By Vance Aandahl

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS (documentary, directed by Luc Jacquet, 2005) WS rating (0 being worst and 6 being perfect): 3

ANIMAL LOVE (documentary, directed by Ulrich Seidl, 1996) WS rating: 2.5

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL (documentary, directed by Judy Irving, 2005) WS rating: 6

GRIZZLY MAN (documentary, directed by Werner Herzog, 2005) WS rating: 5.5

When the protagonists mate in MARCH OF THE PENGUINS, Luc Jacquet’s treacly anthropomorphization of Aptenodytes forsteri, the camera zooms in to give us an extreme closeup of two lovers’ necks. Gently they stretch out their heads, and ever so sensuously they rub their throat feathers together. This is classic erotica. The scene has the slow motion, gauzy-focus look of soft-core porn, but because the participants are birds, and because their necks are the only body parts we get to see them rub together, everything is fine and dandy for the kiddies. In the original French-language version, the birds “talk” to the audience, telling their story as they live it, voicing their dreams and aspirations, so naturally, during the neck-rubbing shot, we get to hear some poor doomed actress and actor try to achieve stardom by pretending to be emperor penguins whispering bad French love poetry to each other. I’m deeply thankful that the penguins do not speak in the English-language version.  Instead we get a rich, warm, ever-so-smooth baritone voice-over, courtesy of Morgan Freeman, who reassures us that even “In the harshest place on earth, love finds a way.”

Love also finds a way in Austrian Ulrich Seidl’s determinedly nasty look at pet ownership, ANIMAL LOVE, a genuinely disturbing film that is not, repeat, not okay for the kiddies. If Jacquet is guilty of sentimentalizing the world, Seidl is equally guilty of demonizing it. Seidl has said that the message he wants to convey in his documentaries is simply that “Hell is us.”  He knows we tend to coo and gush, “Aw, isn’t that sweet!” whenever we hear about some lonely misfit whose only source of love and companionship is a beloved pet. To burn away our romantic delusions with a face-splash of sulfuric acid, Seidl subjects us to nearly two hours of pet owners who are not only lonely but also mentally ill, stupid, uneducated, addicted, and depraved. Their neurotic relationships with their pets take many forms – maternal, romantic, exploitive, neglectful, abusive, and in a couple of cases, sexual. (No bestiality is actually depicted, thank goodness, but several scenes are pregnant with the possibility.) It’s obvious that Seidl searched high and low (mostly low) to find the worst possible pet owners in all of Austria. Interestingly, nearly every pet in the film is a dog. There’s a ferret whose spine is snapped by his owner’s boyfriend during a drunken brawl, a kitten that a panhandler cradles in his arms when he asks passersby to give him money, and a cat or two, but otherwise we see nothing but dogs. Lots and lots of dogs and lots and lots of sicko dog owners. Draw your own conclusions.

It would be unfair not to point out that both MARCH OF THE PENGUINS and ANIMAL LOVE have considerable cinematic appeal and dramatic power. The directors of photography in Jacquet’s film, Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison, give us a consistently gorgeous eye-of-God view of the emperors as they dive into the ocean to hunt for fish (and be hunted, in turn, by seals), as they trudge inland to reach their traditional breeding ground, and as they huddle together to survive a storm with 100-mile-per-hour winds in temperatures that have plummeted to 70 degrees below zero. Any cameraman who can not only work under those conditions but also get great shots has my respect and admiration. So too does Seidl. His signature method is to set up a stationary camera, turn it on, and let his subject talk into it. We never hear Seidl himself speak, nor is his presence revealed in any other way. The film has no introduction or conclusion and no commentary of any sort. From start to finish all we see and hear are the pet owners themselves, and also, of course, their pets, with whom they are typically interacting as they speak. The effect produced by this technique is riveting. Seidl keeps us totally focused on hell itself.

As those brave little penguins waddle heroically across the icy barrens of Antartica, driven not by instinct but by love, even non-diabetics are likely to go into a high-blood-sugar coma, while anyone brave enough to watch two bickering old men “train” their newly acquired dog by jerking it around on its leash and kicking it until it’s driven insane is likely to come staggering out of the experience with both eyes ruptured and the skin of his face peeling away, so let us segue as quickly as possible into two animal documentaries that are not only cinematically strong but also balanced, truthful, and insightful in their depiction of the world.

