South (1919) User Reviews

Remarkable Survival

[Cineanalyst · 7/10 · 20 July 2005]

This is a remarkable film, just in that Frank Hurley was there--surviving the harsh conditions and circumstances like the rest of Sir Ernest Shackleton's crew. Moreover, he didn't interfere, or invent a story, in the way other pioneer documentary filmmakers did, as with "In the Land of the Head Hunters" (1914), Flaherty's "Nanook of the North" (1922) or the films by Cooper and Schoedsack. He had an interesting and amazing story and only needed to record it. Hurley tells the adventure of Schackleton's Antarctic expedition largely by intertitles, but there is some interesting photography, nonetheless.

Film-making isn't a priority when lives are in peril, so the title cards, in addition to still photographs and some drawings help to tell the entire story. Most of the moving pictures are of the exotic animals they encountered and the many dogs they took with them to Antarctica. There's also the slow demise of their ship, Endurance. Two of the images that stood out to me, however, were the shadows of crosses upon the ice when the ship was battering through it and the shot of the ship charging full stern ahead, approaching the camera head on, a la the Lumière brothers' "Arrivée d'un train" (1895). Mostly, the motion pictures help illustrate a story told by intertitles, but it's quite a story. And, like its subjects, the film remarkably survived.

An amazing artefact

[JohnSeal · 8/10 · 30 December 1999]

Until this showed up on TCM's recent documentary series I had no idea that this film existed. It is a truly remarkable document of Shackleton's expedition to the South Pole in 1914 that turned into a two year adventure on ice.

Save for some cute animal footage at the end that seems designed to pad the running time, this is a perfect film.

Great photography of Shackelton's Antarctic voyage

[Ross-17 · 7/10 · 24 November 1999]

Anyone familiar with the incredible true story of Shackelton and his entire crews survival against seemingly impossible odds when their ship Endurance became trapped in Antartic ice will appreciate this documentary.

The quality of the pictures is outstanding for the time. Frank Hurley the expedition's offical photographer did an amazing job.

The first 2/3rds of the film is most interesting. As conditions worsened its clear that Hurley could not take so many photographs (he was confined to a pocket camera in the later stages).

The later part decends into a nature documentary of South Georgia. I would have preferred to see more pictures of the whaling station where Shackelton and two companions made contact with civilization after more than 2 years of struggle.

A fitting memorial to this century's most inspiring survival epic.

Imperfect documentary

[kah-2 · 6/10 · 12 July 2000]

This film is a documentary of the Shackleton Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914. Shackleton's ship was trapped in pack ice and later destroyed, leading to a two-year struggle for survival on the frozen seas. The film is a mixture of live-action movies and still photos from the expedition. It is as much a nature documentary as a record of the voyage, with the latter portion especially paying more attention to the Antarctic wildlife than the struggles of the explorers. It is also incomplete, skipping some important parts of the story, like the fate of the expedition's dogs. Those who want to learn about the voyage might be better served reading Alfred Lansing's "Endurance", or Shackleton's memoir, both of which are still in print. Still, "South" is an interesting video record of the early days of polar exploration.

Considering the equipment and hardships of 1914, it's an amazing film

[FISHCAKE · 9/10 · 15 November 1999]

This film has recently been shown with the title "SOUTH Sir Ernest Shackleton's glorious epic of the Antarctic". Considering what cinematographer Frank Hurley had to work with as equipment and the hardships under which he was working, it really is an amazing film. Think, too, that probably most of his footage and still photographs had to be abandoned as the 28 men fought just to stay alive after their ship "Endurance" was crushed by the ice and sank. Shackleton hoped to land on the coast of Antarctica and cross the continent using dog sleds, then be picked up on the other coast by his ship. Alas, the winter of 1914-1915 turned out to be one of worst in the known history of the frozen continent to that time, and their ship was ice bound and destroyed before they ever reached the shore south of Elephant Island and the farther north island of South Georgia. What we are shown here is mostly the earlier part of the saga before the conditions grew really bad. The latter part is covered mostly by still pics and some artists drawings, pieced out by movies of bird and seal life around South Georgia. This last may prove tedious for some, but the rest is very interesting. For a really detailed account of Shackleton's adventure consult ENDURANCE: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing (McGraw-Hill, 1959) which I imagine many libraries will have.

Getting marooned all in the name of British Valour

[Mr Pants · 8 January 2002]

A truly amazing film, and at least one good thing to come as a result of British self-importance. Film was still in its early years; leave it to the Brits to capitalize on it to record their abortive undertaking at the south pole. Still it is an admirable effort, and the photography is often startling, especially since the Milestone release. Thanks to the previous commentor for the bibliography, as I too had to wonder what became of the sled dogs, who seemed at least as dedicated as their human counterparts.

