Programme 1

There is a South to the south of the imaginary South, of the dream of the South, and it is made of ice. By 1913 it was already conquered and Ernest Shackleton, the third polar celebrity after Amundsen and Scott, had been left without a mission. He invented one: to cross Antarctica from coast to coast via the pole. He called the mission the “Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition” and the necessary vessel “Endurance”; the expeditioners would end up honouring the name of the latter, not the former. In the summer of 1914, twenty-eight men with seventy dogs, brought from the opposite Pole, almost reach Antarctica. Almost, almost, because the Endurance gets trapped in pack ice in the Weddell sea, like a dying horse in a western that no one could finish off. And the twenty eight men, who were only passing through, become inhabitants and they comprehend, perhaps, that what we call “nature” was, once and simply, the world. And the film, which at times seems like a diorama, an object of fantasy, ultraterrestrial, shows how the fate of the one hundred intruders is irremediably linked to the rest of the terrestrial creatures. Impossible, unfilmable circumstances send the men off course and the film too, which goes in search of its own possibility and finds animals. Albatross, cormorants, giant petrels, sea elephants, seals, penguins: beauties, involuntary comics, guarantors of human survival, flesh of our flesh. Frank Hurley films them with the same attention with which others painted them in caves, and South is the same type of proof, a proof of outer life,­ Altamira and its bison revisited.