Shackleton Expedition 1914-17

«Following the model of Ponting's film [on Englishman Robert Scott's 1910-1913 expedition], another image professional, Frank Hurley, shot the footage of Irishman Shackleton's second Antarctic expedition that set off in the ship Endurance in August 1914 and was imprisoned in the ice in the Weddel Sea in October 1915. Yet another ill-fated expedition, miraculously saved by the determination and courage of its commander. The film that has survived, entitled Shackleton expedition 1914-17, lasting about 33', is an incomplete copy of the film South: Sir Ernest Shackleton's glorious epic of the Antarctic, presented in 1919, two years after the expedition's return.

James Frank Hurley (Sidney 1890-1962) had already participated as a photographic and film reporter in Douglas Mawson's Australian Antarctic expedition, which left Sidney in 1911 in the brig Aurora; he collected his exceptional experience (with two other men he travelled 350 miles to locate the magnetic pole) in the photographic book Home of the Blizzard. Shackleton hired him under pressure from a syndicate that had promised him $20,000 if he would entrust the Mawson expedition reporters with the film documentation of his feat. Here, too, the document becomes narrative, with a further expressive articulation in comparison to Ponting's film that is evident from Hurley's very first shots: the focus on the portrait. Immediately after the departure of the ship Endurance, the camera lingers on the large pack of sled dogs on board, tied up in a row of wooden kennels, fed, groomed, brushed and caressed by the men of the expedition, and the intensity of this relationship of necessity that turns into a relationship of love is witnessed with the close-up shot of the man with the dog. On the other hand, the close-up of Shackleton concentrating on controlling the course belongs to the cinematographic representation of the role of the commander: vigilant and responsible leader of a dangerous adventure, just as the austere figure of the boatswain at the helm seals the iconographic tradition of the sea tale. As far as the documentation of navigation is concerned, Hurley resorts to the filming stratagem invented by Ponting to film the slow advance of the ship in the icy sea, and in fact in the film we see the same cameraman filmed from above as he leans over the bow to film. The search for photographic quality is mainly concentrated on the panoramas of icebergs and ice mountains, while Hurley's dramatic sensibility emerges from the moment when the ship is frozen in place. The first time this happens, Shackleton's men, committed by all means and expedients, succeed in unsealing the ship, and it is on this occasion that the cameraman invents a surprising shot of the prow finally advancing through the ice, coming ‘on’ to the camera and the viewer. This is a true cinematic effect that reveals the dramatic contrast between the paralysing force of the sea of ice and the dynamic, vital force of the ship fighting and overcoming its hostility. No less evocative is the final defeat of the Endurance when, after finally running aground and being discharged of all its equipment, men and animals (as if it were losing its vital energy without them), it gradually succumbs to the grip of the frost that sweeps over and devours it. The event itself already communicates a strong dramatic tension, but the way Hurley takes up and edits these scenes transfigures the document of a real tragedy into a symbolic narrative synthesis of the force of destiny. [...]  Surrounding this inescapable event is the life of the expedition shipwrecked in the ice desert: the joyful and vital recklessness of the animals playing and breeding (wonderful close-ups of the St. Bernard puppies), and the attempts of the men to get out of that situation by surviving adversity by building igloos or erecting tents, fishing through the typical hole in the ice, clearing spaces and paths with small snow tractors, retrieving wood from the ship, and finally the journey of the sleds entrusted to the energy of the dogs (still enhanced by intense close-ups on the run). At the end of December 1915 the ice began to break up, but the expedition