Seeing that we are in a literature class, it may seem surprising to some that we are watching a supposed "documentary". This film is, in fact, classified as documentary on many of the websites with information on the film, including Wikipedia and even rogerebert.com. However, if you listen to the NPR interview with director Werner Herzog, the classification of "documentary" is rather deceiving.
Here's the fact about the film. It is based on some ninety hours of footage Timothy Treadwell shot during his 13 or so years living amongst grizzly bears in Alaska. I can imagine that this alone leads people to believe that this film is entirely factual. Herzog, however, makes it clear in his interview with NPR that this is not necessarily the case. Interestingly, he refers to Treadwell as a character that found him as a director. Furthermore, Herzog even admits at one point that the film enables Treadwell to become the star of Herzog's "best feature film".
All of these small details should clue us into something we have dealt with before in the class: this piece is a construct. The Timothy we observe is not a man that stands alone in this film but rather is a character born out of the mind of Herzog. The fact that Herzog had to choose only 103 minutes out of 90 hours of footage should serve as a warning to us that he chose this footage carefully and intentionally. He is crafting his film through the selected footage and music in order to construct us, his audience, to become the viewers he wants us to become. It is very possible and I argue very likely that the film is in fact a playing out of Herzog's argument against Treadwell's idealized, harmonious view of nature that Herzog touched upon during his NPR interview. Therefore, knowing that we are once again subjected to the motif of authorial control, I urge everyone to watch the film in order to understand how Herzog effectively--or not so effectively--pulls the strings and manipulates this story to persuade us to support his view.
When taking all of Herzog's craftsmanship into account, it is interesting how difficult it still is to figure out what exactly it is he is intending his audience to get out of the film. As viewers following his construct, we can see that he was not trying to portray the same message to the masses as Timothy Treadwell, but that leaves us to decipher what that is. He includes more footage about human nature than the actual bears, and his scripted interviews make it obvious that he has pieced this film together a particular way. Our job is to interpret what his goal may have been, or if there was one at all.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree Amelia. Obviously, I wrote this post before I saw the film so I merely speculated that perhaps we would see Herzog's argument against Treadwell play out. In a sense, we are seeing this. Herzog repeatedly includes scenes where Treadwell's trust in nature is violated by the aggressive behavior by the grizzlies or even by the fox when it steals Tim's hat. However, the danger of trusting nature is evident even without watching the film. From the beginning, we know that Treadwell and his girl friend are both dead after being attacked and eaten by bears. We know the end of the story and therefore we know that Herzog is making the argument against trusting in nature all along. So the question is, what else is going on that we can't or don't see yet? There has to be something more to how Herzog is presenting the story and what footage he includes.
ReplyDeleteRight now, my guess is that the key lies in where the film contradicts itself. Tim was going to protect the bears in a national park where the bears are already protected by the government. Herzog says he wanted to defend Tim as a filmmaker yet is seemingly arguing against what he is doing. The pilot who first found Tim said that Tim would have preferred to not be found yet the pilot was the one who called the authorities. In the film, Tim is full of contradictions. The pilot is full of contradictions. Herzog himself is full of contradictions. Thus, perhaps this film's "ecstatic truth" lies not in the story of a single man, but instead in the nature of all men. What this nature is exactly isn't clear yet, but this film seems to be about human nature rather than the life of a single man, Timothy Treadwell.