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Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Cold Love Jennifer Fay (bio) This essay concerns Antarctica, the most unlovable place on earth. We know this continent—such that it can be known—from statistics, photographs, films, and narratives of adventure, each trying to penetrate its virtually empty interior. Antarctica attracts me as a subject because it challenges two intertwined modes of attachment: cinephilia and ecophilia, forms of love that intensify when celluloid and certain ecosystems draw near their moment of disappearance. The latter expresses a love of dwelling in the world, the former a desire to dwell in the image. Both often pivot around highly sentimental object relations that in turn inspire lovers to preserve the films and places of their affections. Antarctica fascinates because it would seem to negate the love of both cinephilia and ecophilia. Its relentless sun in summer can lead to snow blindness and overexposure of skin and celluloid alike. Its winter defies vision and cinematic capture altogether (see figure 1). From its earliest “nondiscovery” by Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century, the seventh continent has figured cartographically as a negative space at the bottom of the earth, and, in many of the first films and photographs shot during the long winter, the landscape captured with flash photography produces what appears to be a negative image.1 Stephen J. Pyne explains that through the mid-twentieth century the South Pole has challenged [End Page 291] not just narrative, but “the metaphysics (and metahistory) of nature”: “In place of abundant objects, there was only ice; and in place of tangible landmarks, such as mountains or lakes, there were only abstract concepts, such as the poles of rotation, magnetism, or inaccessibility, all invisible to the senses.”2 In the early exploration films, the journey to the pole and its “discovery” elude the cinematic and even photographic record, and not simply because few of the early filmmakers reached this prized geographic coordinate. Roald Amundsen had to plant a flag in the otherwise empty, indistinct space before he could photograph a location he “discovered” by virtue of meridian calculation.3 Arriving at the same spot just months after Amundsen, Robert Scott, without a trace of sublime reverence, described the pole’s “awful monotony” of ice, snow, and inhuman cold.4 Richard E. Byrd, accompanied by Paramount cameraman Joseph Rucker, was the first to fly over the pole (see figure 2). The triumphant moment captured on film, however, is little more than an indistinguishable white expanse spied from the plane’s small window. The climax of the film and the goal of expedition leave everything and nothing to the imagination. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. South, dir. Frank Hurley (Ralph Minden Film, 1919). Hurley’s flash photography of The Endurance during the Antarctic winter. As a result of this apparently empty, shimmering topography, modern Antarctica has reflected back more the temperament and culture of the people who have traveled there than it has revealed [End Page 292] anything about itself. Survival in the early days of exploration, as Pyne describes it, “meant surmounting the inactivity and lethargy of the polar night and enduring the introspection and deprivation that were the supreme Antarctic attributes.” Put differently, Antarctica did not produce a sensible experience: rather, its numbing whiteness—“utterly without ‘human interest’”—made it the most anesthetic, even antibiotic, continent on earth.5 Geophysicist Bill Green writes of his Antarctic obsession: “It is precisely what is not there, what has never been there, that makes . . . the whole continent . . . so strange and so important.”6 Antarctica, as a place, and the pole, as a coordinate, seem to offer nothing to lovers of cinema or nature. Or, maybe it is the void that we love. Channeling the last thoughts of one of Captain Scott’s doomed traveling companions, Annie Dillard imagines the dizzying Antarctic freeze as a “lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.”7 While parts of the continent host very cute animal life such as penguins, seals, and whales, humans are hard-pressed to invest in the conservation of ice for its own sake, as an object in its...
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