Grizzly Men

I’ve been a fan of Werner Herzog since some point in the 1980s when I saw Aguirre, Wrath of God on TV. I think it was during the great reign of Alex Cox on Moviedrome, when a stuck at home teenager could depend on a regular stream of the coolest, weirdest cult films coming out of the television (although on researching this it appears that Moviedrome never featured Aguirre!). Nowadays, the dvd bonanza of reissues, and bit-torrented div-x’d whatever’d video files shared online provide a very different route in. Maybe there’s more access now, but there is a lack of the personal curatorship that a Cox would bring to your viewing.

I’m not sure what the next Herzog film I saw was, but the next revelation for me was starting to catch his documentary work. Amazingly inspiring films, and it was amazingly inspiring also that he worked in both fiction and non-fiction modes. It created in me a new sense of what a modern film maker could be, what a film maker could achieve.

This weekend I finally got around to watching Grizzly Man his recent documentary, after picking a used copy up cheap at the local video store. What a pleasure it was to sit down again and hear the warm, pleasant tones of Werner’s voice as he brought another story to life.

By now you probably know something of the story behind the film, even if you haven’t seen it: Timothy Treadwell a minor actor with an alcohol problem finds himself in an environmental crusade to save the grizzly bear, which over a span of 13 years sees him living in ridiculously, dangerous proximity to bears every summer. He captures amazing footage of the animals, gets to know them, the local ecosystem and their patterns of behaviour – until he and his girlfriend are killed and eaten by one of the bears.

The legacy of Treadwell’s video recordings provide an archival record from which Herzog weaves his own telling of Treadwell’s story, adding interviews with other players in the events to find out more about what made Treadwell who he was. In this story Herzog returns to familiar themes of obsession and wild nature, and again we can sense his continuance of a strand of German Romanticism. Never sentimental, Herzog defines his separation from Treadwell in his own sense of the awe-ful, his perception of the neutral chaos in nature where Treadwell sensed some more beneficent order.

Yet the story of Treadwell is both tragic and inspiring – some of the footage of Treadwell with the bears, with the family of foxes he befriends, snowy mountains in the background is like the chocolate box Eden of the Watchtower and other Jehovah’s Witness propaganda. It is easy to confuse an appreciation of nature’s beauty with an over simplified vision of universal harmony. In many of the clips in which Treadwell is shown speaking, he refers to the possibility of his own death, and some viewers have sensed some kind of Thanatos – death wish in him, despite his otherwise carefree behaviour. Some of the most telling parts psychologically come from where Herzog show Treadwell’s rushes in extended form, so we see him moving from the educator persona he has created for his schools audience and the obsessed auteur, swearing egomaniacal force he can also manifest (the connections here between Treadwell and an archetype – which both Herzog and Klaus Kinski often channelled appears clear).

The film is assisted massively by an excellent soundtrack performed by a group of musicians centred on Richard Thompson. The DVD includes a bonus documentary on the session which produced the music score, which is an added delight where you can watch Thompson, Jim O’Rourke, Henry Kaiser and others in action.