In mid-1941 an old ship’s carpenter turns up in an Irish fishing village alleging that he is the only survivor of a secret expedition to the South Pole. J.C. Sullivan explains that he signed on in 1905 with the ‘Hollandia’, without knowing the vessel’s destination. At that time the South Pole was virtually unknown, a white and inhospitable void at the end of the world. Sullivan startled his interrogators with his improbably story of this expedition, which eventually took him and several other crewmen to the very end of the world and of life, to a hell from which no one can return. But Sullivan has film material to prove his story: breathtaking shots of an unknown landscape. ‘We were beyond, the far side…’ says Sullivan. ‘We had gone beyond, to the Other side…’The footage of the South Pole in The Forbidden Quest are indeed authentic; they are shots made during polar expeditions in the first thirty years of this century. Cameramen such as Frank Hurley and Herbert Ponting shot film in almost impossible conditions during expeditions by e.g. Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton. These authentic pictures, which fit beautifully in the classic and heroic story told in The Forbidden Quest, have been found by Peter Delpeut in the unique collection of the Netherlands Film Museum His previous film Lyrical Nitrate came about in a similar way.The story does not relegate the documentary pictures into the background, nor do the fascinating pictures degrade the story. In The Forbidden Quest fiction (the story told in retrospect) and reality (the authentic images) form the unity which one can usually only aspire to.
