10/15/2024 – In this doc by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin and Natalie Hewit, Ernest Shackleton‘s 1914 expedition overlaps with efforts to find his wrecked ship a century later
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Adapting a well-circulated current meme, we could say that men would rather go on two arguably pointless Antarctic voyages, 100 years apart, than go to therapy. The BFI London-premiering documentary Enduranceco-directed by Free Solo filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chinalongside Natalie Hewitintercuts actual footage from explorer Ernest Shackleton’s botched 1914 Antarctic crossing with another in 2022 searching for his ship’s remains deep beneath the Southern Ocean. Aiming to convey the participants’ gung-ho excitement for traversing unknown reaches of the Earth, it instead prompts more existential questions on mankind’s hubris, and what exactly prompts us to celebrate and embrace self-destructive impulses. On that note, Tom Cruise – well known for his life-endangering stunts – would make a great Shackleton in a conventional biopic.
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Named for Shackleton’s own prophetically monikered vessel, Endurance’s primary narrative strand recounts the ship’s entrapment in pack ice before it could properly reach the coast of Antarctica; the outlandish goal for the trip – with the territory already discovered and then published on the world’s maps – was actually for the men to dismount and then cross the entirety of the freezing polar continent on foot, where they’d find a new ship to take them homeward. Well-contrasted in the film’s narration with the onset of World War I, it seems comparable to outstanding acts of weightlifting and strength training now: physical achievement and, indeed, endurance for their own sake. Ever the self-publicist, Shackleton entrusted Frank Hurley to film the expedition for posterity, which the directors presciently mirror with today’s demand for “pics, or it didn’t happen”.
Are Chai Vasarhelyi, Chin and Hewit the present-day Hurleys for the Endurance22 expedition, aboard the South African icebreaker IN Agulhas II? With insistent crosscutting that feels half like a reality-TV cooking show and half like a Christopher Nolan blockbuster, the mission to find the undersea shipwreck, helmed by polar geographer Dr John Shears (what a cool-sounding job title he has…), is depicted with the same overall importance as the eventual heroic rescue of Shackleton’s crew. It feels plausible when we hear the likes of popular British historian And Snow describe what’s to be recovered as vital time capsules, perfectly fossilising and preserving a lost era, but this loses its effectiveness when the more tedious methods of tracking and monitoring it are privileged, rather than the supposedly revelatory results.
After two challenging, platform-funded films, Martin Scorsese is actually shooting a documentary on historic shipwrecks in his ancestral home of Sicily as we speak; in this regard, Endurance is an appetiser for a new lens with which to assess history through its undersea ruins, whilst unveiling it at BFI London is another opportunity to think about Britain’s ruinous imperial influence on the planet. Tracking such a grandiose, inherently fascinating subject in two unique eras of seafaring technology, it compels most when resembling a Herzogian look at human madness, but underwhelms far more with its mainstream TV-ready aesthetic and broad-brush, simplified rendering of history.
Endurance is a US-UK production, staged by Little Dot Studios, Consequential and History Hit, and presented by National Geographic Documentary Films.
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