In Judy Irving’s THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL, we learn a lot of specific information about a flock of wild Peruvian and Ecuadorian cherry-headed conures that somehow wound up living around the Greenwich Steps on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, and we’re treated to some splendid shots of the birds at repose and in action, including a sequence when a hawk alarm is sounded (the flock always has one of its members posted high in a tree to look out for hawks) and several conures outwit the swooping bird of prey by flying directly behind it, where it can’t get at them because hawks have a wider turning-radius than parrots. In Werner Herzog’s GRIZZLY MAN we learn only a bit of specific information about the grizzlies that live in the Katmai Park and Reserve on the Alaska Peninsula, but the footage that shows us the bears includes some jaw-droppers, in particular a remarkably close shot of a prolonged brawl between two male grizzlies, one of whom defecates explosively as the battle begins, then pins the other to the ground, where they struggle and shift position like wrestlers, all the while roaring, snarling, and chewing viciously on each other. 

But the animals are not the main subject. Both directors stay sharply and primarily focused on a human subject, in each case a man who appointed himself to be the observer, friend, and protector of the animals and who worked at this task with a singular devotion for many years. It seems to me that Judy Irving is fascinated by parrot man Mark Bittner because she can see something of herself in Bittner, something gentle that she likes and admires. Werner Herzog is captivated by grizzly man Timothy Treadwell for the same sort of reason but with a different twist. Herzog sees something of himself in Treadwell – something he fears, something he respects yet dreads, something that fills him with primal awe, something that reeks of delusionary grandeur and real death.

Irving has produced a six-film series about Bay Area wildlife and won Emmy and Sundance awards. She is a modest and unpretentious filmmaker who shot THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL in 16mm and blew it up to 35mm for release. Far from making the film appear amateurish, this technique succeeds in conveying the lovely rain-washed watercolor look of San Francisco, accented with bright strokes of tropical color whenever the parrots lift their wings and take flight. Indeed, the film can be seen as a celebration of one of America’s most beautiful and atmospheric neighborhoods.  (Of course, the archetypal San Francisco bird movie will always be THE MALTESE FALCON, but Irving’s film deserves to be the runner-up.) Her leisurely pace and her relaxed, informal narration are completely engaging. And although Irving herself plays a key role in Bittner’s story, she minimizes her presence, preferring to stay focused on Bittner and the birds. From all of this we can deduce what sort of person Irving must be, and we can see why she felt drawn to make a documentary about a man who is shy, self-effacing, sincere, friendly, good-natured in all his dealings with other people, and disinterested in materialistic values, a man who considers himself lucky to have discovered his flock of conures, for through them he has finally found his own personal Zen path to enlightenment after searching for it with a growing sense of futility during his first fifteen years in San Francisco.

The venerable German director Werner Herzog is anything but shy and self-effacing. A wild, passionate, sometimes violent genius, Herzog won acclaim in the 1970’s and 1980’s by making dramas of overreaching ambition. In AGUIRRE – THE WRATH OF GOD, a 16th-century Spanish conquistador (played by Klaus Kinski) leads a small band of soldiers over the Andes and down into the jungle, where he intends to find the legendary golden city of El Dorado, take possession of its treasure, and proclaim himself ruler of the entire Amazon Basin, with all the Indians as his subjects. By the end of the movie his soldiers are dead, he’s insane, and his only subjects are hundreds of little monkeys that have overrun his makeshift raft. FITZCARRALDO is also set deep in the South American jungle and also stars Klaus Kinski. The time is about 100 years ago, and Kinski is a crazed opera lover who wants to bring Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt to the isolated river town of Iquitos for one marvelous performance. To finance this grandiose plan, our hero must find a way to reach a supposedly inaccessible area of valuable rubber trees. He sets out on a long, hazardous river journey in a borrowed steamboat and then persuades hundreds of Indians who’ve never seen a white man before to build a crude system of winches and pulleys with which to pull the steamboat out of the river, over a steep mountainous ridge, and down the other side to another branch of the river. This he succeeds in doing by playing a recording of the Great Caruso on a hand-cranked phonograph. The Indians love grand opera. He plays the record over and over for them as the days pass and they gradually inch the enormous steamboat up the ridge and over the top. At last the incredible portage is completed. Man has conquered nature! Or has he? With a wicked twist of fate, the steamboat goes over a waterfall on its return journey and smashes on the rocks below.

The point I wish to draw from these two examples concerns Herzog himself. He insisted that both films be made on location and that everything in them be done authentically. The cast and crew in AGUIRRE had to make the same journey over the Andes and down the headwaters of the Amazon on a makeshift raft that the conquistador and his soldiers make, and they had to undergo the same hardships, challenges, and frustrations. Members of the crew later reported that after a few months Herzog and Kinski seemed to go half insane, just like the main character in the movie they were making, and at one point the two men attacked each other with murder in their eyes and had to be separated. (In GRIZZLY MAN, Herzog is probably referring to this incident when he quietly says, “I have seen this madness before – on a film set.”) In FITZCARRALDO, once again the cast and crew journeyed deep into the jungle. And even more amazing, actual Indians from a tribe that’s actually isolated actually built winches and pulleys and actually used them to drag an actual steamboat – it looks huge and impossibly heavy – over an actual ridge.  Talk about dangerous filmmaking! Talk about overreaching ambition! The young Herzog was exactly like his protagonists – a madman who thought he could defeat nature itself in his quest to make movies about madmen who think they can defeat nature itself.

