Grizzly Man opens with the sound of nondiegetic guitar music, slowly fading out, and a long shot from a static camera of two bears grazing on all fours, mountains visible behind them. Wearing sunglasses and dressed in black, a blond-haired man (later revealed to be Treadwell) walks from behind the camera into the foreground of the scene, kneels down and starts talking direct to camera:
I’m out in the prime cut of the big green. Behind me is Ed and Rowdie, members of an up-and-coming sub-adult group. They’re challenging every-thing, including me.
Throughout the film, Treadwell’s mode of self-presentation oscillates between the confessional and intimate style of a video diarist and the more obviously performa-tive register of a would-be television presenter, asserting his familiarity with the animals and his own endangerment. To borrow terminology from Michael Renov’s discussion of autobiography and documentary (2004: 185–6), Treadwell is both
‘looking out’ (at the bears and their wilderness) and ‘looking in’ (at himself). With its threats and opportunities for (self-)discovery, nature functions here as a solace and retreat from human society, but also as a testing ground, energizing and validating Treadwell’s sense of self.6
It is never entirely clear how much of his self-memorialization was intended for private use, and how much was amassed for some never-realized media project.7The opening sequence tends more towards the latter, but remains somewhat ambiguous.
On the one hand, the footage is remarkable for its close and sustained visual access to the bears, perhaps 40 or 50 yards from Treadwell. His delivery, while increasingly idiosyncratic, is also coherent and eloquent, and not especially odd to television viewers used to celebrity specials and ‘action man’ series like the late Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter.8 On the other hand, the images are constrained by reliance on a single, static camera, with none of the multiple angles, editing patterns, or use of slow motion to be expected from ‘professional’ wildlife coverage on film or television. In addition to these technical limitations, Treadwell is evidently working alone. His location on screen right obscures one of the bears, and he has no colleague to advise him on repositioning. But the sequence never displays the utter amateurishness of, for example, the home video material used at the start of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (US, 2003).
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As Treadwell proceeds with his monologue, the subtitle ‘Timothy Treadwell (1957–2003)’ appears on screen beneath his image. Addressing the camera and his presumed audience, Treadwell continues, with a smile:
Goes with the territory. If I show weakness, if I retreat, I may be hurt, I may be killed. I must hold my own within this land. For once there is weakness they will exploit it, they will take me out, they will decapitate me, they will chop me into bits and pieces, I’m dead. But so far [saluting the camera with a finger] I persevere, persevere.
After two minutes of monologue, Treadwell smiles, blows a kiss to the bears and walks back to the camera. From offscreen space his disembodied voice says, ‘I can smell death all over my fingers.’
The film fades quickly in and out of black to show another scene of seven bears, with the camera – presumably operated by Treadwell – occasionally panning and zooming to concentrate on two bears in particular. Over the images, a new voice makes itself heard, declaring:
All these majestic creatures were filmed by Timothy Treadwell, who lived among wild grizzlies for 13 summers. He went to the remote areas of the Alaskan peninsula believing that he was needed there to protect the animals and educate the public. During his last five years out there he took along a video camera and shot over 100 hours of footage. What Treadwell intended was to show these bears in their natural habitat. Having myself filmed in the wilderness of the jungle I found that beyond a wildlife film, in his material lay dormant a story of astonishing beauty and depth. I discovered a film of human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil, as if there was a desire in him to leave the confinements of his humanness and bond with the bears, Treadwell reached out, seeking a primordial encounter. But in doing so he crossed an invisible border line.
This is the voice of Werner Herzog, familiar to some viewers at least from his previous documentary works, and an appearance in Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy (US, 1999). The sound and image tracks are synchronized here, so that when Herzog speaks of Treadwell reaching out, this is timed to coincide with footage of him doing just that, moving his hand carefully from behind the camera towards the snout of an inquisitive bear. The effect is to prioritize the voice-over at this point, producing the images as illustrations of the spoken word.
Bill Nichols (1991: 223–4) has noted the controlling function of voice-over commentary in ethnographic films, one that may also pertain in a wider range of documentaries: ‘Voice-over commentary recuperates images that defy mastery … The description stands in for the described, erasing any gap between form and meaning.’
However, the role of voice-over is not quite so straightforward in Grizzly Man. Most obviously, two voices (Treadwell’s and Herzog’s) are foregrounded, offering interpre-tations and commentaries throughout the film. Sometimes they are in agreement, sometimes in opposition.
These first scenes, with their two distinct voices, thus establish the dual authorship of Grizzly Man, and effectively announce its double mediation of the bears AUTHORIAL VOICE, DEATH, NATURE 53
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and their wilderness: through the interventions made by Treadwell – via his profilmic actions, his video footage and frequent use of direct address to camera – and by Herzog and his collaborators – via the selection from and arrangement of footage shot by Treadwell, use of interview and archive material, the imposition of music, and, most notably, voice-over commentary. The latter is both opinionated and authorita-tive but also subjecauthorita-tive, grounded in personal experience and perception. The two voices, the two sets of interventions, the two claims to authorial status, coexist in an unequal relationship. Herzog’s decisions frame those made by Treadwell. Herzog’s voice is empowered to comment on that of Treadwell, while the latter, by contrast, has nothing to say about Herzog’s commentary and can offer no critique of his work.
The privileging of Herzog’s voice – and later his physical presence – produce in the text a second locus of authority and possible audience investment beyond the figure of Treadwell. It also constitutes an invitation to approach Grizzly Man as an authored work. This invitation was taken up by much critical coverage of the film, including a feature in Sight and Sound magazine, which noted Herzog’s tendency in the last decade or so to focus on ‘extreme stories of human endeavour – of ecstasy, death and transfiguration’ (James 2006: 24), and identified Grizzly Man as the latest instance of this.9
An auteurist approach might also trace some significant continuities between Herzog’s fiction films of the 1970s and Grizzly Man. For instance, Gideon Bachmann’s (1977) description of a typical Herzog plot seems to anticipate Treadwell’s trajectory, at least as represented in the film:
An innocent is thrown into the world, unprepared, encounters despair and destruction and loses, leaving behind an emptier, more desperate landscape.
