The Grizzly Man Documentary Analysis

The Grizzly Man is a documentary film directed and narrated by Werner Herzog which focuses on the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, an amateur nature filmmaker and wildlife preservationist. The movie features interviews with people who knew Timothy in his life and people who had heard of his story. These interviews paint Treadwell as a controversial figure, but those closest to him express their fondness for him despite his troubled past. The film also features sequences from Treadwell’s video footage in which he gets up close and personal with wild grizzly bears. In the end, Treadwell appears to me to be a lunatic who let his hurts get the best of him, causing him to undermine the harsh reality of nature which when combined with his ill-preparedness,

These films are mostly non-fiction and non-narrative. The reading defines documentary film as a movie that aims to inform viewers about truths or facts. This kind of filmmaking first appeared in the 1890’s and were called actualities. Many of these films focused on the lives of real people or explored exotic lands. Topical were films that recreated historical or newsworthy events. The 1920’s introduced Robert Flaherty who is considered “the father of documentary cinema”. Soviet documentary’s also arose out of this time, showing that cinema could portray a political agenda. The World War II era brought about the politics and propaganda of documentary film which was heavily used in Nazi Germany and then used by the axis powers during the war. Documentary films can use different forms of organization to explain or tell a story: cumulative organizing includes a catalog of image and sounds that don’t necessarily make sense, contrastive organizing includes a series of differing viewpoints on the subject, and developmental organizing follows a change of progression throughout a film. Explorative positions are often taken is scientific documentaries while persuasive positions take on a perspective that pushes for belief of