Reading Log #9

It’s all about the director… mostly.

Like fictional films, documentaries have different forms and genres. The nature docudrama film, Grizzly Man (2005) by a German director and narrator Werner Herzog is a portrait. It is about a bear enthusiast, Timothy Treadwell who camped in a remote Alaskan land of Grizzly bears for thirteen summers before he died. Including Treadwell’s recordings of his bear interactions as archival sources makes the documentary a compilation film. The dramatic yet artistic sense is assisted by the Treadwell’s own footages he took of himself and his encounters with the bears, where he narrates his expedition. “It has been only five days since the baby (bear) died, … it’s so sad, it was so cute.” Treadwell had spoken out with informative yet dramatic and casual tone. Furthermore, chain of interviews of close friends, work mates, nature experts and relatives are selected and inserted to vary the genres in order to engage with the audience with an appeal of ranging techniques.

Narrated by Herzog, he is able to ask rhetorical questions and presents a persuasive, viewer-centered argument, making his film a rhetorical form and an opinionative issue. “… Could this one be bear 141 (Treadwell’s murderer)? What looks playful could be desperation.” To Timothy Treadwell, bears are his friends and believe in the gradual friendliness of the bears to him but Herzog doubted the bears and positions the audience to either side of the argument using the enthymeme. It is a rhetorical form also because it provokes an emotional appeal, even though the conclusion cannot be proved beyond question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjwLkKih1hQ