Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog
Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, who was a very idiosyncratic American conservationist and bear-lover. Timmy (as he was known to his friends) spent thirteen consecutive summers living with bears somewhere in Alaska. He filmed his experiences in the hope of producing a documentary study that would alert people to the beauty and value of the bear. Thanks to this, Herzog’s documentary can draw heavily on footage recorded by its very subject. Most of the footage features Timmy himself--setting up the camera on a tripod, then standing or squatting in front of it to talk, often with bears in the background.
Grizzly Man is a film about a film-maker, and in many ways Herzog has really just edited and produced the film that Treadwell never got to complete himself. On the other hand, Herzog quite openly brings his own perspective to the piece, as well as his own passages of heavily-accented narration, and further footage of interviews with Timmy’s friends and family.
In case you haven’t yet guessed, Timmy is dead. He got eaten by a bear.
I suppose I went along to this film hoping to see a sort of black comedy. Though I gasped with laughter, it was not a comedy because the film does not set out to be funny. But just can’t help it. When you meet Timothy Treadwell, within thirty seconds of the first reel of
Grizzly Man, you will understand why.
And yet I maintain that this is the most serious film that I could imagine. The audience is swept with laughter because we are brought face to face with the most mortal reality, and in the end there is nothing left but to laugh.
Timmy was in love with the bears, as well as the foxes that lived near his campsite. He knew many of these animals personally, had names for them and developed relationships with them. The evidence is clear in the documentary that they knew him also. The foxes, especially, would hang around him and play with him in a way we would only expect from domesticated dogs. There are numerous scenes in the film where Timmy cries, or almost cries, while he talks about how much he loves the animals, and how thankful he is for the opportunity to live with them. And in the scenes where he is with the animals, he repeatedly tells them how much he loves them. In one scene, he finds poo recently left behind by one of his favourite bears, and he puts his hand on it, babbling excitedly at the camera about how he is able ‘to touch the poop’ and how amazing it is that this poop ‘has been inside of her’.
Timmy is almost totally unguarded--apparently unaware of how flamboyantly insane he appears. And in this way I enjoyed the film just as a document about Americans. About half the peripheral interviewees have this quality as well, this openness, this trust, this bizarre lack of any sense of irony. I can hardly believe how expressive most of these people are in front of a rolling camera; at one point it even occurred to me that the whole thing was so intensely significant, so perfectly poignant, that perhaps it was all a scripted drama made to look like a documentary. But no--I believe that this is a genuine doco. What makes it the most moving film I can remember seeing is the unmistakable reality of it. This is both a film, in the artistic, sculpted sense, and simply a slice of someone’s life: direct, confronting and real. The fact that all this actually happened almost forces me to re-evaluate my idea of reality.
This isn't the first movie that's done this. A couple of other films from the last few years come to mind:
Capturing the Friedmans and
Tarnation. Both these films are also records of desperate, incandescent lives that were somehow captured on video camera. For all three films we can thank the fact that some Americans live permanently in their own home-movie. They seem tailor-made for it--made to be in a movie. The people in all these films seem to need to talk to the camera in order to talk to themselves. We are the audience and they are reaching out to us, asking us to bear witness to their lives, in a way that even the best professional actors cannot.
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