My personal favourite work of his is "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga". Most of the people are doing immediate purposeful work and are much more present. There is so much resilience (the bear destroyed hut), and there is also tragedy in it as well (the fire).
I like Herzog's work, but that's a really tricky one. Herzog only became involved after the film was completed, and then edited it down to make more salable. I liked Herzog's version, but I liked the original even more once I found it.
While Herzog certainly made it more popular, he lost a lot of accuracy by forcing it to tell the story he wanted it to tell. It certainly shook my faith in Herzog as a documentarian. He's a good artist, but you shouldn't trust him when it comes to facts.
The full original by Dmitri Vasyukov (Дмитрий Васюков) is available in four parts (one for each season) on Youtube. Here's the first quarter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttItxwzgbUs
I like that one as well. I just rewatched it again. One of the trappers in the movie is Mikhail Tarkovsky and I just learned he is actually the nephew nephew Andrei Tarkovsky, the film director.
I would describe it as a faustian penguin, not a nihilist penguin. The other day there was a story here about a coyote that swam to alcatraz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674433).
When we look at an animal that does such a thing, we characterize it as a strange and suicidal act of a disturbed creature hurtling it's life force into the abyss. But when man does the same thing, it is a heroic and uniquely human act of exploration.
If you go onto an island or some mountain range or some other type of isolated pocket of the world, you may be surprised to find that life exists there. But there is only one way in which this is possible: at some point in time, some living thing had to abandon its old world with little regard for its personal survival.
When you factor in the probability of survival in the new world, and the requirement of finding a sexed pair on the other side you realize that this takes many living things, integrated over a long period of time.
Life pushes boundaries and explores new environments. It has to start from something. Clearly some amount of mania is a requisite for success in the long term in order to overcome reason in the short term.
> When we look at an animal that does such a thing, we characterize it as a strange and suicidal act of a disturbed creature hurtling it's life force into the abyss. But when man does the same thing, it is a heroic and uniquely human act of exploration.
I'd say that that's mostly because the man in question is rational. They strategize, they collect resources, and they do whatever they can to make sure they can return. The penguin can't do that. It doesn't have a goal in mind, or any way to sustain itself while it wanders. It just goes.
> When you factor in the probability of survival in the new world, and the requirement of finding a sexed pair on the other side you realize that this takes many living things, integrated over a long period of time.
Seems to me you've described how lone adventuring animals are not the source of dispersion to remote areas.
It has been a while since I read Nietzsche but what exactly does trekking off into the unknown or even certain death have to do with nihilism? Maybe active nihilism but even that would be a stretch, not to mention it would make the penguin inspiring rather than depressing.
This is Nietzsche’s will to power in its most unforgiving form.
The will to power is not mere survival or dominance over others; at its apex it is the drive to impose one’s own meaning on existence, even when that meaning is written in self-destruction.
It is like Empedocles and the volcano.
Empedocles does not leap to escape mortality; he leaps to overreach it, to force the cosmos to acknowledge his claim, even if the price is erasure.
The penguin would rather perish as itself than endure as something lesser.
Yeah, this is using nihilism in the colloquial sense that is closer to a synonym of “aimless” or maybe “doomed”. The penguin can’t possibly be a nihilist except for in the sense that all animals are nihilists
Interesting, I've seen videos about this nihilistic penguin the last few days on Instagram... Feels like content regurgitation, but I don't know who's creating and who's recycling it at the moment.
(On HN there's often a story from one site one day, and a few days later the same story reported by a different news site..)
Why nihilism and not just confusion? If you stick me in the Sahara Desert, I might just start marching deeper into it, because I want to get out but have no idea where I am. I think birds have a magnetic sense, maybe this penguin just got that messed up?
The researcher in the film says the penguins can "become disoriented" and it's not made clear in the film whether that _always_ results in the penguins venturing off to the centre of the continent or if that's just what happened to the one they got footage of.
Huh? I was expecting at least one or two Nietzsche or Dostoevsky quotes but this article completely fails to go beyond what is obvious to anyone who has seen those 3 minutes of the documentary.
That's how new species happen. Over time, the penguins who get sufficiently tired of all the other penguins' shit march off to the edge of the map, and when they finally get lucky, enough of the smart, independent minded penguins survive to produce a new generation. The new adventure flock eventually garners enough members to march back to the feeding grounds and seize the territory from the loser normy penguins.
Thus the arc of the universe bends towards badass penguins.
