Oh man! I forgot to talk about Grizzly Man.

I forgot to talk about Grizzly Man. So I'll do that now.

When we see Timothy Treadwell cultivate this persona of a lone - but kind, lest we forget, warrior in front of his camera, I felt forced to question Bazin's ideas to an even greater extent. It seems that the camera becomes Treadwell's metaphorical paintbrush or chisel with which to create an artifical eternity that Bazin perceives to be the purpose of "plastic art."

I have an issue with what is illustrated as the mutually exclusive roles of "plastic art" and photography/cinema. To me, "plastic art" can seek to depict reality, and in turn, photography and cinema can seek to document and give life to a constructed reality. Bazin almost writes of photography with a language of machinery and technical aspects; he writes of the camera but not the human mind behind it.

While reading the Bazin, I thought of an episode of America's Next Top Model. Though my memory is escaping me, I remember that the models were made to resemble vampires, professional make-up artists devoting hours and hours to teasing hair and applying thick black eye shadow to transform these real people into characters. That which was depicted in these photographs were real people, yes, but real people portraying characters like those in a painting. Bazin does not account for photography's potential to be an art in and of itself.