The Protagonist: Where Narrative Meets Technicality

                

Considering Jessica Yu’s Protagonist documentary film and a narrative story’s relationship to technical writing, I take a page from Moore’s “Storytelling as a Pedagogical Tool.” Moore talks about structure, which I what I feel aids Yu in the process of telling the stories of four mean with disparate upbringings who are all alike in the way they dealt with overwhelming adversities in their lives and their fights to regain balance and self-control. Technical writing, being about the process of structuring a story and not necessarily the content of the story itself, is a huge factor; influencing which story came first, how to weave the narratives together, what editing techniques would yield the best results and bring the viewer to the narrative through the delivery of the protagonists’ stories.

               

 Yu also had to consider how to bring in her Greek dramatist theme and what frames and stories from the Greek playwright, Euripides, made most sense to break the monotony of the interviews’ verbal delivery and the chosen b-roll clips that worked to drive home the points and emphasize the climactic appeal of each interviewer’s storylines. Mitcheson writes in “Allowing the Accidental; the Interplay between Intentionality and Realism and Photographic Art” that a special connection exists between image as symbol and the photograph, or reality, it represents. The photographs, taken from the actual lives of these men, add to the film too and work to provide a bridge between the personal traumas they suffered and the universal feeling of suffering, which breaks the barriers of individual circumstances of pain and leave only the all-around relational effect of pain that everyone can identify with.