had to wait until April of the following year to reach Elephant Island, a no-man's land, by lifeboats. From here begins Shackleton's real odyssey, which with a seven-meter rowboat (and five companions) crosses 1,200 kilometers of stormy sea to reach the nearest inhabited place-South Georgia. The area where he lands, after 16 days of terrible sailing, is described by the camera of Hurley, who carries the camera equipment in his personal luggage, thus increasing the heaviness of an already desperate undertaking. Hurley mainly shoots the various types of birds that frequent the coast: albatrosses, cormorants, giant petrels, etc. To finally get help, Shackleton then has to reach a Norwegian whaling station 250 kilometres away (here, too, Hurley captures the coastal landscape inhabited by penguins and aggressive elephant seals, and the whalers' activities). The return of winter forced Shackleton to ask the Chilean government for a large tugboat that could rescue the 22 men of the expedition who remained on Elephant Island with very little food. Fortunately, the venture succeeds and Hurley is able to end his dramatic documentary with a happy ending, filming the triumphant arrival in Valparaiso of the entire group safe and sound, greeted by a huge festive crowd. Hurley's film only reproduces a small part of the extraordinary adventure of the Shackleton expedition, and for obvious technical reasons it elides the most difficult moments, but the characteristics of the enterprise, the very way in which it is told and its places are described in images constitute a revelation for the time that photography could not convey with the same intensity. On this subject, Pierre Leprohon writes: ‘Photography had been incapable of providing a realistic image of these disinherited regions. Cinema instead reveals them in their tragic aspect, revealing their grandiose character and purity. For the first time, one realises how movement can render the breadth of a landscape. The film of Shackleton's expedition espoused the very rhythm of the voyage, being patiently slow. Through the repetition of the shots of the ship advancing through the ice, the film leaves in the viewer's mind an impression of excruciating monotony, perfectly in keeping with the film's subject’ (P. Leprohon, L'exotisme et le cinéma, Les Éditions J. Susse, Paris 1945, p.45). Leprohon thus recognises in Hurley's film two elementary but founding aspects of the art of filmmaking: the movement of the camera (even if it is still simple tripod panoramas) that draws the space, communicating not only its topography but also its emotional quality, and the duration of the shot, which through the rhythm and repetition of the montage, testifies to a subjective dimension of time. And this cinematic revelation of the subjective dimension of time comes indirectly to confirm the philosophical reflection that Bergson (a great admirer of the cinematograph and in particular of the documentary) was developing in those very years, according to which the time concretely experienced by consciousness is a real duration, seamlessly between states of consciousness. Here, then, cinema overturns the commonplace of quantitative, “objective” and measurable time: the cinematic synthesis of movement, space and time, communicates the subjective experience of an event, thus its actual duration in human memory and consciousness. In other words, documentary film is not true insofar as it simply reproduces a reality, but it is true insofar as it constitutes the subjective experience of that reality, its interpretation. Then, too, documentary film, speaks more of man's consciousness than of the world, the external landscape becomes the inner landscape, practical action becomes symbolic action, time flows to the rhythm of the heart and the mind, and that is why the audience, especially the audience of early cinema, is so deeply engaged by the images of those documents, as Leprohon again suggests: ‘Beyond the image of a hostile nature, beyond an interesting documentation of Antarctic wildlife, these two films (by Ponting and Hurley) constitute human testimony. It is perhaps to this aspect that the audience was most sensitive’ (P. Leprohon, ibid.).

