Director: Leanne Pooley
On
a Novel by John Thomson
With
the support of New Zealand on Air’s Platinium Fund
The movie Shackleton’s Captain – The Famous
Antarctic Expedition is a documentary movie that reenacts the epic
story of the expedition of the British explorer, Ernest Shackleton, and his
crew to Antarctica (1914-16). The story is told retrospectively (London, 1926)
by Frank Worsely – the photographer of the expedition – to a group of guests, possibly
former donors.
After two previous visits to Antarctica, Ernest Shackleton settled an ambitious goal: to get to Antarctica and to cross the white continent. In order to reach his goal, the 40 – year old British explorer, with Irish origins, bought the most solid ship for that time, brought it from Norway to England, and rechristened it: ‘Endurance’. Designed for hunting cruses, Endurance was modified so that it can successfully carry all the twenty-seven crew members and their belongings, approximately fifty Canadian sleigh dogs, and a cat.
This
expedition started in August 1914 and everything went fine until the crew was
sixty miles far from the Antarctic shore. It is there that the Endurance got
stuck in ice packs on the Wendell Sea. The crew was stuck for months on the
ship, then the ship went down and the crew lived on a floating ice pack carried
by currents until Shackleton decided to risk and reach the uninhabited
Elephant Island, from where he and the other five members would risk again and
venture to reach the South Georgia Island to get support and return to the
Elephant Island to bring back the rest of the crew.
The
moment the Endurance got stuck in the ice pack, the situation for the crew went
from bad to worse. Surrounded by death in all its forms (i.e. darkness,
coldness, hunger, sea dangers, mountaineering without any experience, etc.) the
unendurable endurance brought to light Shackleton’s leadership skills, as well
as his sense of geographical orientation on the sea, on the darkness and without a
map – a soaked map that one might want to check in darkness, with frozen hands
and body, weakened after days of hunger and without sleep does not help as much
as an innate sense of geographical orientation.
This
also brought to light … the luck as a divine blessing he had. Shackleton and
two other crew members arrived on the wrong side of the island. And they decided
to cross the South Georgia Island on foot, through snow without any mountaineering experience and without many resources. He used to say that in
this venture, it seemed that there was a fourth man next to them, ‘like a
spirit’, that gave them strength and courage. Facing such an angry and
determined Death, that spirit must have been an even more powerful spirit than
Death!
This documentary movie alternates real photos and great quality original videos of both the crew and the ship, the story is correlated with testimonies of researchers and the enactment of the story by a group of talented actors helps visualize better all the hardships the crew had been through.
Shackleton himself, as well as
history, refers to this expedition as a ‘successful failure’ because it did
not reach its expedition goal, but it had a happy end. I think that the term
‘successful failure’ is a beautiful rhetorical device (an oxymoron) that
summarizes in general terms this entire expedition. But I believe that although
Shackleton’s noble goal was to discover Antarctica, for science, for history, and for his country, this expedition was a quest to discover himself; to discover
his human and other skills in relation to his men and to divinity – skills, he
might have had a clue that he had, but that we have never known about them if
they were not tested to such an unendurable human limit. My God, what a limit! And
from this point of view, this expedition was absolutely no failure, but a
tremendously great success. What do you think?
Enjoy the movie!
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