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The novel premise of the documentary Antarctica: A Year on Ice, which Chicago Filmmakers will screen at its Andersonville location this coming Saturday and then at Columbia College the following Wednesday, is that it doesn’t focus on the wonders of Antarctica or the scientists who study them. Rather, it centers on those people who work year-round on scientific-research bases in nonresearch roles. (There are very few people who do this. The movie informs us that only a few hundred people remain on Antarctica after the summer season ends.) Director-cinematographer Anthony Powell maintains communications networks for a living, and some of the more prominent interviewees include a fireman, an office manager, and a woman who manages her base’s general store. In its own modest way, the movie is as awe-inspiring as the sort of straightforward nature documentary you might see at the Omnimax Theater. It shows us that, even in the most forbidding conditions, little neighborhood communities still take root.
A couple weeks ago, I proffered the term “neighborhood movies” to describe a certain model of light entertainment grounded in the everyday routines of a particular community. These movies are much easier to watch than they are to review—they’re unambitious by design, yet convey such authority in their details that they linger in the memory much longer than “important” works. Because of its gorgeous images of giant icebergs and the aurora australis, Antarctica doesn’t resemble most neighborhood movies, but it belongs in the genre all the same. The night before I screened it, I caught up with the restored version of Jacques Becker’s Antoine and Antoinette (a classic neighborhood movie, for certain), which played at the Gene Siskel Film Center a couple months ago. I found the films complemented each other beautifully. How encouraging it was to find the same anxieties about staying on task at work and keeping on good terms with your neighbors in such different eras and climates.
