I’ve had a couple more thoughts after thinking about the film – and yes, the fact that I’d think about it is truly an indicator that the film did its job.
Herzog. He’s a good editor, and that’s the films strength. He should have had the restraint to resist grandstanding in the scene with the audio tape. If you aren’t going to include it – which you shouldn’t – don’t make it central to a scene. By the way, despite his fatherly advice that Jewel destroy the tape, it’s clear that he ended up with it in his possession. Some of the video is clearly labeled as occurring hours before the attack.
Herzog also strays from the documentary theme by prepping, and perhaps rehearsing, the scenes with the coroner. The guy is clearly uncomfortable in front of the camera, and looks into it for further direction at several points. In his scene with the watch, the scissors are conspicuously placed on the table in advance, and he rather oddly cuts the bag first from one end, and then the other, while mechanically going through his lines. Distracting.
I think Treadwell’s rant about the parks service may have had more of a purpose than paranoid fantasy after all. He must have known that at some point they’d be forced to remove him, and that, as opposed to their lack of stewardship over the bears, is probably the source of his anger. Could it be that there is a correlation between threats from the parks service and the escalation of his risk taking behavior? The last thing that an addictive personality would have wanted was to be removed from whatever was currently getting him high.
It’s clear he used it, and returned it. Assuming it was the same tape. And grandstanding? That was a powerful moment, one of the central moments of the film. I saw no grandstanding.
I put that all on the coroner, not on Herzog. It was very revealing of his personality. You’d have a point if Herzog “prepared” everybody else, more than is “proper” in a documentary, but there’s zero evidence of that. I can totally see that coroner dude thinking, This is my big chance! Let me comb my hair first! Here, let me put the scissors out first, OK? I think Herzog just let him do his thing.
Possibly. Still, the simpler explanation is that he just grew progressively more obsessive and paranoid.
Wow. I think we have a new title-holder for the “Most Badass Reaction to Being Shot” award:
And lissener, I agree with your assessment of the coroner’s situation. He works in a job that most people don’t like to think about, in a remote area of a remote state most people will never visit, and suddenly he’s getting some attention from a big-time filmmaker.
Watching him, I got the impression that this was a man who’s spent many, many hours alone with corpses; every facet of his behavior seemed to be a reaction to his extreme discomfort.
No, I’ve got to stick with blaming Herzog for the coroner’s ‘performance’. He could always have told the guy, “Look, if I wanted this badly acted, I could have called Michael Caine.” And as a last resort, could have omitted, or edited down the scenes.
Herzog is also not a character in this drama. He didn’t belong in a scene where he, Herzog, listens to the tape and then deems it improper to include. Clearly he would have already have come to that conclusion.
Sadly the most interesting thing about the movie for me was how a 46 year old dude living in the wilderness managed to look like a 24 year old GQ model every day. Maybe there is a fountain of youth up there or something.
Say what? Herzog is making this film; if Herzog decides he’s a character, then he is.
Grizzly Man is not intended to be the story of Timothy Treadwell’s time among the bears; it’s the story of Herzog’s investigation into Treadwell’s story, an investigation which is greatly aided (and made cinematic) by the availability of a couple hundred hours of Treadwell’s own footage. If it were just intended to be the story of Treadwell, then Herzog’s intrusions would be unwelcome.
But it’s up to Herzog to edit all this footage. Every time he decides to include or exclude a clip, he’s putting his own views and opinions into the story. (“Every cut is a lie,” as the cinéma vérité types say.) For him to pretend to present an objective view of this story would be ridiculous, and indeed dishonest; like all of us, he’s got a viewpoint, and he can either acknowledge that openly in his working of the material, or try to pretend it’s not there. I’d much rather have it out in the open than get some skewed, dishonest pretense of “neutrality.”
I can’t prevent him, of course. He has, as you suggest, immense control of the story through his narration and editing. He didn’t need to also have himself filmed listening to that audio. Just one man’s opinion, but he let his ego get in the way here.
I watched this last night, mainly because there wasn’t anything else on. I remembered vague things about the story- that he and his girlfriend had been eaten, and they’d killed the bear responsible- but didn’t recall hearing much about it when it was in the theaters.
Partway through the movie I turned to Mr. Kitty and said “This guy is INSANE. Unmedicated bipolar, probably a former alcoholic. And I think he might be dealing with some sexuality issues. The former girlfriend isn’t all there either.” Not five minutes later was a mention of his wild mood swings, his brief experimentation with psychiatric meds, and his alcoholism. I hate being right sometimes.
