Documentary films have been in my interest as of recent times. Though many people may regard it as a boring genre like how it is sometimes linked to being educational, I strongly believe that it is the filmmaker’s task to make something based on actual dry facts interesting and engaging for the audience. A documentary film that really struck a chord in me would be Grizzly Man, 2005, directed by Werner Herzog, which was screened during one of the screenings in Introduction to Cinema Studies last semester. That film carried so many layers of meaning to the term documentary and when you start unpacking the different layers you find yourself getting lost in between them, and it gets quite intimidating, for me at least.

On the surface, that filmed carried all the elements a documentary film need. Interviews with various parties related to the subject matter, a narrator, facts backed up with evidence, arguments that provided not just a single point of view for the viewers and, in a way, separated that audiences on where they might stand with the filmmaker and his point that he is trying to put across to the viewers.

However, when you look deeper into the film, it is in the craft of the filmmaker to create suspense, drama and maybe even point to a certain direction for the audience, instead of letting them pick a stand for their own, although it may seem like that to the general audience.

To give an example of the different layers of documentary within the film, we have the first level of the film about a man named Timothy Treadwell and how he would spend the whole summer living with grizzly bears in Alaska and it became a annual affair. However, Timothy Treadwell himself was making a documentary about the grizzly bears and the filmmaker, Werner Herzog, uses the footages that were filmed by Treadwell himself in the film. This changes the whole dynamic of the film as not only it becomes a biography of Treadwell, but also a basic documentary on the grizzly bear living in Alaska. We have to understand Treadwell’s approach on documenting the bears and the wants and needs to do so, before we can start understanding the man himself. What’s even more challenging is how Herzog keeps it engaging with the audience.

I believe documentary has evolved largely in the recent years, and making documentary films have definitely played a part in that. It’s no longer just presenting facts to the audience, it is almost like writing a narrative plot where we have a protagonist, and he has a challenge to overcome and an antagonist who might get in his way of overcoming the challenge.