A Film Canon

The logical conclusion of early silent cinema's fascination with sublime alpine and polar landscapes, South is photographer Frank Hurley's record of Shackleton's legendary 1914 Trans-Antarctic Expedition. For the most part, the live footage focuses on the early stages, specifically the ship's navigation, entrapment and eventual destruction at the hands of the gathering pack ice, which fuses sea and sky into a single, hyperbolic whiteness that, combined with the relatively grainy quality of the film, frequently occludes the horizon, jettisoning the characters and objects from their own actions, and condemning them to wander in an eerie, Romantic ether. This is only enhanced by the central spectacle - the increasing buckling of the pack around the ship, which twists it out of all recognition, and is occasionally caught by Hurley at its most violent or dramatic, as when the masts finally topple. The final section, detailing Shackleton's journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia, is largely composed of still photographs, painted reconstructions and later footage of the terrain he traversed - with the critical exception of an extended depiction of the biology of that terrain, which represents possibly the first systematic cinematic natural history, and provides an antarctic bestiary (seals, whales, sea-elephants, albatrosses, shags, giant petrels, cape pigeons, emperor penguins, king penguins) to rival Flaherty's later, arctic one. In particular, Hurley individuates sea-elephants and king penguins, shooting them with those medium and close-up perspectives conventionally used to elaborate subjectivity, and which are notably absent from the depictions of Shackleton and his men, who are presented as largely continuous with their dogs, suggesting that Hurley's interest turns on the dynamics, achievements and endurance of the team, or pack.