NPR interview of Werner Herzog on Grizzly Man

Here is the link to an NPR interview of Werner Herzog on the making of Grizzly Man. He provides explanations of his filming choices and additional insights that are not included in his documentary.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4778191

Herzog makes it very clear that he now believes Timothey Treadwell was inexorably drifting towards his death as he ventured to film grizzlies in Alaska. The director goes as far as asserting that the “grizzly man” had a suicidal penchant. Werner Herzog most likely could not have afforded to say this in his film, fearing his opinions could prove too controversial.

W. Herzog also stresses how he believes nature should be respected, not sentimentalized. He condemns a modern “Disneyization” of wilderness. To him, the dramatic outcome of Treadwell’s adventure illustrates a chronic misunderstanding of wild animals.

The filmmaker also explains he could not make a work of fiction out of Treadwell’s life story since he was dead and respect was owed to him. Herzog says he often likes to go deeper into stories than “cinéma vérité” allows it. Without unreasonably distorting the truth, he often tries to give an esthetic form to his works in order to further captivate his audience.  

Timothy Treadwell : The Grizzly Man

When I first saw Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, I feared I was about to view just another consumer-oriented, sensationalism-fuelled documentary. My first impression was based on P. Aufderheide description of this type of broadcasts in Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction.

This assumption came as I saw Timothy Treadwell talk in the same words you often hear from wildlife documentary producers on various television channels. Recurring expressions such as "death,""warrior," "survival" and "weak" in the first minutes of extracts from Treadwell’s footage turned me towards these false first impressions that perhaps would not have come to my mind if I knew about the story of the “grizzly man” and the renown Herzog who directed the eponymous film before viewing it.

This impression quickly disappeared as I watched the documentary and realized the depth of Herzog’s work on Timothy Treadwell. Not only does he attempt to provide a full picture of his subject’s life and work but he also seems to be determined to dissect and better understand the psychology behind this difficult character. His exposé consists of a selection of segments from Treadwell’s footage as well as interviews of friends and family which help comprehend this man’s choices concerning his life and perhaps his death.

Grizzly Man definitely aroused my curiosity and I look forward to posting again after I see more of Treadwell’s footage in Grizzly Man Diaries and maybe learn more about director Werner Herzog and the mysterious man he decided to study in his documentary. 

Waiting for "Superman"

As we discussed our first documentary, Waiting for “Superman”, several fellow students rose their concerns about how in the film teachers seemed to be held fully responsible for their students’ academic failure. This said, everybody in the class agreed that there were evident flaws in tenure laws. I later reflected on this matter and wondered, if tenure was stopped in the secondary education system, would there even be enough teachers to replace the “Lemons” that would be discharged as a result? 

Here is a graph from a study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the unemployment rate for Elementary, Middle and Secondary school teachers compared to the national average rate as well as the total number of unemployed teachers in those grades.

In the film, expert Eric Hanushek asserts that if the lower performing 6 to 10 percent of US teachers were replaced with “average teachers”, the American educational system could compete with the Finish one (said to be the world’s best).

Studying the unemployment graph, you discover that the unemployment rate for teachers from elementary to the end of middle school reached a high of 4.1% in 2012. So if you consider that the proportion of “lemons” are the same among new teachers replacing those who retire each year, only about half of the 6 to 10 percent of lower performing teachers could be replaced if tenure was turned down this year.

To conclude, it seems as if there simply would not be enough teachers available to counterbalance the theoretical discharge of even 6 percent of today’s teachers. It would also be interesting to know whether teachers obtaining their licensures today are better equipped to make their students succeed than teachers now reaching retirement. Would a more comprehensive education help tomorrow’s teachers improve their own students’ academic achievements?