When watching Grizzly Man in class, I made an effort to look for connections between this documentary and the other readings we've done in class. I found that while watching, and looking for truth, lies, and bias, I found that the lies were more subtle than in other works that we have seen. Because all the footage was shot by Treadwell himself, and it all depicts actual events, it is hard to find lies in his footage. However, upon looking deeper, there is a lot of room for manipulation on the part of the director. The documentarian, Werner Herzog has a lot of freedom in terms of what clips to use, when to use them, and especially has a lot of control over the interviews that he includes. This allows for the film to be fairly biased even though it is non-fiction.
In Herzog's NPR interview, he even says that he believes that Grizzly Man really more of a fictional feature film than a documentary, while he says that another one of his fictional films is more like a documentary. This indicated to me that even though something uses events and interviews etc. that actually happened, that does not necessarily give it a documentary-like or nonfiction-like feel. Herzog believes that he is telling Grizzly Man's story, and he is doing it in his own way through his own biased lens. This means that we are being subtly lied to (manipulated) by Herzog. He is presenting a documentary about Tim Treadwell that reflects his personal bias, and therefore has an argument of his own that he is making. It is important for us as readers to be wise to this reality, and to take this manipulation into account when analyzing this movie.
I definitely agree that the narrator used his freedom to manipulate the viewers. As I was watching the second half of the movie, I realized that the narrator inserted more of his own commentary and opinions. When he began saying things similar to "this differs from my own view", I started thinking "since when did documentaries include the narrator's personal opinion?" I think Herzog tried to be subtle in his narration but it definitely becomes obvious at one point what kind of view he had and wanted the viewers to have as well. It is definitely a different take on documentaries than what I think most viewers are used to. Like you said and we discussed in class, we often think that since it is a documentary, we should believe everything in it. I think it is difficult as viewers to choose what to believe in, but as long as we have that choice, we can still be wise.
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