Timothy Treadwell has spent the last 13 summers living among grizzly bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Reserve. For the last 5 years he has filmed 90 hours of the wilderness, the bears and himself. In one of his last recorded statements he seemed confident that he had found a way to live among them.
It’s understandable the appeal that this story had for Werner Herzog. He has no interest in ordinary lives, at least as a subject. His work dwells on the verge of death, where life finds its deeper expressions. He filmed humans in the South Pole, indigenous people living in the heart of the Siberian Taiga, death row inmates with weeks to live, a visionary air traveller the sole survivor of a plane crash, etc. He says: “If I had a chance to venture out with a camera to a planet in our solar system, I would go, even if it were a one-way ticket only.”
Treadwell does what no man before him had done, he proclaims and there’s truth to that. He lives in constant danger and if he didn’t love the smell of death in the morning he certainly grew accustomed to it. He has a pet fox, to the extent that foxes can be pets. In his footage he is often a few feet Continue reading “Herzog’s Grizzly Man”
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