The 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog, plays between a couple of the modes proposed by Bill Nichols in the “Documentary Film” of his 2010 book Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies. In my opinion, I believe Grizzly Man fits into at least three of the six modes that Nichols proposes: the expository, participatory and poetic modes. This blending between modes might be due to the fact that this is technically a documentary that talks about a documentarian and uses footage from a potential documentary, but it could also just be that this film was not meant to fit any one category.
For the purposes of this assignment, I will focus on two specific scenes and point out how they fit (or don’t fit) with the modes I proposed above.
First, I want to focus on the scene at minute 25. The scene where the fox appears as Treadwell is wrapping up talking about a bear in the background. Herznog gives the viewer the clip with no preface. Just as Treadwell is wrapping up the scene, Herznog’s voice interrupts it and he gives us a hint of what will happen, saying: “Now the scene seems to be over, but as a filmmaker sometimes things fall into your lap which you couldn’t expect, never even dream of…There is something like an inexplicable magic of cinema.” In this sense, because his voice is narrating the scene and is separate from the actual footage presented, this part is an example of the expository mode that Nichols offers. Nichols defines the expository mode as “direct address [that] involves the use of a voice that speaks to the viewer directly” (114). However, I think this scene is a little more nuanced than this, since it is more of an expository mode of the observational mode that Treadwell delivers because, to use Nichols’s definition, Treadwell “capture[s] the unfolding duration of what took place in front of the camera” (117). Why did Herznog decide to use this particular scene to show “the inexplicable magic of cinema”? And why did he choose to interrupt the scene in the middle instead of narrating it from the beginning? I think that this scene complicates how we interpret what an “expository mode” might look like in actual documentaries.
The next scene I want to take a closer look at is the scene at minute 52:20. This is the scene where he listens (and Jewel watches him listen) to the tape that was recorded at the time of the bear incident. At this moment, Herznog breaks out of the expository and instead shifts to the participatory mode—where the “filmmaker becomes an openly integral part of what happens in front of the camera” (118). I believe this is the only scene where we actually see his body in the frame (someone can let me know if this isn’t the case), which breaks the norm of the documentary. He is literally participating in this scene by being in the frame of the camera, performing an action (listening to the tape and relaying what it says), and explicitly telling her “Jewel, you must never listen to this”. Though a very staged scene, this moment is meant to dramatize the emotional aspects of Treadwell’s death. But again, how and why did Herznog decide to physically interrupt the general mode of the documentary? Why show this scene at all? Compared to the fox scene, how is a visible interruption affecting how we read the general narrative Herznog is developing about Treadwell?
For me, these two scenes were two impactful moments of the documentary and let on a lot of what Herznog thought about Treadwell. They also seemed good examples of the modes Nichols covered in the reading. I also think that this documentary had some aspects of the poetic modes, since Herznog often let the camera linger a lot on nature (I’m thinking about the scene with the seagull diving into the sea) . So in many ways this film overlaps with most of the modes that Nichols covers, especially considering that footage of Treadwell’s would-be documentary are also used. What does everyone think?