The Great White Silence is a very interesting silent documentary about an expedition to the Antarctic back in the early 1910s, and the age of the footage and the documentary itself makes it all weirdly eerie and a bit sad. Maybe part of the sadness came from listening to Sigur Ros while watching this - I was trying to think of wintery music without lyrics, or with minimal vocals, and that band came to mind first. Their 2002 album simply known as "( )" paired well with the visuals on offer.
It's a pretty straightforward historical document, with many title cards being used throughout for context, and little by way of story. It almost didn't need any narrative - much of the documentary is just spent on wildlife and simply how human beings are to live in freezing cold conditions, and so eventually, I forgot about the whole expedition thing, until the film seemed to remember that was the point all of a sudden and then got back to covering it.
Some might find it all a bit boring, but I think for its time, this was pretty amazing, and for capturing so much footage on Antarctica from this long ago, I'd say The Great White Silence certainly has merit. It's a shame it falls into the Dambusters and H. P. Lovecraft camp of giving a pet a very racist name (that whole segment was more than a bit awkward), and I feel like they're also kind of mean to the animals (scaring a mother away from her newly-hatched chicks every hour to document their process of growing, and a "game" played with young penguins really just involves chasing/frightening them all over the place), but that's the 1910s for you, I guess. Speaking of the 1910s, it's crazy to think all this footage was shot before the Titanic disaster, and the director filmed plenty of icebergs.
Anyway, documentary fans should check this out. I feel like it's a classic/definitive title within the canon of documentary cinema.
