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Treadwell is a self-declared “protector of Grizzlies” who spent thirteen summers in Katmai National Park living among the wild brown bears often armed with nothing more than his camera equipment. To assemble his documentary, Herzog uses interviews of close friends of Treadwell, various professionals, and family with handpicked footage from over one hundred hours of Treadwell's wildlife footage. In constructing Grizzly Man, Herzog intentionally disrupts the reality of the film to build his narrative. In a similar fashion, Treadwell falsely portrays himself as a lone ranger and sole master and protector of the Alaskan wilderness in order to maintain a captivating character.
However, without abandoning ‘cinema verite’ Herzog would not have been able to produce such a compelling film.
The fabric Grizzly Man is stitched together by Herzog’s manipulation of sequence, perspective, and dialogue to reveal the deeper truth not portrayed by reality. Many critiques of the film debate whether or not Grizzly Man qualifies as a documentary. Is it a 'true' or appropriate representation of reality? The replicating of reality through cinema will always be fictional because of the very nature of film.
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“ She followed all my directions. It was really easy to contact her and respond very fast as well. ”
Reality is forced through several lenses and framed before it can ever be produced and viewed by an audience. As a filmmaker, Herzog shares this ideological perspective: all documentary is false even if it conveys the myth of objectivity. In his interview with NPR news host Scott Simon, Herzog asserts “I try to dig into something much deeper than the superficial truth of the so-called cinema verite [...] I've always looked for something much deeper, an ecstatic truth--the ecstasy of truth--some illumination in my feature films and in my documentaries.”
The function of the film image for Herzog is not to represent reality, but rather to build and shape images to form a facet of unseeable and unsayable truth.
The filmmaker readily admits to fabricating his documentaries, including staging scenes and inventing dialogue, thus blurring elements of fact, event, realism, and fiction. His motivation is spurred by the postmodern and digital age's challenges and alterations to representing reality, which the filmmaker believes need to be redefined and restructured. As a result, Herzog's documentaries are as mystically charged as his fiction films. Beyond that, the key benefit of having Herzog assembling Treadwell’s footage is a perspective on the material that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
Herzog stands in awe of Treadwell’s up-close-and-personal shots of bears in all their “grace and ferociousness”—a long take of a fight between two males over a female is stunningly savage, not to mention revealing of Treadwell’s own romantic frustrations—but the stuff that truly fascinates would have gone straight to the cutting-room floor. Though Treadwell failed in his efforts to become a Hollywood actor—his story about nearly getting Woody Harrelson’s part on Cheers doesn’t pass the smell test—he had an innate sense of where to place his camera, and how to present himself in front of it. At the same time, the camera served as his companion out in the wild, a sounding board for his frustration, his paranoia, and the ebb and flow of his joy and despair.
The questions surrounding Treadwell's identity and objectives elicited by Herzog's interviewees deepens his role as the forger, thus strengthening his will to power through the crystalline system. As the protagonist of the film, Treadwell is a link in the 'chain of forgers,' blurring notions of reality and imagination. In an attempt to portray Treadwell beginning to craft his own movie, 'something way beyond a wildlife film,' Herzog shows the amateur filmmaker methodically shooting monologue scenes, claiming he would sometimes film fifteen takes to perfect his work. Herzog's film cuts to a scene where Treadwell emerges out of the Alaskan bush running toward the camera as if staging an 'action-movie scene.' What is most revealing in this scene is that Treadwell is seen clutching a loaned video camera from Minolta as he enters into the frame. In another example, viewers see Treadwell again from his footage holding a camera as he stands in knee-deep water posing for the other camera who Herzog tells us becomes his 'only companion.'
The scenes are reflexive of the film's production and ultimately endorse evidence of Treadwell, like Herzog, as a charlatan (Deleuze, 1989a: 132). This obscures the viewer's recognition of what is present or past, false or real in Treadwell's footage. Grizzly Man forces viewers to question one of many mysteries, such as: Is Treadwell's footage real? Is it staged? What is its final purpose? What is Herzog's role in this? How much is he manipulating Treadwell's images and defining his footage? For example, are Treadwell's monologues purposefully inviting the viewer to suspect that perhaps the repetitive acknowledgment of the dangers presented by the bears are used to heighten the risk he was taking and promote him as a courageous adventurer? Or are they more sincere? Perhaps Herzog's editing constructed a character who wanted to star in his own movie and the majority of the 100 hours of footage are recorded nature scenes, as Pavolack reveals in interviews.
Elsaesser believes it is difficult to assess the identity and motivations of Herzog's protagonists because the director shoots and edits in a way so as to 'not interfere with the integrity of the image' (Elsaesser, 1989: 131). The crystalline system, however, as used by Herzog in Grizzly Man causes 'appearances [to] betray themselves, not because they would give way to a more profound truth, but simply because they reveal themselves as non-true' (Deleuze, 1989a: 138). This is corroborated, if not intensified, by Treadwell's footage revealing its own production.
Directed by Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man. (2022, Jan 28). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/directed-by-werner-herzog-grizzly-man-essay
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