South

[CinemaSerf · 7/10 · 11 September 2022]

Using some originally shot footage from the expedition that started just as Europe went to war in 1914, this tells a fascinating story of human endeavour in the face of just about everything hostile that nature has in it's armoury. We see elements of their preparation, their voyage and of the treacherousness of their new environment as their ship struggles to make headway through the ever thickening ice - before ultimately ending up as glorified kindling! Unfortunately, though not unsurprisingly, there are no images as the majority of the crew are left on Elephant Island whilst Sir Ernest Shackleton and his small crew embark on an 800 mile journey to "neighbouring" South Georgia in an open boat to try and summon help from the whaling station there. The photography is great - we see many creatures from the Antarctic for the first time; have some fun with the penguins and the seals - and the weather, the adverse weather conditions just have you reaching for a duvet at each turn. This is a great story of endurance that demonstrates just what could be done with grit and determination, and without the aid of modern technology - and if you can see it on a bigger screen, then the whole scale of their adventure through this perilous terrain makes this quite a compelling watch.

Slice of history

[lousvr · 9/10 · 9 November 1999]

This is a slice of history. The documentation of the expedition that didn't work out and turned into a adventurous flight for survival. Unfortunately, and of course naturally, the real story, the trek to Elephant Isle and then to South Georgia, the pinnacle of the whole event, was not on film. But again, this is were film becomes a 'time-machine'.

Documentary With Real Footage of Shackleton's Soul Pole Adventure

[springfieldrental · 8/10 · 27 September 2021]

Little did cinematographer/photographer Frank Hurley know when he left Plymouth, England with Sir Ernest Shackleton's Trans-Antarctic Expedition in August 1914 he was recording one of history's most epic feat of endurance. For two years, the goal of crossing the South Pole turned into a nightmare as the expedition's ship, the "Endurance," became solidly stuck in the ice for over a year before buckling under pressure. Hurley had to surrender his camera, but he did save a few reels of his footage as well as 100 photographic plates.

After a miraculous return in August 1916, Hurley used the film he cranked out and the still photographs he shot while on the Endurance to produce his 1919 documentary "South." This was Hurley's second voyage to Antartica, so he knew about film preservation in frigid weather. But nothing quite prepared him for the hardships facing the expedition when the Endurance became ice jammed. What's notable in the Hurley footage is how the crew, foot by foot, attempted to get their ship to the mainland by physically hand sawing the ice in front.

The highlight of "South" was Hurley's footage of the crew unloading all the necessary hardware from the Endurance and capturing the ship's destruction. Hurley returned to the destroyed ship and waded in waist high water to retrieve the photographic plates. "I hacked through the thick walls of the refrigerator to retrieve the negatives stored therein," he wrote a week later. "They were located beneath four feet of mushy ice and by stripping to the waist and diving under I hauled them out."

Unfortunately, he had to give up his camera, not able to film his crew mates when they scampered onto the three lifeboats as the packed ice broke up. They ended up on the uninhabited Elephant Island, where Shackleton and five others, in an open boat, made an 800-mile journey to South Georgia Island, where eventually they rescued the 22 waiting members. This became the last major expedition of the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

Director George Butler used Frank Hurley's footage and photos to reconstruct his 2001 IMAX movie "Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure." Butler's film crew shot on location at the South Pole where the Shackleton crew journeyed to complement Hurley's work that will forever live in documentary history.

the Australo-British documentary sets sail

[kekseksa · 10 November 2017]

I have written often about how the rediscovery of films of the silent era has allowed us to re-tell the history of cinema, in a way that is generally much less US-centric and invariably less simplistic, but I have paid relatively little attention to documentary.

This is a grievous omission because documentary, far from being a peripheral part of cinema, is one of the real motors that has driven it, particularly in encouraging cinematographic experimentation and in enriching the visual vocabulary on which film-makers could draw.

Here too we are learning much, both in understanding how documentary like photoplays developed quite naturally out of the early "views" as the length of the films increased and in appreciating that documentary did not begin - or anything like it - with Nanook of the North.

Full-length films that reconstructed historical events (always docufictions of a kind) started at the same time as the epics and other full-length fictions in 1911 (the Russian Siege of Sevastopol and the Serbian biopic Karadjurdje). In the US The Truth about the Pole (not on IMDb) was a short dramatic reconstruction intended to vindicate the claims of Frederick Cooke but, with slides and lectures, ran, according to the adverts, anywhere between 45 minutes and two hours "as desired".

1912 (the year of the sinking of the Titanic) saw Pick's reconstruction Im Nacht und Eis (medium-length) and the same year brought the Italian film Viaggio in Congo (again medium-length), an account of a trip through the Belgian Congo, while the linked genres of biographical and historical reconstruction continued with the Romanian film, Independent Romania and the US film The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino (medium length).

In 1913 there is the German biopic Richard Wagner and Ince's lost reconstruction of The Battle of Gettysburg (US), the Russian medium-length Tercentenary of the Romanov Dynasty's Accession and the Russian full-length documentary Lives of the Jews in Palestine. While Universal's Traffic in Souls is very decidedly fiction, the same year's The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (originally longer than the surviving 30 minutes) was rather more in the nature of a docufiction.

