Knowing Death

I'm a bit tired, so I'll keep it short and sweet. I came into this movie knowing it was about Tim Treadwell's death, and that seeing the opening where he gets dangerously close to the bears set me at unease, and made me realize that that man, whom the camera is pointed at, is dead. Although most people who probably came to see the movie knew the premise of the movie, the background information, coming in, Herzog put in a little subtitle of "Timothy Treadwell (1957-2003)" as a signifier to label him as a dead man. In a way I feel this is how Herzog tries to manufacture punctum, but that's not what I'm really going to talk about. See, there's Herzog's footage that he films and Treadwell's footage, and the two sources are sometimes not easily discernable from each other. The whole confusion that I felt between the switching of the two cameras seemed to link Tim's death with a reminder of Herzog's own mortality. The camera became a pointer of death, that in the hands of "Tim" (or rather Amy) the camera is both bringing the dead back to life and a constant threat to that life on film, that at any moment for all we know that man on film may be attacked, and we will witness his death.