Mid-winter treats

Christchurch winters can be pretty miserable. Among the few things to look forward to at this time of year are the Christchurch Arts Festival and the International Film Festival. I eagerly await the publication of the programs for these festivals each year (or every two years in the case of the former, which is biennial) and love going through and circling the various events I want to attend. I then add up how much it's all going to cost, and go through the programs again, re-circling the events I really don't want to miss.

This year I ended up going to two arts festival events and three movies. First up was the Sydney Dance Company's presentation of Rafael Bonachela's 360° at the Theatre Royal. Dance is something I haven’t seen a lot of in the past, so the novelty of the experience made the evening all the more enjoyable. The music was great, and I particularly liked the way video was incorporated into the various routines.

Next up was the Iiro Rantala New Trio, a jazz outfit from Finland, who performed in a tent-like structure in the middle of Cathedral Square. I was intrigued by the line-up for this show, which featured a pianist, a guitarist, and a beatboxer, but I was also a bit apprehensive, given that it's not the sort of jazz I normally listen to. It turned out to be a thoroughly entertaining evening. Rantala talked quite a bit between numbers, but thankfully he's a pretty funny guy (his dry humour reminded me of another Finnish jazz artist we saw at the same festival several years ago, Jukka Perko, so it may be a Nordic thing) so mostly these musings were a bonus. The notable exception was a joke about Susan Boyle and the moon landing, which quite rightly went down like the proverbial lead balloon.

The three movies I saw at the International Film Festival were Departures, North Face, and Encounters at the End of the World. I enjoyed them all, but Encounters made by far the greatest impression on me. Ostensibly a documentary about Antarctica and the people who work there, this movie is actually an exploration of our relationship with the planet and the universe. It's hard to avoid concluding that the famous scene with the disoriented penguin who wanders off alone in the direction of a distant mountain range (and certain death) is a metaphor for the human species.

Despite Herzog's at times hilarious narration, there's no escaping the fact that this is a dark movie (what movie that deals with the reality of global warming, among other things, wouldn't be). Having said that, its message isn’t entirely negative. There's something noble about the efforts of the scientists Herzog interviews to find answers to all manner of questions about the natural world around us, efforts the director contrasts with those of the early explorers who set out to "conquer" Antarctica and of people like the idiot who plans to pogo-stick to the South Pole.

The movie ends with one of the interviewees (not a scientist, but in fact a forklift operator at McMurdo Station) paraphrasing a quote by Alan Watts: "We are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its own glory." Watts is religious, but similar sentiments have also been expressed by non-religious figures, including Carl Sagan ("We are a way for the universe to know itself") and Murray Bookchin, who in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, my copy of which remains missing, describes humankind as "nature rendered self-conscious".

Although I've seen two documentaries about Werner Herzog (Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe), this was the first documentary by him that I've seen. I'm now eager to see more. I'll probably start with Grizzly Man.