The whole point of the sequence is that there's no chance that these "badass penguins" are going to make new species. There's no food where they're monomaniacally heading. They're going to die.
Interesting fantasy but these broken penguins are too infrequent to start something new. They usually just wander off to die alone in the cold.
New species are usually formed gradually while introducing their mutations to the population until they eventually break off as a group. But more commonly there’s usually a geographic barrier that separates an existing group and they gradually just drift apart from each other.
Or they find a new feeding ground? Why does the universe bend to “badass penguins”?
The universe really does not care, in a “badass” way. Major league not caring.
It’s our interpretation that something is “badass” mainly because our species has pretty much negatively affected most parts of the environment.
It’s us that are “badass” and don’t “get it” when it comes to nature and the environment.
As someone else points out, there is no such thing as a nihilist penguin, it’s purely us putting a label on behaviour that we - once again - don’t understand.
Pet_Ant|1 month ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_People:_A_Year_in_the_Ta...
nkurz|1 month ago
While Herzog certainly made it more popular, he lost a lot of accuracy by forcing it to tell the story he wanted it to tell. It certainly shook my faith in Herzog as a documentarian. He's a good artist, but you shouldn't trust him when it comes to facts.
The full original by Dmitri Vasyukov (Дмитрий Васюков) is available in four parts (one for each season) on Youtube. Here's the first quarter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttItxwzgbUs
rdtsc|1 month ago
seizethecheese|1 month ago
Totally different but Little Dieter Needs to Fly is one of my favorites
beeflet|1 month ago
When we look at an animal that does such a thing, we characterize it as a strange and suicidal act of a disturbed creature hurtling it's life force into the abyss. But when man does the same thing, it is a heroic and uniquely human act of exploration.
If you go onto an island or some mountain range or some other type of isolated pocket of the world, you may be surprised to find that life exists there. But there is only one way in which this is possible: at some point in time, some living thing had to abandon its old world with little regard for its personal survival.
When you factor in the probability of survival in the new world, and the requirement of finding a sexed pair on the other side you realize that this takes many living things, integrated over a long period of time.
Life pushes boundaries and explores new environments. It has to start from something. Clearly some amount of mania is a requisite for success in the long term in order to overcome reason in the short term.
barcodehorse|1 month ago
I'd say that that's mostly because the man in question is rational. They strategize, they collect resources, and they do whatever they can to make sure they can return. The penguin can't do that. It doesn't have a goal in mind, or any way to sustain itself while it wanders. It just goes.
dd8601fn|1 month ago
Seems to me you've described how lone adventuring animals are not the source of dispersion to remote areas.
Notatheist|1 month ago
krona|1 month ago
The will to power is not mere survival or dominance over others; at its apex it is the drive to impose one’s own meaning on existence, even when that meaning is written in self-destruction.
It is like Empedocles and the volcano.
Empedocles does not leap to escape mortality; he leaps to overreach it, to force the cosmos to acknowledge his claim, even if the price is erasure.
The penguin would rather perish as itself than endure as something lesser.
seizethecheese|1 month ago
netsharc|1 month ago
(On HN there's often a story from one site one day, and a few days later the same story reported by a different news site..)
DavidPiper|1 month ago
arjie|1 month ago
I suspect it was something like that.
Towaway69|1 month ago
> It’s a decade since the film officially premiered at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, and it remains one of Herzog’s finest achievements.
So it would seem the article is nearly a decade old.
mig39|1 month ago
direwolf20|1 month ago
palmotea|1 month ago
ytoawwhra92|1 month ago
mellosouls|1 month ago
History of the meme and resurgence in the last month:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/penguin-walking-toward-mounta...
mitchbob|1 month ago
krona|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
NedF|1 month ago
[deleted]
observationist|1 month ago
Thus the arc of the universe bends towards badass penguins.
tptacek|1 month ago
dyauspitr|1 month ago
New species are usually formed gradually while introducing their mutations to the population until they eventually break off as a group. But more commonly there’s usually a geographic barrier that separates an existing group and they gradually just drift apart from each other.
Towaway69|1 month ago
The universe really does not care, in a “badass” way. Major league not caring.
It’s our interpretation that something is “badass” mainly because our species has pretty much negatively affected most parts of the environment.
It’s us that are “badass” and don’t “get it” when it comes to nature and the environment.
As someone else points out, there is no such thing as a nihilist penguin, it’s purely us putting a label on behaviour that we - once again - don’t understand.