1914 brought the US/Canadian film In the Land of the Head-Humters and the US historical reconstruction Ireland a Nation (both medium length) and 1915 the Italian biopic Silvio Pellico (medium length), the Russian historico-political Lilya Belgii (medium length) and a full-length biopic of Ivan he Great as well as the US historico-political All for Ireland. In 1916 there was the British war documentary, The Battle of the Somme while in the US Benjamin Brodsky released his feature-length travelogue, A Trip Through China.

In 1917 Dutch documentarist Willy Mullens produces the medium-length Holland Neutraal and the Germans produced their own film of The Battle of the Somme. There was the Mexican historical reconstruction Tepeyec and the Russian medium length Delo Beilisa (the Russian "Dreyfus Affair") and more British war films (The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks and German Retreat and the Battle of Arras). In 1918 the Dutch produced a compilation of footage about the East Indes (Onze Oost) while the Germans shoot a medium-length film about their war hero Von Richthofen. Beethoven was the subject of a (heavily fictionslised) Austrian biopic while the US produces its war documentary, America Goes Over as well as the fictional propaganda film Hearts of the World and Brodsky produced his second feature-length travelogue, Beautiful Japan.

It is true that I have mixed documentary with historical and biographical dramas (to give a clearer picture of how these genres develop together) and that I have included medium-length films (c. 32-45 minutes) along with "full-length" films (the distinction between them seems to me rather spurious) but what is clear is that documentary film-making (even if the word did not yet exist) was making strides in absolute parallel to its fictional counterparts several years before Flaherty's Nanook.

And this film, beautifully shot and skilfully narrated, is evidence of just how good those documentaries could be. I agree with the reviewer who sees it as in some ways the antithesis of Flaherty's Nanook in its faithful recording of events as they happen and this would remain an important distinction (and often point of contention) between the British documentary school as it developed (associated with the Scot John Grierson) and its US counterpart (which tended to follow Flaherty) and is, for the matter, at the heart of all debates about the nature of documentary ever since.

The late twenties/early thirties was really the golden age both of fictional and documentary films and saw some extraordinary forms of convergence between the two. Interesting, for instance, to compare this film not only with later documentaries like The Great White Silence (1924) but also with fictions like Der Ruf des Nordens (1929) and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933).

Another major element in this film is Hurley's awareness of the relationship between naturalistic photography and abstract design (the ghost ship at night and the patterns of frost, for instance) which also foreshadows developments in the late twenties in the work of Walter Ruttmann or Joris Ivens and for that matter all the many documentary film/abstract art cross-overs that have succeeded and that have proved to be the mainstay quite as much of the advertising industry as of so-called experimental cinema. It is also this aspect of the film no doubt that inspired the curious 1993 fantasy by Dutch "found footage" specialist Peter Delpeut, The Forbidden Quest, dedicated to Hurley and making use primarily of footage from this wonderful film.

A brief word, finally, in defence of Cooper and Schoedsack. While it is true that once they got to see the work of Flaherty, they were immediately corrupted by it and Chang is a deplorable piece of fakery but their very first documentary Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925) is a superbly genuine piece of work.

Expedition with Endurance vessel till near Antarctic's and what will be after its down degradation

[carvalheiro · 10 November 2007]

"South" (1919) by Frank Hurley with the cooperation of Ernest Shackleton is one of the rare pieces of evidence, very soon doing the searching in Antarctic continent and all its own backwardness as movie is concerning with such a reality of glacial activity, within also the fisheries and animals for the typical environment. Too, the spirit of geographical adventure is there, with some willingness from veterans of the Scott's expeditions and risky failures, as responsible background on the spot as usual in such a collective project, nurtured by Shackleton in it : to bring humanity from such an experiment in the last continent of our planet, where the footprints of some represented there, just before were lost for ever with its tent near the South pole.

At its first stage, in contact with innocent human beings out of the First World War casualties, this Shackleton expedition got a discovery of what is fixed from onetime for ever, in such a fascinating way of holding images, moving like within that visual instinct. Pictures that would also be recuperated only a lot of years further, after standing perfectly conserved by the icy waters, in a submerged box inside the wreckage of the famous lost vessel, from that specific and interrupted expedition. In a kind of fact, that it was legend in the history of that forgotten region of the globe and this is almost incredible, as well rarely seen as a document restored, but still concerned with the insight of the trip on a failed mission. This movie is the recollection of part of the itinerary made by Shackleton team, specially the "Endurance" vessel slow wreckage and agony of sad evidence, with the polar sunny side of few moments nearby Antarctic.

What should be done in homage to some of these past individuals, that took part in such an adventure ? Briefly, to such kind of human beings, now if it could be necessary for that comprehensive task, nothing less than going again in a further initiative. For repeating the trip, like it was before, it was rather obligatory facing an almost permanent Winter without the Sun in the most part of the year. This occurring still in such a similar kind of conditions, as though even having the same and getting the enraged flesh of the local seals and bears for the meals as it was made in the past, animals that such an expedition ate before, in last instance for surviving. All that working, when people still at the time was obliged then, while encircled by severe glacial circumstances, burning coal to stay alive. Even with their frozen noses perhaps not alive, but saving partly of it in supplies and returning from nowhere, again at home.