Alone in the Wilderness (2004)

Only an hour in length and not entirely honest in its presentation, Dick Proenneke’s footage and achievements nevertheless make Alone in the Wilderness a relaxing vicarious experience in which beautiful competence and industry are celebrated.

The celebration is made all the sweeter by the fact that, although the viewer’s own comparative uselessness is gently and implicitly chided by Proenneke’s success, that success also serves as evidence that others could accomplish such things in their own right with the proper amount of effort, determination and planning. 8/10

I first stumbled upon Alone in the Wilderness by accident: I mistook it for the endurance/adventure movie Man in the Wilderness in which Richard Harris plays a 19th century fur trader who makes his way through miles of forest hell to get revenge on the colleagues who stranded him. Alone in the Wilderness is not that movie, and though I still haven’t been able to see the one I thought it was, I am in no sense disappointed with what I got.

Dick Proenneke, a former carpenter in the US Navy and later an accomplished mechanic, retired in 1968, set out for the distant and uninhabited Alaskan valley of Twin Lakes, and there built himself a cabin and surrounded himself in general with the wilderness he so loved. He lived there alone, but he had help getting set up; some tools and provisions were flown in to help him establish himself, and he lived in a cabin belonging to a friend while he was building his own. He had intended to keep the whole thing as natural and old-fashioned as possible – no power tools are used, for example – but there are certain “cheats,” like a plastic tarp to line the cabin’s roof and modern cement mix, that Proenneke candidly admits to using simply because they work better.

Still, he builds a fully-functional house with windows and a hinged dutch door, a fireplace, an external outhouse, a below-ground cold cellar and an elevated food storage tower on his own and using tools that were in many cases made by his own hands. Most of his amenities are produced that way, too. His kitchen implements, for example, are made from the tin cans in which his initial supplies were brought to him; he builds every piece of furniture from scratch; he uses scrap wood to put together everything from sawhorses to carrying racks to smokehouses to sleds. A short sequence in which he makes a wooden spoon for pouring hotcake batter is strangely thrilling. The most astonishing thing of all (for me, at least) is his production of the hinges for his cabin’s door. The hinges for the outhouse were simple enough: two pieces of bent tin with a nail for the pivot. But for his cabin door he makes some beautiful wooden hinges out of stump wood, and they are truly beautiful in both form and function. He follows them up by making a latch of surprising complexity for the door, and also a small locking mechanism for the latch to thwart animals that might try to bat at it and accidentally succeed in getting it open. All of it is made entirely out of wood. It’s amazing.

Once he has completed his major construction work and planted his root garden – just in time for the coming of the Alaskan winter – he really cuts the tether. The weather makes it hard for anyone to fly in and land on the lake near his cabin as it is, but with the provisions he’s laid in for himself and the food he takes off the land such visits are hardly necessary. The lake provides fresh water and the occasional fish; the land provides wild game, berries, and good soil for potatoes, onions, rutabagas and carrots.

It may reasonably be asked what he does with his free time, and it turns out that the reason we know about what he got up to at all is because what he did with his time was write copious journal entries about his experiences and film hundreds of hours of footage on the camera he brought with him. This footage forms the basic substance of Alone in the Wilderness, and much of it is frankly amazing. Proenneke chose a truly beautiful valley for his home, and it is rich in both natural and animal interest. He is surrounded on all sides by stupefying mountains – up which he occasionally hikes, camera at hand – and a combination of lush forest and bare scrubland. The river flows into a great hollow between the mountains, forming one of the lakes that gives the area its name, and the sixteen months covered by over the course of the film see the lake transition from a churning maelstrom of broken ice to a placid, fish-filled mirror and back to a plain of ice again, thirty inches thick. Caribou trot gaily through the scrub; bears skulk through the hills; ptarmigan frisk in the brush; a wolverine comically falls down a snowy hill at one point, rolling all the way to the bottom. Proenneke films it all.

Still, the movie as it exists now – that is, as Alone in the Wilderness – has been heavily edited. The footage in the movie doesn’t all come from the same sixteenth months it purports to cover (some anachronistic nature footage, clearly shot on video rather than on Proenneke’s 1960s film stock, is inserted to form establishing shots, and a few short parts where Proenneke is followed by a moving camera come from a later trip), and though the film is narrated in the first person it is producer Bob Swerer, not Proenneke, doing the talking. Everything he says comes from Proenneke’s journals, but still… they don’t really make it clear until the closing credits. There’s a sequel of sorts, called The Frozen North (2006; I haven’t seen it, unfortunately), in which more of Proenneke’s footage is presented in a less-edited form, and with his own narration, so that might be a better source for an unpolished view of the man and his exploits in the far north.

That having been said, though, the bulk of the footage really is shot from the little camera Proenneke brought with him, resting on ledges or rocks or tripods while he does his work. There’s an unavoidable sense of the dramatic to some of it, naturally, as Proenneke knows he’s filming himself and so goes to the trouble of mounting the camera to capture shots of him walking around and doing other things that he might more easily have just shot from the hip, so to speak.

In the face of the excellent things being recorded and the excellent ends towards which that recording has been used, other considerations mostly fall by the wayside. Alone in the Wilderness was put together from old footage on a low budget, and it shows in some of the editing. The score is nice and inobtrusive, mostly light woodwinds and strings, and Swerer’s narration has just the right sort of tone for the material.

Dick Proenneke returned to the lower United States for a little while after his cabin was completed to see friends and family and lay in more supplies, but he returned to Twin Lakes and would spend the next thirty-five years living alone in the home he had made. While there, he served as a constantly useful source of information to various park officials and government agencies about weather patterns, herd movements, the presence of poachers, and other related matters. Though he died in 2003, his cabin continues to be maintained by the Alaska parks service, to whom he was a valued friend. Watching him work in Alone in the Wilderness, it’s easy to see in him, in whatever small capacity, what so many others did throughout his long and interesting life.

You can watch ten minutes from Alone in the Wilderness on YouTube if you’d like to see what’s what.  It jumps around a bit and skips a lot of the cabin-building process, but what’s there is pretty representative of the movie as a whole.  Give it a shot.