Wild Sound

I am glad to hear that Werner Herzog is up to his old tricks. I an eagerly anticipating his new documentary, Grizzly Man:

He is a mad Herzogian hero, to be sure:

Treadwell was a failed actor and alcoholic, rescued in a sense
by the power and individualistic importance that such a reckless
undertaking gave him. The bears saved him from obscurity and addiction,
but his staying there, against the wishes of the park service, to play
out his own narcissistic fantasies and adamant death wish, was bound to
end in tragedy. His childlike love for the animals around him seems
genuine, as was his belief that the animal world, though admittedly
dangerous, was somehow more benevolent than that of humans. In reality,
nature is cruel and animals want to survive.

You may not know that Herzog has a tendency to fabricate in his
documentaries. All docs have some measure of manipulation, but I’m
talking about complete fabrication.So I had to smile when I read the following:

The most powerful scene in
the film comes when Herzog listens to a tape of the attack (the
camera’s lens cap was thankfully on during the recording). He agrees
that, at over six minutes, this is something that the audience should
not hear. 

Hmmm, does it not sound a bit too convenient that Treadwell turned the
sound recording on but left the lens cap on? It could happen, sure, but
Herzog’s docs are filled with these kinds of scenes of things we have
no way of proving. In Lessons of Darkness,
he shows the image of a young boy who just sits there and looks at the
camera. On voiceover Herzog tells us that the horrors he witnessed in
the Gulf War made him lose the ability to speak. And it rings
completely false, as does this Grizzly scene. I’ll bet that when Herzog
is supposedly listening to the tape of the killings, he is in fact
listening to nothing and grimacing for the camera.

Yes, I wrote my thesis on Herzog’s documentaries, and I never made up
my mind about the ethics involved with this kind of fabrication. And
apparently the Greencine correspondent who wrote the review above has some problems with the ethics as well:

Herzog’s docs have never been well-known enough to garner much
criticism for the ethical problems involved, but this one has a lot of
buzz at Sundance and now that docs are so popular these days, perhaps
they will come under greater scrutiny. Not that he’ll care, of course.
He freely admits to the manipulations and fabrications: