Grizzly Man is one of those rare docos that just make you feel uncomfortable because Herzog presents you with a very controversial character in the form of Timothy Treadwell but doesn’t really give you any sense of how you should feel about the man. The difficulty with this is that many documentarians have an agenda and it’s very rare to see such an obviously weird documentary not take a very obvious point of view. Film Art suggests that a documentary is about presenting factual, external information (that is information that exists outside the world of the film), in a somewhat more objective light, however as I said, I feel like most documentaries intentionally attempt to persuade me of a particular point of view and as such, I find Grizzly Man to be a very different film.

It was interesting in the lesson, discussing the film and talking about the way in which Herzog kind of interrupts his own film to kind of be very existential and suddenly deep, almost trying to have an agenda but the agenda was not about the subject of the documentary, it was about the world itself. Film Art says that the label of Documentary suggests to the audience that the film is trustworthy in a sense, yet this film again, has a very distinctly different reading for me. I watch each and every person in that documentary and none of them seem like normal people, including Herzog himself. There is no real window into that world for me. No grounding character or person within the ‘narrative’ of the documentary and that is why I think the film confuses me.