The Role of Narrator in 11th Hour

The documentary film, 11th Hour featured numerous experts, and offered various ideas coherently. Though the claim of the people is not completely same and the claims may disturb each other (because of multiple value claims and scientific truth), the film overcomes with a world-wide famous Hollywood actor, Leonardo Decaprio who participates into the film as a narrator.

In the beginning of the film, the audience is guided to recognize what the problem is with a bunch of experts. They commonly say we have a problem in terms of environment of the earth which is very urgent that we need to react to the happening. However, the length of the time to interview those experts is quite short and also the scenes depicting specialists announcing claims tend to change quickly that the audience might be lost or lose the attention. To this characteristic of the interview film genre, the film mixed its type with a narrator who is not scientist or chairman at all.

Until the time, 19 minute and 41 seconds, the film defines that what we were and are in the ecosystem what we are currently facing, how we will struggle in the planet, by borrowing the words of specialists. And right after the time, the narrator appears. Decaprio squeezes out what experts said before, and asks a question for the climate change in order to progress the debate. At this moment, the role of the narrator is similar to a bridge because he highlights the focus we need to see and the relations between the cause and the result of the climate change.

Besides, the narrator constructs a strong pathos in this scene because to most people his image is reliable. We can extend the concept what we learned in Booth’s Types of Narration to the film. Though the film doesn’t construct the reliability of the audience in the tone of narration as same as the novels do delicately, Decaprio stands with a reliable image and believable character which is based on what he has done before and how he shows himself in the film.

The film controls the tension and develops the broad topic into the specific issue by changing the figures in the film. The director achieved to extract strong ethos by forming powerful images of narrator that the film comes close to the audience with a narrowed distance between the implied author and the audience.