Having seen the movie and ending q&a with the participants… I don’t know. I felt uncomfortable watching the movie, like I was peering into someone’s losing battle with inner demons. Treadwell was misguided, and behaved utterly irresponsibly (the foxes following him like little dogs and sleeping next to him killed me), and I fear that one of the kids he lectured to may grow up to be as irresponsible because really, he got away with it for a very, very long time. But he was clearly driven by an innate madness that had as much to do with his death as the bear.
I do have to admit I laughed when the pilot (not the friend-rodeo-guy-pilot, the other one) said the bears must have thought Treadwell was “retarded or something.” Eeesh.
I wish Amie’s parents had allowed the film to address her more; they kept mentioning how afraid of the bears she was, yet it was her third summer with them and she chose to return with Treadwell after the airport altercation (side note: can you imagine watching TV one day, and realizing that your argument with a stranger put them totally over the edge and led to them fatally being in the wrong place at the wrong time?) despite his diary notes that she was preparing to leave him for good.
Question: Jewell was saying at the end there were six bears poached the summer after Treadwell died, and that despite what the park service said it was an ongoing problem. They showed the carcass of a bear, but how could they tell it was poached? All I saw were the dessicated remains of a bear. Considering the scene earlier where after five days all that was left of a bear was the clean-picked skull, how were they able to know the difference between a poached bear and one that had been chewed on?
Interesting; that didn’t occur to me for a moment as I watched it. I found that scene one of the most powerful and chilling in the movie, as we sit there and imagine what he’s hearing. I thought it was brilliant filmmaking.
Also just one person’s opinion, of course. YM clearly Vs.
That would have been more intrusive of Herzog than just letting everyone he interviewed be themselves. That would have been an attempt to artificially achieve some kind of Official Documentary Style, rather than allowing things to happen naturally. His other interactions were personal; part of the story. To “direct” as you suggest would have been in service of the film, rather than simply being swept along, as a person, with the story still unfolding around him, as in the scene with the tape.
There are no “rules” for documentaries. Some of my favorite documentaries of all time have included the presence of the filmmaker:
Sherman’s March
The Gleaners and I
Stevie
Everything by Errol Morris, some of the greatest documentaries of recent years.
In all of these films, the filmmakers’ interactions with his/her subjects, while they were making their films, was very real and ultimately part of the story. The story is not required to end before the documentary process begins. Again, there is no such “rule.”
Whuh . . .?
Anyway.
*Grizzly Man *was not a news report; it was not journalism. It was a great filmmaker–a great filmmaker with a history of making great films about obsessive men–investigating the life of a fascinating person, without the Official Rules of Documentary Filmmaking in his back pocket at all times.
What makes a film a documentary is not that it’s journalistically dry and removed. No. What makes a film a documentary is the fact that the filmmaker and the subject are directly addressing the subject under discussion–often, that they’re directly addressing the audience. That a subject is being discussed directly, explicitly, rather than through metaphor and fiction.
Jeezopete, I was beginning to think I had imagined hearing this on the internet back when it happened. It was pretty harrowing, as I recall.
Was anybody watching the show on Discovery Channel annoyed by all the freakin’ commercials? There was a spell where they’d show 4.5 mins of movie, following by almost that long a spell of commercials. Yes, I timed it.
I never said it was. I think I’m allowed an opinion as to what flows and what’s distracting, and I voiced it. Unless I missed it, there is only one segment that is ‘about’ Herzog, and that is one too many for my taste.
Re: Herzog already having come to that conclusion: He used footage from the last tape. I would find it hard to believe that the first, last, and only time he listened to the last six minutes he was on camera.
I don’t get all this “Hertzog is the filmmaker, he can craft it any way he wants” business. Ed Wood was a filmmaker, does that make his judgment sound? If the filmmaker is right by definition, then we’d better write to Roger Ebert and tell him pack it in.
Jeezus, yes! I timed it, too, simply because I couldn’t believe how many damn commercials there were. Thank gawd for the DVR - I can FF through them, but I was getting a cramp in my thumb! I can’t imagine why they wanted to stretch a 103 minute movie into a 180 minute broadcast.
I, too, disagree with waverly. A man who gets shot and says, “it was not a significant bullet” is not the kind of man who “grandstands”. I thought it was an effective technique.
