Herbert Ponting spent more than a year with Captain Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition, and this is the footage he brought home: ponies and dog teams hauling sledges across the ice, penguin colonies, the wooden hut at Cape Evans, and the men who would die on the return from the South Pole in 1912. Ponting shot the film as the official record of the expedition and edited it himself in 1924, years after the deaths of Scott and his four companions were already public knowledge, so the same shots of departure carry a weight the original audience couldn't have missed. There is no reenactment here, only what the camera actually caught on the ice: killer whales surfacing near the ship, blizzards pinning down the camp, the everyday work of a scientific expedition that became a tragedy. The BFI National Archive's restoration, honored with Best Archive Restoration at the 2011 Focal International Awards, is the reason the image quality holds up. What remains is the closest thing to eyewitness footage of the Scott expedition, silent and largely unnarrated, letting the landscape and the men's faces carry the record.