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German filmmaker Werner Herzog has always nurtured an affection for lunacy. His continual recasting of the outrageous actor Klaus Kinski serves as an obvious example of this, as does Herzog’s on-foot trek across Europe (from Munich to Paris, in the middle of winter) to see film critic Lotte Eisner when she was dying. He has long displayed an aggressive rejection of bourgeois, behavioral norms. You might consider him deranged, potentially detrimental to himself and those around him; the cold, deliberate German accent in which he says many a sadistic thing does not always reveal his sardonic sense of humor.
The pre-production for the film took three years, what with building a boat and a camp that would house a thousand extras plus the crew. Plenty of injuries were incurred in the name of art: Herzog’s cinematographer, filming on board the steamboat, had his hand cut open (and it had to be stitched up without anesthesia). Another crew member was bitten by a venomous snake, and then cut off his own foot with a chainsaw in order to avoid cardiac arrest. But in the end, the boat made its way successfully over the mountain, and Herzog captured it all on film—challenging the basic laws of nature, and triumphing.
The film’s most upsetting scene comes when Herzog sits with Treadwell’s best friend and listens (with headphones on, so she cannot hear) to the audio recording of Treadwell being eaten alive by a bear, along with his girlfriend. Herzog narrates what is happening a little, and Treadwell’s friend watches with wide, horrified eyes. “You must never listen to this,” he tells her after he’s finished. He also suggests destroying the tape, because otherwise it would haunt her for the rest of her life. They hold hands. To Herzog, Treadwell was child-like in his naïveté about nature and the ability to exist in an indifferent landscape with wild creatures. Even though Herzog thinks such idealism ignorant, he still forces us to sympathize with Treadwell.
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