In any case, the great success of the film of the Scott Expedition and the second Shackleton Expedition determined the establishment of the documentary as a genre, fostering the making of Nanook, Robert J. Flaherty's first film, financed by the French furriers Revillon and shot between 1920 and 1922 in Hudson Bay to chronicle the life of an Eskimo and his family». (Andrea Balzola, "Prime visioni d'Antartide – La nascita del documentario e il cinema delle spedizioni al Polo Sud", in L'avventura Antartica – Immagini e storia, Cahier n. 75 Museo Nazionale della Montagna "Duca degli Abruzzi" – CAI-Torino, Torino 1990, pp. 77, 80, 81)

Travel Notes [Cinemambiente 1998]

Gute Reisende sind herzlos

Good travelers are heartless

Elias Canetti

From the travelogues of Hale's Tours to reportages on great exploits and exotic lands, from the road movie to the thousands of invented and untold stories of conquered spaces and lost or rediscovered identities, the theme of travel has accompanied the entire history of cinema, in all its genres and areas of production, the very metaphor of the new medium capable of restoring the movement of the world.

The brief itinerary proposed here allows us to observe some areas of the prolific relationship between the camera and the environment constituted by the travel film. These are works and materials that concern different dimensions of travel – some probably permanently disappeared – in which constant, however, is the exercise of looking at a reality, a place, a culture, an “elsewhere” reached through physical movement. Colonial conquest, exploration, scientific discovery, family vacation, as well as ritual and soul-searching, are the main passages of this reconnaissance, which reveals first and foremost the importance of the possibility of creating images, which document but also represent a determining factor shaping travel itself.

The components of violence and cultural imposition of Western voyages of conquest in the first decades of the century are, for example, shown in the work of recovery and reworking of original materials carried out by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, who with the power of images alone manage to construct a lucid discourse on the role of the camera as an expression of a will to appropriation and domination. It is the same colonialist gaze analyzed by Peter Kubelka in his African journey in the 1960s, following a group of whites engaged in a safari.

The reliance on cinema as a possibility to record the real, to bear witness to natural events and human endeavors appears evident in the works of volcanologist Haroun Tazieff, who filmed apocalyptic scenarios and spectacular eruptions, or in the conspicuous documentation left by Alberto Maria De Agostini during his wanderings in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, or again in the images of early mountaineering expeditions to the great peaks, not without political implications in some cases, such as the document on the ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1938, which becomes an example of Nazi propaganda. The exploration of the environment as a human challenge, a ground for confrontation with the force and sometimes the hostility of nature, is still visible in the first filmed documentations of Antarctic expeditions, in which the narrative and spectacular vocation of cinema peeps out even where one would presume total adherence to realistic subject matter.

What becomes immediately clear in this chapter of the history of travel is that there is no truly achieved goal and conquered space, if not properly documented, no expedition and enterprise that can renounce being filmed and thus make its own contribution to the construction of an imaginary made of heroes and great adventures, of immense spaces real and unknown. Immersed in the silence of their innocence, and in the seduction of their genesis – possible in many cases despite difficult environmental conditions and thanks to daring actions – such images enchant today as they did then. The crossing of a last sailing ship filmed by Henrich Hauser, in which neither places of departure nor points of arrival are shown, becomes the emblem of the experience in itself of movement, a hymn to the deepest sense of travel. Of which the deviations from the desired outcomes, the failures, renunciations, tragedies or simply the impossibility of creating the longed-for image (the summit as well as the return) must also be collected. But the fascination with travel to distant and extreme lands can also become an explicit advertising tool, as happened with the African and Asian cruises organized by Citroën between the 1920s and 1930s, in which human enterprise and produced image turn out to be totally inseparable.

Another type of relationship with the environment is that traceable in home movies shot during family vacations: Gustav Deutsch rereads anonymous materials from the 1950s and 1960s, offering an interesting catalog on the amateur gaze in its attempt to capture places – in this case those deputed to tourism – and preserve memories.

Travel as an encounter with “other” worlds and cultures, rapprochement and self-discovery, is the theme finally of some works in which the dialogue with the environment is constructed on the basis of the awareness that movement is not the prerogative of the person holding the camera. Ulrike Koch's documentation of the migration of nomadic Tibetan herders to the great salt lakes of the Himalayan plateau, a tribute to a sacred dimension of travel; Bill Viola's contemplation of natural landscapes and animal presences, Chris Marker's reflections from the “two extreme poles of survival” – Japan and Africa – or even the crossed gaze proposed in another work by Deutsch (who juxtaposes his images of an Austrian in Morocco with those of a Moroccan in Austria), suggest modes of travel based on dialogue, confrontation, meditation: observing the movement of nature and its inhabitants, with respect and hesitation, leads to a movement of consciousness, a production of thought, an activation of memories. The relationship with a place is no longer established through topographical and cultural appropriation, but through an appreciation of differences, the maintenance of a subjectivity and a historical understanding. Travel as discovery and adventure belongs perhaps only more to mythology and nostalgia, just as the very conditions of image production and consumption turn out to be profoundly transformed with respect to the eras evoked here. The cognitive potentialities of travel, and therefore of the images borrowed from it, are then entrusted, rather than to a movement in space guided by a ravenous gaze in search of the pure and the uncontaminated, to an ability to stand in any different place, to let this otherness speak and be absorbed, also tracing its historical motivations and welcoming the dimension of memory that that place can give off in those who try to approach it.