Blackfish Analysis

For journal four I decided to watch the film Blackfish, which is very different from the other films I have picked before instead of an inspirational, encouraging documentary about overcoming something or being optimistic; it is very dark in comparison. Thus, this documentary follows a killer whale named Tilikum a Sea World whale that has been in captivity most of his life working shows at the theme park however, he has also killed three people during his time in captivity. Two of which being trainers who worked with him on a daily basis and the other one being someone who snuck in to swim with the whale. At first I thought this was maybe the implied narrative of the film.
Consequently, that was not necessarily the narrative of the film; instead in my view it focused more on how whales in captivity suffer both physically and possibly even psychologically. To create this narrative the film employees various former SeaWorld trainers’ interviews and older footage of the whales and trainers interacting with one another they also used a lot of layering of audio to set the scene and darkness in certain spots. Each interview is setup as a three point light interview however, this film used various visual metaphors as well instead of physically showing the whale attacks they instead used footage of horrified audience members or even …show more content…
The filmmakers do this to create terror and they do this over and over again. “Accident’s” were a big topic of the narrative one of the trainers says that the park has had over 70 whale attacking incidents or “accidents ” that were not relayed to the trainers that often. They do this by again using layers of audio and visual metaphors of courthouses and typing police reports on the