The legendary expedition of Ernest Shackleton, the Anglo-Irish explorer who led 27 men on a voyage to Antarctica in 1914 aboard the three-masted schooner Endurance, only to see his ship sink and spend the next 500 days trying to stay afloat and survive. Returning to civilization, it sounds like something you read about in history books – or maybe a story book. It’s an epic so far removed from our time, so rooted in a pre-technological world, that the idea of being able to see it while it’s happening seems bizarre.
However, Shackleton, who had a knack for publicity in the early 1900s, took a film director as part of the crew – photographer and cinematographer Frank Hurley, who filmed the entire trip. So, even as Shackleton and his men were stranded at the bottom of the Earth, trapped in an endless expanse of ice blocks, their daily routines, and their research, the entire ordeal of frozen time was filmed and recorded.
The Titanic’s voyage took place in 1912, two years before Shackleton’s expedition, and just imagine if the fate of the Titanic had been captured on film, and the footage had been saved under the ocean and then restored. You will feel like you are witnessing something strange. Shots of Shackleton and his men evoke a touch of this level of dread. It travels, like a time machine. I first encountered this footage – and indeed the entire saga – when I watched The Endurance: Shackleton Legendary Antarctic Expedition, the stunning 2001 documentary on the subject. This film, in its own way, casts a spell of aesthetic freedom.
“Endurance,” NatGeo’s new documentary about Shackleton’s journey, is very good, but its tone is less poetic and more scientific. The film intercuts two journeys: Shackleton’s voyage (which he shows us in extraordinary detail) and the attempt in 2022 by a team of researchers, led by esteemed marine archaeologist Munson Pound, to trace Shackleton’s voyage and locate the sunken body of his sunken ship. The ship is 3,000 meters below the surface. (They found it in the end.)
The wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985. After that, locating the wreck of the Endurance became the holy grail of undersea historical treasure hunting. In paralleling this quest with Shackleton’s, Endurance creates a somewhat superficial equation (as if the journeys were remotely equivalent!). However, the film becomes a meditation on the meaning of two eras: one rooted in nineteenth-century mores—in faith and wonder, man confronting the elements—and the other guided and protected by technology. One era appears to be religious and the other secular. I wish I could say the crossover made the movie more interesting (but it doesn’t), but it’s satisfying to see the stories come together in the middle.
Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chen and Natalie Hewitt, “Endurance” is a rigorous documentary adventure film. It is based on the letters and diaries of Shackleton and his men. At one point, Shackleton wrote to his wife and said that he could not describe the thrill of exploring places and things that no human being had ever seen before. This was the main lure of Shackleton’s expedition, his fourth attempt to reach Antarctica. He never reached it. When he and his team sailed from South Georgia, the whalers there warned them not to postpone the voyage, saying the conditions would be too forbidding. But Shackleton, always desperate for funding, felt he could not turn back. Six months later, he and his crew were stuck in the icy Weddell Sea, and the ship soon sank.
The men we see in the old footage look strangely calm. They had supplies and lifeboats, each of which weighed a ton when stocked with equipment; The men had to pull those boats over the ice. Later, after they have washed up on Elephant Island and reached the end of their rope, Shackleton takes five men in a whale boat to sail 800 treacherous ocean miles to South Georgia, a land mass they must then walk across and expand. Mountains and crossing the icy abyss. You feel the worst of it. (This is what faith is like).
The film uses enhancements such as colorization and sound effects, something I was against until I saw Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Century-old silent footage is revamped in “Endurance” with respect for its verisimilitude. But I hope the movie doesn’t get mixed up with re-enactments. It is better to let us imagine what we cannot see. But what we see in “Endurance” is quietly astonishing.