed aboard the Terra Nova from New Zealand to the mission's base camp on Ross Island. Among them was Herbert Ponting, a skilled photographer tasked with documenting the mission for use in a lecture series that would help to recoup some of the costs. Ponting brought a video camera with him making him the first known person to film Antarctica.
Most of the film is sees Ponting based at Ross Island going around the area filming the remarkable sights of the Antarctic. Plenty of people have since been able to film on the frozen continent yet the images captured in this film are still so magical and other-worldly. We see a range of extraordinary icebergs and Ponting spends time filming the local fauna from penguins and auks to seals and killer whales. It's clear that Ponting was hugely skilled because every shot in the film is stunning. Just spending time living in such low temperatures must have been challenging but Ponting managed to shoot beautiful imagery with a pretty basic camera and often put himself at great personal risk in order to get the best shots.
From a modern perspective there's quite a few things which are unpalatable. There's a brief but very unpleasant bit of racism and endless moments of what we'd probably now consider animal cruelty, plus a bit of unethical filming of wildlife for good measure. It's very much a snapshot of history, even in the way that the British empire is mentioned constantly, and though there are things that don't sit right with me as a modern viewer it's understandable in context.
Throughout the film we're shown the equipment and animals that were part of the expedition and the final half an hour details Scott's journey. Ponting remained at Ross Island so there's no actual footage after Scott's waves farewell to head off but scenes from base camp are intercut with intertitles which tells the story and simple animation showing where the progress of the team. The intertitles, in this section and indeed the whole film, are superb because they are not written by some later documentarian but by Ponting himself who was actually there. They therefore feel far more personal and involved than I've seen before.
The expedition famously ended tragically with Scott and his team perishing when caught in a storm only eleven miles away from their next supply base. I knew the basics of the story, that Amundsen had won and that Scott arrived second and didn't make it home and I had the attitude that Scott and the team were a bit useless, underprepared and inexperienced. This view was totally wrong and though they perhaps didn't quite have the knowledge that Amundsen had this film makes it clear that they were extremely prepared and in reality it was just pure bad luck that led to their deaths. The intertitles are superb at describing the moment Oates said he would be gone for some time and use extracts from Scott's journal to describe the final days of his life. By the end of the film my attitude had completely changed and I left with a huge respect for Scott and the men who went through unimaginable things in the quest for exploration.
I just thought this whole piece was superb. Ponting managed to film beautiful sights of Antarctica and tell the remarkable story of Scott's expedition in a hugely profound way.
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