You’ve all seen it. The shaky footage of a Bigfoot, arms swinging, walking across a creek bed against a background of trees in autumn colors. Suddenly, without breaking its stride, it looks back over its shoulder at the person holding the camera and then walks into the woods.
That minute of Kodak film, known simply as the Patterson-Gimlin footage, has been one of the most hotly contested and dissected home movies this side of the Zapruder film since the day in 1967 Roger Patterson and his friend, Robert “Bob” Gimlin, claimed that they had found definitive proof of the existence of the great cryptid in the Six River National Forest in Northern California.
There’s a whole cottage industry (at this point, more a media subdivision) that has sprung up from this footage, from bumper stickers to half of the Discovery Channel’s scheduling. But no study has ever really looked at its creation and the impact upon the people caught up in its wake quite like Capturing Bigfoot, the new documentary that debuted today at South by Southwest.
At its heart is the semi-tragic figure of Roger’s son, Clint Patterson, who worshipped his dad but is the first to call him a liar. The footage ripped his entire family apart after his father’s premature death when Clint was only 12, and Capturing Bigfoot increasingly centers around his personal quest to vindicate what he knows to be true.
Director Marq Evans isn’t simply interested in asking whether the Patterson-Gimlin footage is real, but about setting two parallel lines of inquiry. If the footage is fake, then how did a bunch of literal cowboys from rural Washington State pull off one of the great practical effects of all time, creating a costume that dupes Hollywood experts and research biologists to this day? And, if it is real, then why are so many of the people involved claiming that it’s fake?
Fortunately, aside from the younger Patterson, the chorus of unreliable narrators and ever-more-convoluted facts make that level of ambiguity plausible. So much of the story of the Patterson-Gimlin footage is a small-town feud between a bunch of guys in their 80s, most of whom feel ill-served by or cut out of its history and profits. Bitterness truly eats at the soul, and everyone here has much to be bitter about – not least the actions of Patterson’s brother-in-law, Al DeAtley, who became the only person to get rich from the film.
The film isn’t about debunking the footage in an “I told you so” kind of way. Moreover, Evans never goes so far as to suggest that the validity of the Patterson-Gimlin says anything about the existence of sasquatch. Instead, he creates rounded profiles of the good ol’ boys at the heart of the story, none of whom seem completely trustworthy. He also has a real compassion for figures like cryptozoologist René Dahinden, who staked his reputation on 24 feet of film stock, and Greg Long, who almost went broke trying to debunk it.
That sense of balance is what allows Evans to finally paint a real portrait of Roger Patterson, a figure as frustratingly enigmatic as Bigfoot himself. In doing so, it becomes an unexpected portrait of outsider artists and whisky bar con men, with as much to say about indie film distribution in the 1960s as it does about the cowboy code. When a new discovery – teased in the opening moments – finally puts the legitimacy of the footage into real focus, Evans keeps his lens trained on the people watching. Sasquatch may not be real, but their feelings are.
