Docudrama
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In film and television, docudrama is a documentary-style genre that features dramatized re-enactments of actual historical events. As a neologism, the term is often confused with docufiction.
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[edit] Characteristics
Docudramas tend to demonstrate some or most of the following characteristics:
- Focus on the facts of the event, as they are known;
- Use of literary and narrative techniques to flesh out the bare facts of an event in history to tell a story;
- Some degree of license may be taken with minor historical facts for the sake of enhancing the drama.
A good docudrama does not abuse dramatic license, and avoids overt commentary and explicit assertion of the creator's own point of view or beliefs.
Docudramas, are distinct from historical fiction, in which the historical setting is a mere backdrop for a plot involving fictional characters.
[edit] History
The impulse to incorporate historical material into literary texts has been an intermittent feature of literature in the west since its earliest days. Aristotle's theory of art is based on the use of putatively historical events and characters. Especially after the development of modern mass-produced literature, there have been genres that relied on history or then-current events for material. English Renaissance drama, for example, developed sub-genres specifically devoted to dramatizing recent murders and notorious cases of witchcraft.
However, docudrama as a separate category belongs to the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II, Louis de Rochemont, creator of the March of Time, became a producer at 20th Century Fox. There he brought the newsreel aesthetic to films, producing a series of movies based upon real events using a realistic style that became known as semidocumentary. These films (The House on 92nd Street, Boomerang, 13 Rue Madeleine) were widely imitated, and the style soon became used even for completely fictional stories such as The Naked City. Perhaps the most significant of the semidocumentary films was He Walked by Night, based upon the serial killer Erwin "Machine-Gun" Walker. Jack Webb had a supporting role in the movie and struck up a friendship with the LAPD consultant, Sergeant Marty Wynn. The film and his relationship with Wynn inspired Webb to create what became one of the most famous docudramas in history -- Dragnet.
The influence of New Journalism tended to create a license for authors to treat with literary techniques material that might in an earlier age have been approached in a purely journalistic way. Both Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were influenced by this movement, and Capote's In Cold Blood is arguably the most famous example of the genre.
[edit] Notable examples of works
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[edit] Films
- Nanook of the North (1922)
- Ala-Arriba! (1942)
- A Night to Remember (1958)
- The Gallant Hours (1960)
- Culloden (1964)
- The War Game (1965)
- Cathy Come Home (Drama documentary) (1966)
- Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)
- The Missiles of October (1974)
- Pumping Iron (1977)
- King (TV miniseries) (1978) [1]
- Death of a Princess (1980)
- Threads (1984)
- Canada's Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks (1985)
- Seacoal (1985)
- Life Story (1987)
- Dien bien Phu (1992)
- Baraka (1992)
- Ed Wood (1994)
- Nixon (1995)
- Hillsborough (1996)
- Thirteen Days (2000)
- Bloody Sunday (2002)
- The Laramie Project (2002)
- The Day Britain Stopped (2003)
- The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)
- Touching the Void (2003)
- The Last Dragon (2004)
- End Day (2005)
- Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005)
- Supervolcano (Drama documentary) (2005)
- Bobby (2006)
- Hollywoodland (2006)
- The 9/11 Commission Report (2006)
- The Road to Guantanamo (2006)
- United 93 (film) (2006)
- The Lost Tomb of Jesus (2007)
- The Beckoning Silence (Made for TV) (2008)
- The Lena Baker Story (2008)
- The Execution of Gary Glitter (2009)
[edit] Television series
- Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire
- Border Security
- Bondi Rescue
- Heroes and Villains
- House of Saddam
- Motorway Patrol
- Space Race
[edit] See also
- Docufiction
- Mockumentary
- Ethnofiction
- Fly on the wall
- Factual television
- Reality television
- Peter Watkins, a pioneer of docudrama
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
- Hellmann, John (1981). Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
- Kazin, Alfred (1973). Bright Book of Life: American Hot Dogs and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.
- Lukacs, Georg (1983). The Historical Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
- Siegle, Robert (1984). "Capote's Hand-Carved Coffins and the Nonfiction Novel." Contemporary Literature 25 (1984): 437-451.
- Stavreva, Kirilka (2000). "Fighting Words: Witch-speak in Late Elizabethan Docu-fiction." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 309-338.
- White, Hayden (1985). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
