A:

Waltz with Bashir is a movie about a man with no memory of a war in which he fought trying to figure out what had happened to him.

The quick scene at the very beginning of the trailer showing the main character and his friend discussing the war and going “searching for his memories” inter cut with scenes of war fare paint a strong picture of the story’s topic. The somber reflective music at the beginning contributes to this as well.

The shot of the main character’s silhouette starring out over the stormy seas is a classic and iconic short hand for showing that a character is at a low point and is lost in their own “darkness.”

The montage of clashing shots of dancing, fun, and destructive tanks overlapped with trippy music gives the audience for the confusing and sometimes jarringly brutal nature of the topic at hand. This motif is continued when a child soldier is shown killing several men with a rocket launcher, hammering home the horrors of these memories that the main character is trying to gain back

B:

Virunga:

Intro: A funeral service for a park ranger and a quick timeline of events leading up to the present day.

Welcome to Virunga: Transitioning from the jaunt from time the timeline stops on the present day as park rangers track down poachers. We are introduce us to the Virunga park, the park rangers, and the Gorilla Orphanage. We also learn about M23 and the refugees.

SOCO Enters: The SOCO oil company is introduced with their company jingle which comes off as creepily happy given their quickly revealed purpose. Through this part we see the growing tensions in the Congo and the intentions and rhetoric of SOCO.

War: The War begins with the leaders of M23 declaring war on the Congolese government and troops being mobilized. Over the course of this section, war goes down.

Epilogue: The Epilogue starts with one of the Gorillas at the Orphanage dying and the area of the Congo being taken by the rebels. Everything is left uncertain.

The documentary is narrative as in it follows an ongoing plot and has a framed protagonists and antagonists.

The narrative is structured with four primary plot lines that all crash together in the fourth part: The Orphanage, the Park Rangers, M23, and SOCO.

C:

The movie used a lot of long shots of the Virunga landscape, as well as shots of Gorillas during more mournful segments or to punctuate the change of topic. The light is stable throughout most of the doc but becomes fuzzy and indistinct in certain scenes, usually when the creator of the doc is interviewing the members of SOCO. In those scenes the lights are darkened and colors are uniformed to shades of blues and greens as the footage is far more impromptu.

The camera is also very stable throughout the doc, only becoming less so in scenes of, like in the SOCO scenes, are more impromptu such as during the fleeing of the war zone segment. The interviews with SOCO and M23 diverge from those with the Rangers and the Orphanage in presentation. While the interviews with M23 and SOCO happen almost always in a single lengthy shot of a large chunk of conversation with the person of interest front and center, the interviews with the Rangers and the Orphanage spend most of their time overlaying the interviewee’s words over their actions and daily duties to Virunga.

The narrative is presented fairly straight forward, dividing the documentary into two parallel plots, each consisting of two of the four “factions” mentioned earlier, with small diverges into villages and the refugees on occasion.

D:

The documentary tries to offer a wide variety of perspectives within it’s run time. The Orphanage and Rangers, being the primary topic of the doc, are the central focus while SOCO, M23, and the fishing village, and the refugees are given smaller direct focus. All groups get interviews with relevant representatives. However the major focus on those defending the park, the unsettling camera work of the interviews with the members of SOCO, the development on the emotional struggles of the Orphanage head, and with the documentary reporter describing, with disgust, the behavior of the SOCO representatives as “Straight out of a movie” lead to the conclusion that the doc’s goal is not just to inform about the crisis in Viruga, but to direct sympathy towards those working to defend it.

The doc would be filed under the role of the promoter. The doc is not just telling the tale of Viruga, but is deliberately framing the audience in the camp of the Rangers and Orphanage. The maker of the doc even says, within the doc itself, that she worries the people watching “will just move on with their lives” and ignore what is happening. The doc even ends with the statement “Find out how you can help Viruga at Virugamovie.org”

Now this brings up the age old question about documentaries, is the fact that the director had a clear message about the facts portrayed ethical? Does this intended message somehow taint the documentary’s ability to inform effectively. I’d say no, at least in this case. A strong bias can very easily compromise a documentary but some is always going to exist, and just because a documentary has an argument to make, that doesn’t mean it’s inherently malicious in it’s endeavor to do so. There are also problems that could spring up on the other end of the spectrum, giving completely neutral and equal exposure to two sides of a conflict subliminally puts them on equal moral footing at the start of a documentary, even if the situation has a clear aggressor and defendant. Very few situations are black and white but it’s not uncommon for one side to clearly be more in the wrong than the other, and this reality should be taken into account when reporting or documenting instead of lazily giving a “Both Sides” stance in any and all situations. Regardless, in Virunga, the documenter does try, and fails, to get interviews with the higher leaders of SOCO, and still interviewed those they could and the leaders of M23, even though they, especially SOCO, were the aggressors in the situation, and gave them ample showing so they may plead their views. So while there is a clear message and “good guy” protagonist shown in this documentary, it does it’s best to give the audience as full a accurate a picture of the situation as possible.

• Saved: 2-Documentary, A2