Timothy Treadwell’s bear footage and fierce speeches to his own camera make him a compelling screen presence. We value his commitment to filming the animals, even when his certainty about understanding them gives us reason to doubt him.
Fi1m perspective
Timothy Treadwell talks to bears in baby-talk and gives them names, treating familiarity as though it might secure their friendship. When he addresses his own camera, he can become vehement, insisting on an account of himself that leaves little room for doubt. These two habits make him a compelling, sometimes uncomfortable presence in Grizzly Man (2005). He wants us to see the animals as he does, but his footage also lets us question what he tells us about them. We can admire the effort he puts into filming without accepting his reading of a bear’s behaviour.
He had already put the bears and himself on screen in The Grizzly Diaries (1999), for which he was a producer as well as an on-camera presence. For Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog takes that self-presentation out of Treadwell’s hands. He builds his documentary from Treadwell’s archive footage and interviews, adding narration that openly challenges his subject’s beliefs. Treadwell’s speeches become something we are asked to examine as well as listen to.
We laughed at his rants and then regretted it a little: the force of those speeches makes his need for an audience hard to ignore. Peter Zeitlinger has the cinematography credit, but Treadwell’s bear footage supplies the images that hold us most firmly. There is enough to look at in the wilderness without a voice explaining it, and enough care in the filming to make his attachment to the place comprehensible.
Editor Joe Bini moves between that footage, interviews and Herzog’s commentary so that the competing accounts complicate one another. Richard Thompson’s reflective music also helps keep Treadwell from becoming merely a collection of errors for the documentary to expose. Our reservation is with Herzog’s narration, which can be so certain about nature that it invites the same doubts as Treadwell’s speeches. Watch Grizzly Man for the bears, but give their cameraman a fair hearing.
Biography
Timothy Treadwell, also credited as Timothy Dexter, was an American environmentalist, naturalist and documentary filmmaker. Born Timothy William Dexter on 29 April 1957 in Mineola, Long Island, New York, he later changed his surname legally to Treadwell.
He spent thirteen summers living among coastal brown bears in Katmai National Park, Alaska, and founded the bear-protection organisation Grizzly People. Treadwell produced films about the bears and appeared on television, including the Late Show with David Letterman.
His life and death were the subject of Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man (2005), which features archive footage of Treadwell. He and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed by a bear in the park on 5 October 2003.
