South is a documentary about Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which departed from South Georgia in 1914 to search for a passage through the South Pole. Although it was not the first time that a cameraman went on such an expedition, the first time was in 1903, South was the first long movie made of a Pole expedition.
Although the First World War had just begun, First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill gave the green light for this expedition. In order to prevent people from thinking that crew members shirk the moral duty to serve, Shackleton and his crew were put in a military uniform on departure.
Shackleton had an unconventional way of choosing his crew. He asked them one or two questions and then decided if they could join. In one case he did not ask any questions at all and took a man on because he thought he looked funny. It is therefore astonishing that all crew members survived this failed expedition. The only ones who did not return alive were the sled dogs. Where we see cute puppies in the beginning of the film, we do not see any more dogs at the end of the trip. You can guess what happened to them.
Shackleton's ship was stuck on the ice on 19 January 1915. They hoped that the thaw in the coming spring would melt the ice and set the ship free, but the floating ice caused the ship to be crushed and on November 21, 1915, the ship would definitely disappear under the ice. Cameraman Frank Hurley filmed it. I think this is the most impressive part of the whole movie. You can imagine that the crew saw their only possibility of returning to the inhabited world disappear like snow before the sun. With some lifeboats, they continued their way to find out that they were on a large floating ice shoots. Many crew members were too weak to continue the journey and Shackleton decided to continue the journey with some crew members, including Hurley, by sea. They would later return with a rescue team to rescue the rest of the crew. Because the movie camera was too heavy to take with them, Hurley only had a photo camera. With this camera he made some color pictures.
They managed to reach land and save the survived crew members and also film some animals on the way. I'm uncertain if Hurley had bought a new camera when they landed or they went back to save the crew and that he had his own camera back there. The latter seems most likely to me because a movie camera was expensive and Hurley agreed that he would receive a percentage of the proceeds from the expedition instead of pay. So it was to his advantage to spend as little money as possible and to shoot as many images as possible. He even went so far as to jump into the freezing water to save the movie negatives when the ship made water.
South is definitely not a David Attenborough documentary and there's too little action to make it a docudrama, but you should keep in mind that Hurley, in addition to filming, was mainly busy surviving just like all other crew members. I think that even nowadays, too little is known about what a cameraman has to do if he has to make a documentary. If he has to shoot a mountain climb, we as a viewer all see what the mountaineer has to face. We do not realize that the cameraman is going through the same misery. He’s even suffering more than the subject he’s filming because he has a heavy camera and the task of filming everything.
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