{"id":4033,"date":"2005-01-29T10:22:45","date_gmt":"2005-01-29T14:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/httpblogslawharvardeduceerock4\/2005\/01\/29\/bamboozled-by-"},"modified":"2005-01-29T10:22:45","modified_gmt":"2005-01-29T14:22:45","slug":"bamboozled-by-herzog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/2005\/01\/29\/bamboozled-by-herzog\/","title":{"rendered":"Bamboozled by Herzog"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I am glad to hear that Werner Herzog is up to his old tricks. I an eagerly anticipating his new documentary, Grizzly Man<\/a><\/i>:<\/p>\n

a fascinating character study of Timothy Treadwell, self-appointed
\ngrizzly bear expert. For thirteen summers, the youthful Treadwell
\ncamped in the Alaskan wilderness to observe and commune with grizzlies.
\nHis final year there ended in tragedy when he and girlfriend Amie
\nHuguenard were attacked and completely devoured by an older, aggressive
\nbear. Most of the visuals for the film come from Treadwell’s own video
\nfootage, shot during his last few excursions. \n<\/div>\n

\nHe is a mad Herzogian hero, to be sure:<\/p>\n

He comes dangerously
\nclose to the bears, touching them and swimming with them, all the while
\nconvinced that his work as a naturalist and lobbyist is helping to
\npreserve their environment. Unfortunately, we soon come to learn that
\nwhat Treadwell is filming in the Alaskan wilds is less a nature
\ndocumentary than a kind of ongoing Crocodile Hunter episode with Treadwell styling himself as a great lone adventurer and
\nthe only human capable of understanding the creatures around him. His
\ndisturbed mental state becomes clearer through interviews and Herzog’s
\nown voiceover.\n<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Treadwell was a failed actor and alcoholic, rescued in a sense
\nby the power and individualistic importance that such a reckless
\nundertaking gave him. The bears saved him from obscurity and addiction,
\nbut his staying there, against the wishes of the park service, to play
\nout his own narcissistic fantasies and adamant death wish, was bound to
\nend in tragedy. His childlike love for the animals around him seems
\ngenuine, as was his belief that the animal world, though admittedly
\ndangerous, was somehow more benevolent than that of humans. In reality,
\nnature is cruel and animals want to survive. \n<\/p>\n

You may not know that Herzog has a tendency to fabricate in his
\ndocumentaries. All docs have some measure of manipulation, but I’m
\ntalking about complete fabrication.So I had to smile when I read the following: \n<\/p>\n

The most powerful scene in
\nthe film comes when Herzog listens to a tape of the attack (the
\ncamera’s lens cap was thankfully on during the recording). He agrees
\nthat, at over six minutes, this is something that the audience should
\nnot hear. <\/p>\n

Hmmm, does it not sound a bit too convenient that Treadwell turned the
\nsound recording on but left the lens cap on? It could happen, sure, but
\nHerzog’s docs are filled with these kinds of scenes of things we have
\nno way of proving. In Lessons of Darkness<\/span>,
\nhe shows the image of a young boy who just sits there and looks at the
\ncamera. On voiceover Herzog tells us that the horrors he witnessed in
\nthe Gulf War made him lose the ability to speak. And it rings
\ncompletely false, as does this Grizzly scene. I’ll bet that when Herzog
\nis supposedly listening to the tape of the killings, he is in fact
\nlistening to nothing and grimacing for the camera. <\/p>\n

Yes, I wrote my thesis on Herzog’s documentaries, and I never made up
\nmy mind about the ethics involved with this kind of fabrication. And
\napparently the Greencine correspondent<\/a> who wrote the review above has some problems with the ethics as well: <\/p>\n

Surprisingly, the film doesn’t deal with the ethical issue of
\nusing Treadwell’s own footage to make a film that he, undeniably, would
\nhate.<\/span>\n<\/div>\n

\nHerzog’s docs have never been well-known enough to garner much
\ncriticism for the ethical problems involved, but this one has a lot of
\nbuzz at Sundance and now that docs are so popular these days, perhaps
\nthey will come under greater scrutiny. Not that he’ll care, of course.
\nHe freely admits<\/a> to the manipulations and fabrications:<\/p>\n

“By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am glad to hear that Werner Herzog is up to his old tricks. I an eagerly anticipating his new documentary, Grizzly Man: a fascinating character study of Timothy Treadwell, self-appointed grizzly bear expert. For thirteen summers, the youthful Treadwell camped in the Alaskan wilderness to observe and commune with grizzlies. His final year there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58QoK-133","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}