Bear Images: Human Performativity and Animal Touch in Grizzly Man

Abstract

In Grizzly Man (2005) Werner Herzog edits and presents footage shot by Timothy Dexter while in the company of grizzly bears. As the film states, Grizzly Man centres on the human story that unfolds in Treadwell’s videos, especially in the context of the fact that he was killed by one of his beloved animals. The bears are of interest to Herzog only insofar as they symbolise an inscrutable and indifferent nature – i.e. those aspects of nature that in Herzog’s view Treadwell misconstrued finally leading to his demise. Against this explicit framing of the bears by Herzog, this essay argues that Grizzly Man opens up a visual space for these animals in which they come to touch not only Treadwell, but also this film’s spectators. Faced with the excessive performances Treadwell enacts for his own cameras, the spectator of Grizzly Man is left wondering about the authenticity or ‘naturalness’ of the human, and is compelled to ask about the gaze humans cast on animals in general, and most specifically on the bears that share the cinematic frame with Treadwell.