As if we needed any more proof of how fragile and illusory is man’s dominion over nature, two sobering new documentaries arrive to put us in our place. Darwin’s Nightmare, directed by Hubert Sauper, offers dispatches from an environmental catastrophe: the hostile takeover of Lake Victoria by the Nile perch. A non-native species introduced some 40 years ago, the monstrous fish is now the sole export of the Tanzanian villages on the shore. It’s also a ravenous predator wiping out the lake’s native species. When there’s nothing left, the perch will eventually turn on its young and eat itself into oblivion.
What Sauper records, in intimate, glaring video, is a perfect storm of ecological and economic disaster. Too expensive for the starving locals, the precious flesh ships out daily for Europe, on planes that carry out the region’s food and bring back guns. What the fish does to the lake, the ravages of global commerce accomplish on shore. Sauper’s enraging film is less a methodically constructed narrative than a lobster pot of scalding ironies: homeless kids left with nothing but a cheap high from huffing discarded fish containers; a prostitute whose living turns out to be her death. Each scene finds a fresh new hell.
Man’s folly, in Darwin’s Nightmare, is to treat the world as his laboratory and expect nature to sweep up. In Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, a work of serene and severe greatness, it’s his attempt to impose any kind of anthropomorphic design on the wild. The film’s subject, Timothy Treadwell, spent 13 years in the Alaskan wilderness, returning to civilization with minor celebrity as an activist on behalf of grizzly bears. With mostly a camera for company, he remained convinced that he knew how to live amongst the bears as an equal—until one devoured him and his girlfriend in 2003.
From his copious footage, Treadwell, an ex-actor, often emerges as a painfully sincere show-off. Addressing the grizzlies by cute names, genuflecting before bear poo, he resembles Andy Dick with an L.L. Bean catalog. He would not be the first filmmaker to think that just because he has a camera, the outdoors is his backlot. But in his deluded quest to have the bears return his love, and his genuine obsession with the wild, Herzog seems to recognize a kindred visionary.
Tempering Treadwell’s manic optimism with his own dour narration, Herzog turns what could have been a Discovery Channel snuff movie into an eerie contemplation of nature’s unknowable depths. Grizzly Man ends with a haunting shot of Treadwell receding into the wild, followed close behind by two ambling grizzlies. Nature does not have motives, both films suggest; it simply is. But if you turn your back on it, it will devour you.
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