The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) presents itself as a documentary portrait of Timothy Treadwell, a nature filmmaker and self-styled friend of grizzly bears in Alaska’s Kodiak Island national park. Using Treadwell’s own material, which he recorded over many years camping in the wilderness, the film sets out to discover what made Treadwell tick and the circumstances leading to his death.

It is a synthetic documentary that blends many different types of documentary form: there is a framing narrative that occurs in “current” time (following Herzog as he talks to Treadwell’s friends and coworkers, watches Treadwell’s footage, etc.); talking heads interviews with people speaking generally about Treadwell’s life; and archival footage and images captured by Treadwell himself during his summers in Alaska. The story is not told in chronological order, nor is it governed by cause and effect, and it contains no fictional reenactments or recreations (with actors, staged lighting, etc.), but it does contain several sequences where real people explain to the filmmaker certain events in current time, such as an aeroplane pilot walking through the wilderness and pointing out the location where he discovered Treadwell’s body.

By manipulating Treadwell’s footage — deciding what to present, and how it is presented, as well as narrating the footage with his own words — Herzog articulates his own thesis about the nature of humanity using Treadwell’s life and work as supporting evidence. Though it presents itself as a portrait of Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man is actually a more nuanced and complicated essay film, with some similarities to the rhetorical form of documentary that sets out to convince the audience of a particular viewpoint.

This is a particularly subtle demonstration of the idea that documentaries are never true depictions of reality, no matter how convincingly they present themselves as such. Herzog manipulates the objective reality of Timothy Treadwell’s life and death, and uses it to craft and present his own worldview.