I wonder if three spools of film ever went through more
exacting experiences before they were developed.’ (F Hurley, Shackleton’s
Argonauts, Sydney 1948).
SHACKLETON
A century after the death of Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton CVO
OBE FRGS FRSGS on South Georgia at the start of his last great adventure, the Shackleton–Rowett
Expedition, the BFI have paid tribute by rereleasing South along with a
host of extra films dedicated to all those who pursued the unknown. This was
the golden age of polar exploration and there were compelling motivations of
national prestige and personal glory that drove Ernest Shackleton and his team
to the South Pole and, when all went wrong, they proved to have remarkable
qualities above and beyond mere pride. Ultimately Shackleton could have opted
for an easier life after South, the war, the Russian Civil war… but something
compelled the 47-year old to return.
Shackleton had previously been on two missions to the South
Pole, once as third officer on Captain Scott’s expedition from 1901-04 when his
health failed and he had to return home early and the next time as commander of
his own Nimrod Mission in 1909 when his team got to within 97 geographical
miles of the Pole, a record which earned him a knighthood. After Scott had
narrowly lost the race to Amundsen in late 1911, the biggest challenge remained
the crossing of the Pole from shore to shore, from one sea to the other.
It was this that Shackleton set off to achieve in 1914 as
part of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition referring to the transcontinental
route as the "one great object of Antarctic journeyings". One ship, the
Endurance, would take the team from South Georgia through the Weddell
Sea to Antarctica and then, after a crossing of 1,800 miles they would join up
with supplies left by a second ship, the Aurora, which would then take
them to New Zealand, completing an epic journey from the South Atlantic to the
South Pacific… in one mind-boggling, map-defying stretch.
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| Endurance sets off from Buenos Aires |
On 8th August, just five days after the outbreak of the
First World War the ship set sail and a few weeks later, Shackleton joined them
and the show really got on the road. In the circumstances the team had
naturally asked British officials whether they should go on but the answer
came: “proceed”. The hope was that it would all be over by Christmas after
all...
As with Scott’s expedition of 1911, Shackleton’s was a
miracle of fundraising with a commercial eye on the future so, just as Herbert
Ponting was to record Scott so Frank Hurley was nominated to do the same for
this latest adventure. Interesting in this case that a film about so much
British pluck was led by an Irishman and filmed by an Australian… let’s just
say that this was a film about pluck full stop not to mention discipline and
courage.
FRANK HURLEY
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| Frank Hurley |
The film starts with shots of various members of the crew, including
Shackleton himself and you search each line and every nuance of expression for
a clue to his character: this is what a brave man looks like… even if the
close-ups were taken after the event with him in uniform ready to do his bit in
the War.
We then see the Endurance as it sets off from Buenos
Aires, waved off by a large crowd as Shackleton’s pre-publicity had encouraged world-wide
wonder, and then makes its way south to the Antarctic landmass, smashing its
way through ice and passing by enormous ice bergs. It looks unstoppable,
reinforced steel providing an extra cutting edge for the spring ice floe: this
is the best modern science can offer and surely nature will not be able to
stand in its way. There are stunning shots from high overhead up the foremast as
one member of the crew sits on the bowsprit steering the ship through the
weakest parts of the ice; Hurley was some sailor as well as cinematographer.
Hurley’s camerawork is not only brave but technically so
impressive, far more mobile than you might expect as he pans across and upwards
to show the depth and range of this forbidding landscape and, through use of
close-ups and point of view, places the crew and consequently the watcher in
the heart of this deadly landscape. Unlike Ponting, brave though he was, Hurley
was in the middle of the main drama itself – he too was stranded and in peril -
yet he kept on working.
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| Steering through the ice |
The film proudly shows us the packs of dogs who were to be
the expedition’s backbone once they landed and there’s a typically British
fascination with animals both domesticated and wild throughout with a long
section on penguins and seals near the end (eat your heart out Herbert P!).
Before the Endurance was able to make land it became
trapped in the ice in mid-January 1915. At first this seemed just a temporary
setback but then the predicament became much clearer and much more serious. The
crew tried many times to hack a channel through the ice to enable the ship to
make progress and to break through to clear water but this wasn’t to be. After some days they were resigned to a long
wait for the ice to thaw and they kept themselves busy with research, hunting
and football matches. Obviously, we only see what’s on film and what Hurley
edited and was perhaps allowed to show but clearly the command from Shackleton
was strong and effective: moral appears to be high. They knew they had a long
wait ahead… until the arrival of the arctic spring later that year.
Yet, when the thaw did start in September 1915, a far more
serious challenge arose as the force of the shifting ice started to compromise
the Endurance’s hull and the ship began to be lifted from the water.
Hurley’s shots of the stricken ice-breaker are amongst the most iconic of the
whole journey especially those he shot at night using dozens of magnesium
lights… it’s haunting, not just because of the eerie phosphorescent glow but
also because you realize that the men could be watching their best hope of
survival being crushed and sunk.
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| The men try to cut a way through the ice |
Shackleton had the men strip everything of use from the Endurance
before she finally sank in November and he established a camp using tents,
shacks built from the ship’s timbers and upturned lifeboats. One of these, the
twenty-foot James Caird, with some major adjustments from the team's
carpenters, was used to make Shackleton’s heroic journey from Elephant Island
to South Georgia. Before that the crew had had to use the boats to make their
way from the melting ice floes to land an epic adventure in itself.