This in a nutshell, has been the story line of each film Herzog has made … the films are all records of doomed struggles. But hardly ever in the history of cinema has the depiction of doom carried so strong a message of life.
(1977: 2) Herzog’s status as auteur is (re)asserted by intratextual elements within Grizzly Man (principally his voice-over commentary and single on-screen appearance) and also by extratextual appearances and citations. The latter function both as satellite texts put into circulation around the film for promotional purposes, and as more autonomous constructions of Herzog which may not necessarily be encountered as ancillaries to Grizzly Man.10
Much like film stars, whose extrafilmic manifestations and promotional labour have long been recognized and investigated by scholars, directors-as-stars need be conceived of as discursive, cultural and commercial phenomena that are constructed across a range of media outlets not restricted to their films. For instance, Timothy Corrigan has suggested that the media interview ‘is where the auteur, in addressing cults of fans and critical viewers, can engage and disperse his or her own organising agency as auteur … writing and explaining … a film through the promotion of a certain intentional self’ (Corrigan 1991: 108–9, cited in Grant 2000: 103).
Herzog’s particular performance as auteur, via extratextual and intratextual cues to the viewer and/or reader, is an unmistakably physical one. Certainly, his voice, and the body from which it originates,11are more central to his persona, as a tool of his 54 THOMAS AUSTIN
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filmmaking and its promotion, than that of, say, Steven Spielberg or art cinema peers like Wim Wenders. While relatively unremarkable in themselves,12Herzog’s body and voice have become freighted over time with a particular and complicated set of connotations that could be summarized as centred on notions of endangerment, empathy and intensity.13
Clearly, commentators, journalists and critics have all played their parts in the discursive construction of Herzog’s reputation. But the director himself has also participated in the fabrication of his persona since the early years of his career. Much like Treadwell, Herzog repeatedly presents himself in the role of the male adventurer.
For instance, in addition to filming in remote locations and extreme conditions, from the Amazon to the Sahara, he has performed a number of feats of endurance and risk-taking which (whether or not intended as such) are readable as acts of self-dramatization. These include walking from Munich to Paris in 1974 to visit Lotte Eisner (recounted in his 1981 book, Of Walking in Ice), and walking 2,000 kilometres around the German border in 1984.14 In 1978, Herzog literally made a spectacle of himself by eating one of his shoes live on stage at UC Theatre in Berkeley, California, in honour of the premiere of Errol Morris’ debut film Gates of Heaven, as captured in Les Blank’s short film Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe (US, 1980).15
More recently, during a televised interview to promote Grizzly Man conducted on a hillside in Los Angeles, Herzog was shot in the stomach by an unseen assailant with an air rifle. This event became rapidly incorporated into the mythology of the director as risk-taking visionary. The footage, including the incredulous response of interviewer Mark Kermode when Herzog reveals his blood-stained boxer shorts (‘You’re bleeding! Somebody … created a wound in your abdomen!’) and Herzog’s relaxed reply (‘It’s not significant. It’s not an everyday thing, but it doesn’t surprise me to be shot at’), was screened on BBC2’s The Culture Show following an introduction that noted ‘even meeting Herzog isn’t without its risks’.16 The broadcast sequence concluded with Herzog telling Kermode:
I think the bottom line is, the poet must not avert his eyes. You have to take a bold look at what is your environment, what is around you, even the ugly things, even the decadent things, even the dangerous things … I’ve done good battle and I’ve been a good soldier of cinema, and that’s what I want to be.
To return to the film, as previously noted, Herzog’s voice is privileged as a locus of authority throughout Grizzly Man, even while it avoids the conventional claims to objectivity of the documentary ‘voice of God’ by repeatedly stressing the subjectivity of the speaker. Most obviously, the commentary develops his own interpretation of Treadwell’s life and work. For example, in one sequence, Treadwell has completed his address to camera when a fox that he has named Spirit runs into shot from some bushes in the background, followed by her cubs. The aleatory nature of this footage and other shots is foregrounded by Herzog’s voice-over, which notes ‘as a filmmaker sometimes things fall into your lap that you couldn’t expect, never even dream of.
There is something like an inexplicable magic of cinema.’
In a later instance, speaking over footage shot on a tripod-mounted camera left by Treadwell as he climbs a wooded hill in preparation to descend in one of his ‘wild AUTHORIAL VOICE, DEATH, NATURE 55
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Timmy jungle scenes’, Herzog comments: ‘In his action movie mode, Treadwell probably did not realize that seemingly empty moments had a strange secret beauty.
Sometimes images themselves develop their own life, their own mysterious stardom.’
The beauty of grasses and trees blowing in the wind in this scene retains something of the ‘harnessing of spontaneity’ which Dai Vaughan has located in the films of the Lumière brothers via the visual capture of non-human movements (plants, leaves, water), to which one might add the motility of animals.17 But an auteur-oriented viewing strategy might also recall the shots of windswept trees and fields in Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (West Germany, 1974). Seen via this interpretive prism, Herzog’s selection of such a sequence from Treadwell’s footage, and the foregrounding of his particular reading of it via commentary, become yet more evidence of his auteurist stamp. The intratextually-cued recontextualization of the shot results in the production of ‘Herzogian’ imagery even when derived from another’s filmed material, reaffirming Herzog as Grizzly Man’s dominant author figure.