Hasta La Motion!

In his documentaries, German filmmaker Werner Herzog has made poetic pessimism his trademark. His voice overs seem to bask in the bleakness of their own words, sometimes making it hard to gauge whether he is serious or jesting. Peet Gelderblom’s mash-up plays on this aspect by combining audio from Herzog’s antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World with footage from a very different kind of icy movie: the animated musical Happy Feet. The result is a surrealist clash of heavy-handed narration and lighthearted visuals. It’s a clash that, for one thing, reveals the appetite for Hollywoodian hyperboles in Herzog’s dramatic narration. Heading Towards Certain Death is the third instalment of Pretty Messed Up, a limited series of conceptual movie mashups by Peet Gelderblom (www.directorama.net). You may know Gelderblom from his side-by-side montage that pitted Hitchcock against De Palma in a Split Screen Bloodbath (www.vimeo.com/193068848), or from his Director’s Cut of Raising Cain (www.directorama.net/raising-cain-directors-cut/). Please visit www.filmscalpel.com for detailed credits. This video was made solely for educational purposes and makes “fair use” of copyrighted material. Fair use is codified at Section 107 of the Copyright Act: Under the fair use doctrine, it is not an infringement to use the copyrighted works of another in some circumstances, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, or educational use.