That Hurley’s film survives is one thing but that it
survives in such good quality is another. He buried film canisters in the snow
during parts of the escape in order to preserve them in the event that things
didn’t quite work out… When Shackleton
departed on that final stage, Hurley remained behind with the rest of the crew
and the gaps in the story are made up of illustrations and then later footage
of both the forbidding ice wall Shackleton and his men had to climb in order to
reach help.
In the end Shackleton returned with help and ensured that
every one of his crew returned safe: the greatest survival epic of the golden
age of polar exploration at a time when far less was known about these still
treacherous waters… Whatever the merits
or otherwise of Shackleton’s motives you cannot doubt his leadership and
courage nor that of the men, like Hurley, who followed him come thick and thin
ice.
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| Endurance high and dry |
Hurley later remarked that the earlier Australian expedition
he had been on was a means to a scientific end whilst the British focus was on
the adventure first with science an added bonus. Be that as it may, there was
certainly great domestic interest in viewing the strange creatures of the South
as Ponting’s film had already proved and there’s some twenty minutes of
crowd-pleasing wildlife footage once it’s clear that the men survived. This is
all the more remarkable given that according to Bryony Dixon in her booklet
essay, Hurley was persuaded by the Ernest Perris, editor of his sponsor, the Daily
Chronicle, “…to return to South Georgia (in the middle of a war, we
should remember) to capture images that would be popular with the public of
Antarctic wildlife (penguins) and the whaling station.”
THE SCORE
This splendid transfer comes with a stirring new orchestral score
from Neil Brand which perfectly captures the spirit of the times and of
adventure as it used to be: indomitable, brave and with the passion to overcome
all obstacles - they endured!
I hope that the overall effect of the score is to help us
go through the screen and onto those icy wastes with those men...
This set includes a feature on Neil Brand’s approach to the
scoring and, it is every bit as revelatory as the music as the composer
explains his relationship with the film and the reasons behind his choices.
Neil uses the film in teaching at the Royal Academy of Music and one of the
reasons is the sheer relatability of the events; when the ice crushes the Endurance
we all feel as the men must have felt, that this was probably their doom, their
only means of return destroyed leaving them a thousand miles from the nearest
human.
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| Endurance finally succumbs |
Neil chose a small ensemble combining flute, piccolo, cello,
violin, viola and horn – no piano, no safety net – to enable an uplifting and
febrile composition that could change with the sudden shifts in mood of the
film. This works so very well, music full of the hope and determination of
these men as their near disaster plays out against the deceptive tranquillity
of the sublime white silence and stark, sunlit cinematic contrast. It’s the
most extraordinary meditation on human perseverance against all odds, as they determinedly
fight for their ship and then their lives. As Neil says, this film has been a
major part of his professional life for twenty years and this familiarity has
enabled him to construct a deeply resonant musical response.
Long-time collaborator Ben Palmer helped with the score and the
mucisians from the Covent Garden Sinfonia who he then conducted for the recording:
Francesca Barritt (violin), David Campbell (clarinet/bass clarinet), Kira
Doherty (horn), Simon Gilliver (flute/piccolo), Matthew Kettle (viola) and
Alexander Rolton (cello)
Having been unable to attend the IMAX screening with live
accompaniment, I hope the show is screened again with the musicians – this is a
story we all need to see and hear right now. Neil previously scored the film in
2002 and you can listen to that to as an option on these discs too.
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| Trapped but the team played on |
EXTRAS
The set also includes extra footage of the expedition – the football
match with Endurance marooned in the ice, perhaps the purest example of the
team spirit, and there’s also extra animals and terrifying icebergs.
There’s also an audio commentary from Luke McKernan, who
worked on the restoration, and a bumper 38-page Illustrated booklet with new
essays and credits for all content including contributions from the BFI’s Bryony
Dixon, Naomi Boneham and Charlotte Connelly, Masaki Daibo, Eirik Frisvold
Hanssen, and Quentin Turnour, which gives a truly international perspective on the
Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration – Japan, Norway and Australia, so many were
pulled south.
There’s footage from these countries expeditions as well as other British adventures:
Fram’s South Polar Expedition (1910-12, 22 mins)
documents parts of the legendary ‘race to the Pole’ won by Roald Amundsen and
his Norwegian team. This the English version of the film footage seen in
cinemas and theatres in 1913.
Nihon nankyoku tanken (1910-12, 19 mins) is the
extraordinary and rare footage taken in the second year of the Japanese
expedition to Antarctica led by Nobu Shirase.
Australasian Antarctic Expedition Films aka The Home
of the Blizzard (c1916, 68 mins) film taken by Frank Hurley of the
1911–1914 scientific expedition to the Magnetic South Pole led by Sir Douglas
Mawson.
Other films in the set, range from 1898 – 1922 and
include visual references to these and other notable Antarctic expeditions.
Additional special features include film and audio extracts, including from Shackleton
himself in short audios My South Polar Expedition (1910) recorded a week
after returning to New Zealand and Shackleton Speaks (1910) naming his
Nimrod crew.
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| 800 miles to South Georgia Island... |
WHAT TO DO NEXT
It’s a wonderful and inspiring package and absolutely essential
for all those fascinated with the spirit of adventure both in cinematic and Antarctic
terms.
You can order now from the BFI online shop. Go on, be
bold!
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| Endurance's Captain Worsley |
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| Captain L Hussey with his moral-boosting banjo |
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| Some of the Endurance's 70 dogs |
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| Hurley's haunting night shots of the frozen ship |
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| Shakleton's men needed to climb this huge glacier in South Georgia |
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| It took them 36 hours to finally find refuge at Stromness Whaling Station. |
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