I’ve described the stark, forlorn qualities of Antarctica to a friend and they deemed it an “ideas graveyard.” An apt description for those who find inspiration in the vibrantly alive and vividly colorful world of life. However, here, rather than expiring, I think one’s ideas simply change. At the South Pole you are immersed in the future and the past. The first explorers, operating in an age fueled by the zeitgeist of colonialism and high-modernist human supremacy, made it here in a heroic struggle against nature (if blank, cold, mineral nothingness can be deemed nature). Personal, national, and scientific fame for those most daring and well-prepared. This legacy is everywhere you look. And walking two miles in -70f wind-chill makes this history visceral.
Yet the work performed now is oriented toward the future. Science is discovery, and the data might be collected now but it will be many months until anything profound will be gleaned from it. An effort so detached from the trillions of tiny particles searched for and measured so precisely as to seem unreal. Where does that leave the minds of those who inhabit this liminal space? A sense of waiting without knowing what for.
I’ve been tasked with capturing this for a filmmaker. Briefly trained in camera usage, shot composition, and basic light exposure, I’m meant to represent not the people of the South Pole but the spaces they inhabit, the passing of time, and the emotional detritus left by all of us who will only ever be a guest here. Empty hallways, silent wind whipping flags in snow, a room full of green life bereft of movement. Silhouettes and turned backs in still reflection out windows and at screens. Behemoth balloons floating out over the ice measuring the high atmosphere, only ever seen once. A comfortable stillness where people know their purpose and have no reason to rush. Here there is no competition, somehow, where space and resources are most restricted. There exists a rare sense of purpose and fulfillment, most forgetting at length their extreme separation from the world at large.
The film is titled Messengers, directed by Jeffery Zablotny, and it will premiere at the 2024 Canadian Film Festival. And who knows, maybe my Canadian permanent residency application will be approved by then too?
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