Grizzly Man (2005) is one of Werner Herzog’s best-known films in the U.S., though it is just as complex and brutal and transfixing as anything else in the German director’s oeuvre. A documentary nominally about the life of wild animal obsessive Timothy Treadwell, it is also in large part about humanity’s connection to nature in all of its aspects, from admiration to awe to destruction. It might have become the cult hit it did in this country because of its semi-lurid aspects—who is to say, really—but to think of it that way elides so much of its beauty and subtlety. (Herzog declines to use the audio documentation of Treadwell’s death in the film, but does show himself reacting to it. It serves as meta-commentary on the way we consume violence and how art uses and portrays it—a theme in many of the director’s works—as well as having direct emotional impact.)
Richard Thompson - Grizzly Man Soundtrack Interview - Bandcamp
Richard Thompson's score for Grizzly Man – Werner Herzog's 2005 documentary film of real life and death in the Alaskan wilderness – is one of the best-kept secrets in the British guitarist's epic canon: an instrumental masterpiece disguised as a movie soundtrack. Recorded over two days as Thompson played live in the studio to Herzog's footage – mostly alone, at times in chamber settings with cello, piano and percussion – these tenderly detailed melodies and quietly visceral improvisations are cinema in their own right, rendered with pictorial instinct and the dazzling technique forged in Thompson's lifelong passage through traditional folk, psychedelia, North African modes and intensely personal songwriting. Here is Thompson at his natural best – finger-picking dance; snake-curl twang and singing-wire harmonics – in a solo clarity that runs from jig-like joy to deep-note meditation, the "Grizzly Man" blues march with its echoes of Fairport Convention's "Sloth" to the long night of "Treadwell No More," a harrowing darkness in slicing treble and tremolo shiver. Produced by guitarist Henry Kaiser, Grizzly Man is a record of powerful solitude – as bold and majestic as the land in Herzog's film; as intimate as prayer – and essential Richard Thompson.
- David Fricke
Richard and Werner working in the studio
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