No wonder Herzog jumped at the opportunity to make a movie about Timothy Treadwell. Every summer for 13 years the egomaniacal Treadwell defied common sense and the warnings of experts by choosing to live unarmed among dozens of wild grizzlies, his tent pitched in the middle of their feeding grounds. During the last five summers, using video cameras loaned to him by Minolta, Treadwell took 105 hours of footage of the grizzlies. He liked to set the camera up and turn it on so he could run out in front of it and film himself standing near the bears. During such shots, he stares back at the camera and defiantly declares himself to be the sole guardian of the grizzlies, their “kind warrior,” the only man on the face of the planet brave enough to live among such ferocious carnivores and protect them from poachers. Frequently he talks in a strange, high-pitched, manic voice, half baby talk and half sarcastic mimicry. What he’s doing is making fun of the rest of the human race, mocking us for being scared to death of bears. After all, we’re just ordinary mortals who lack his courage and conviction. In other scenes he seems determined to prove that he is also more sensitive than the rest of us. We see him choking back tears as he crouches over a dead bee, mourning it. And when he finds the carcass of small fox, he becomes distraught and murmurs in a tender little voice, over and over again, “I love you! I love you! I love you!” Somehow all of this would be more convincing if we didn’t know that before he got around to weeping, he first took the time to position his camera, point it at the fox, and turn it on.

In one of the movie’s most telling moments, we see Treadwell when a prolonged drought is threatening the bears with a shortage of food. The land needs rain. So Treadwell stands in front of the camera and glares up at the heavens themselves. Angrily he demands rain. Angrily he commands every deity he can think of, including Jesus, Allah, and “the Hindu floaty thing,” to deliver a downpour immediately or face the consequences. In effect he is telling us, his audience, that the gods better not mess around with Timothy Treadwell and his beloved bears! Hubris of this magnitude enthralls Herzog precisely because he knows that men filled with such hubris are almost always tragically doomed.  When Herzog interviews a Native Alaskan historian, the historian says that Treadwell showed “the ultimate disrespect to the bear” because he “crossed the boundary we have lived with for 7,000 years.”

You’ll notice that the historian is using the past tense. That’s because late in the summer of 2003 Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Annie Huguenard were killed and eaten by a hungry grizzly. The camera was running, but Treadwell forgot to take the cap off, so there is no video footage of the tragedy, but the audiotape captured all the sounds – six minutes of horror. A day or two later the bear, still skulking around the bones, was shot and killed. When Dr. Franc G. Fallico, the medical examiner, cut the bear’s stomach open, he found enough human body parts to fill two big black plastic garbage bags. (Herzog is a masterful cinematic artist with a keen eye for the dramatic and the revelatory. He must have quickly realized that Dr. Fallico is a born storyteller. Basing his account on his autopsy of the victims’ remains and his study of the tape, Fallico tells us his version of precisely what happened during the attack. It’s a lurid, gruesome story that he delivers with perfect enunciation, perfect pauses, and perfect gestures while maintaining a fixed gaze at the listener – a show-stopper of a performance, beautifully captured by Herzog’s camera.) 

Does Herzog let us listen to that ghastly audiotape? No. We see Herzog himself put on a set of headphones and listen to a minute or so of the tape. Jewel Palovak, a longtime friend and supporter of Treadwell, is sitting nearby, watching Herzog’s face.  He turns the tape off and in a hushed voice tells her that she must never listen to it, that it would be better to destroy the tape. This is the only scene that bothered me when I saw GRIZZLY MAN. It felt staged rather than spontaneous, and it struck me that Herzog was being condescending, paternalistic, and yes, grandiose. What’s the deal, Werner? Do you think you’re tough enough to listen to that tape but the rest of us ordinary mortals aren’t?

I guess I prefer the Mark Bittners of the world. Bittner loves Gary Snyder’s Zen nature poetry, which makes him one cool guy in my book, and near the end of THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL, he shares with us a parable that he learned from a Zen master after the Zen master saw one of the waterfalls in Yosemite National Park. When the river reaches the cliff and pours over the edge, the flow of the water is broken into a zillion drops, but when the drops hit the bottom, they join each other once again.  The drops, Bittner tells us, are our individual lives. The river is something much larger, much greater – the stream of life itself. 

That sounds better than being eaten by a bear and emptied out of its gut into a garbage bag.