Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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The following assortment of notes, musings, proposals for future consideration, lists,
and quotations is by design doubly open: exposed to the reader, but also subject to revision, expansion,
excision in a way that a traditional written journal (or even a blog) is not.
Grizzly Man  All right, I'll admit that the initial reason I was interested in seeing Werner Herzog's new film was that Richard Thompson provided the score. That it was Herzog was an added attraction; though I hadn't seen any of his new films for quite a while, I had enjoyed several of his earlier ones back in the 1970s, including the extremely odd Even Dwarfs Started Small. The subject matter was neutral as far as I was concerned (something about a guy who hung out with bears, until one ate him). In short I might well not have gotten around to Grizzly Man at all except for the RT connection. Which would have been a big mistake. Not that the score, though sparingly used, isn't great. But this is as fascinating a movie as I've seen in a long time.Timothy Treadwell, the subject of the film, was an amateur naturalist and video maker who, after a somewhat troubled youth, cleaned up his act — at least in some respects — and spent thirteen summers living in close proximity to wild grizzlies in Alaska. Too close proximity, as it turned out, of course; even before the fatal encounter, which also resulted in the death of his girlfriend, Amy Huguenard, he was in hot water with the National Parks Service for, among other things, getting closer to the bears than was permitted. This, incidentally, prompts a typically over-the-top tirade (tantrum might be better) on the part of Treadwell, who — though alone in the wilderness at the time — filmed himself popping his cork with a long string of profanity directed at the employees of that organization. Treadwell's fascination with filming himself, and filming the bears, seems to be one of the things that attracted Herzog to his story. Here was not only an obsessive, but someone obsessed with the camera. In other ways, the two filmmakers were opposites; Treadwell considered the bears his friends and made emotional and frequent declarations of his love for everything about them, including their freshly made feces, while Herzog, looking at Treadwell's footage of the the bears, sees nothing in their eyes but indifference to everything except their next meal. (I am paraphrasing his voice-over.) One of the things I liked about this movie was that Herzog puts his bias right out front; as the narrator, he declares his view that the universe is chaotic and murderous, a sentiment that is echoed by some of the language in his “Minnesota Declaration” of a few years back (for which see below). For Treadwell, it wasn't nature that was cruel, it was human society. Hell really was other people; the bears were beautiful and noble and could be trusted, or so he thought. The problem was that, with his own internal torments (he seems to have been bipolar, with a touch of paranoia) he wasn't really at peace even when he was alone in the wilderness. His very death, it appears, was indirectly the result of his inability to function in society; his presence in the area of the fatal attack, in a time of the year during which he would normally be absent, was supposedly due to a fit of pique caused by a disagreement with an airline employee. Treadwell's video, by Herzog's reckoning, takes up about half of Grizzly Man. Some of it is in truth remarkable, including the scenes of Treadwell and several wild foxes with whom he shared what seems to have been very genuine mutual companionship and affection, and of course much footage of grizzlies, including one horrifying duel between bears. Treadwell's footage of himself is more disturbing; his charisma is evident, but so is the intense, and costly, effort that went into maintaining that charisma. The remainder of the film is largely made up of interviews with people who knew him, some of whom are fairly creepy themselves, though in subtler ways than Treadwell. Herzog has an interesting way of conducting these interviews; rather than asking questions and filming the responses in a traditional manner, he has his subjects introduce themselves and then tell their stories as if delivering a previously rehearsed speech. Whether they were rehearsed or not actually makes little difference; the point is how Herzog catches them in and out of character. The coroner, for instance, whose job it had been to examine the rather ghastly remains of Treadwell and Huguenard: he seems to relish the retelling just a little too much, even as it horrifies him to recall it. When he stops talking the camera stays on him, even though he has clearly said his piece; after a few seconds he awkwardly lowers his hand a few inches. Herzog doesn't edit this out, as a conventional documentarian would have; he leaves it all in, and as a result we briefly glimpse the self-conscious individual beneath the polished professional manner. One of the most fascinating moments of the film concerns an audio recording of the fatal bear attack. Apparently, when the attack began, Treadwell, or more likely Huguenard, turned the video camera on, but either forgot or never had the chance to remove the lens cap. Thankfully, the resulting audio recording, which is apparently quite horrific, is not included in the film. But we do see Herzog listening to it, as we look over his shoulder into the face of Jewel Palovak, a previous Treadwell girlfriend who, as apparently more or less his executor, had come into possession of the tape. Herzog listens for a moment on headphones, then asks Palovak to turn off the machine. He tells her that she must never listen to it, and she tells him that she won't. Then he tells her that she should destroy it. Apparently — though it is not mentioned in the film — she has not gone quite that far. According to an interview with Herzog, the tape is said to be in a bank vault. August 24, 2005 Postscript: Werner Herzog's Minnesota Declaration Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema "LESSONS OF DARKNESS" 1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants. 2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail." Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time. 3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable. 4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. 5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. 6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts. 7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue. 8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity." 9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down. 10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life. 11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile. 12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species — including man — crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
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