DOCUMENTARY ON A DOCUMENTARY : "GRIZZLY MAN"

Ok , I rather like this one. It’s kind of neat – or I think so anyway. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man is a documentary. It’s a documentary on a documentary. No, I’m not trying to be clever or anything, this is real life. Herzog looks back on the life of Timothy Treadwell who spent the best part of 15 years living in the Alaskan wilderness campaigning for the protection of wild animals and specifically Grizzly bears. A greater part of his work involved filming the animals in their natural habitat and talking about them later, giving information to the general public.
And it has to be said at this point, Treadwell was quite a character. A one-time actor (never completely comfortable in his own skin and going as far as pretending he was Australian to most of his friends until his death) and a recovering alcoholic with much darkness in his past, he found his own form of salvation in the months he spent out in the wilderness. His work was very evidently well-meaning but none-the-less controversial. A lot of the natives of the area thought that Treadwell was in fact crossing a boundary and this was not only disrespectful to nature on a spiritual level but detrimental to the animals he was trying to protect as his constant presence made them used to humans and thus easier to catch and kill. Herzog presents as objective a look at he can at the life of an extraordinary man who literally lived and died for the animals.
Herzog’s Grizzly Man is thought provoking to say the least. Whatever else he was, Treadwell had the capacity to make you think. As one watches the footage – carefully edited post-mortem by Herzog and his team – one cannot, for example, help but notice Treadwell’s dark past seeping out. His approach to the animals is almost that of a child not an adult man. It could be argued that this was done purposefully to engage children and the general public (Treadwell spent the other half of the tear touring the schools and giving talks to children about conservation) but one doesn’t need to be overly observant to realize that it isn’t all an act. He gets frustrated with park authorities (who are not doing all they can to protect the animals) and goes off on a frustrated, violent rant about them littered with all kinds of insult. Out of the blue, a short but intensely homophobic rant finds its way into the footage. It could be argued that Treadwell was not a very pleasant man. From the footage, Herzog’s sympathy to him is very evident. But the admirable thing is that Grizzly Man doesn’t try to paint a pretty picture, it is very much “warts and all”. If nothing else, this film will get you thinking about Treadwell specifically and conservation in general. And even if, like me, you end up thinking that Treadwell was a rather unpleasant and rather troubled man, it is important to remember that his intentions concerning nature, animals and conservation were all in the right place, even if the ways he went about realizing them were questionable.