British Docudrama Georges Fournier
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British Docudrama Georges Fournier To cite this version: Georges Fournier. British Docudrama. InMedia : the French Journal of Media and Media Represen- tations in the English-Speaking World, Center for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW), 2013. hal-02467735 HAL Id: hal-02467735 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02467735 Submitted on 5 Feb 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. InMedia The French Journal of Media and Media Representations in the English-Speaking World 3 | 2013 Cinema and Marketing British Docudrama Georges Fournier Publisher Center for Research on the English- Speaking World (CREW) Electronic version URL: http://inmedia.revues.org/591 ISSN: 2259-4728 Electronic reference Georges Fournier, « British Docudrama », InMedia [Online], 3 | 2013, Online since 16 November 2013, connection on 15 October 2016. URL : http://inmedia.revues.org/591 This text was automatically generated on 15 octobre 2016. © InMedia British Docudrama 1 British Docudrama Georges Fournier 1 Hybridized forms or representation, whether for the big screen or for television, have only recently aroused the interest of researchers, though the practice itself can be traced back to the origins of film. The tug of war that lies at the heart of docudrama − the generic term for this type of representation − springs from the mixture of elements borrowed from the fictional and documentary genres. Unlike conventional fiction films, docudramas claim a testimonial dimension. In Introduction, Drama-documentary, Dossier 19, the extensive investigation Andrew Goodwin and Paul Kerr carried out for the British Film Institute into the adjustments of documentary to television, the authors come to the conclusion that “television ‘drama-documentary’ is not a programme category, it is a debate,”1 a contention based on the problems of taxonomy but also on the blurring of boundaries which are issues that this paper is going to try and explore. Naming Hybrid Productions 2 In The Television Genre Book Glen Creeber chooses to situate his examination of genres within the broader framework of television studies, taking into account broadcasters, notions related to reception and television as a whole. Exploring the hybrid combination of documentary and fictional genres, Glen Creeber draws a fine line between documentary drama2 on the one hand and dramatised documentary on the other hand: “Whereas dramatised-documentary might include conventional documentary material alongside the dramatised sequences, it is likely that, with the exception of brief scenes from archive footage, most of a documentary-drama will be the product of full directorial management of scripted action and speech.”3 Derek Paget takes the taxonomy a step further in No Other Way to Tell It by giving meaning to the several linguistic combinations that can be worked out with the words “documentary,” “drama” and all the related morphemes that compose them, not to mention the absence or presence of hyphens. His study highlights the fact that although the passage from complete forms – “dramatised documentary” and “documentary drama” − to amalgamated structures – “dramadoc” InMedia, 3 | 2013 British Docudrama 2 and “docudrama” − is mainly telling of the evolution of the genre over time, the choice of the word “docudrama,” “dramadoc” or “faction” is, on the contrary, very meaningful. He takes the opportunity of a linguistic analysis to start a semantic explanation on the distinction between the British and US traditions, the latter favouring fictionalisation while the former is more inclined to evidential forms of representation. Yet, Derek Paget first investigated the differences between productions from the USA and Great-Britain, in True and Truer Stories – Documentary and Drama published in Médias : entre fiction et réalité, an article which also represented the opportunity for him to define the typically American concept of “faction,” and also to underline that the notion of crisis stands at the core of the hybrid genre of the docudrama. 3 In British TV Docudrama: Origins and Developments, published in Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV by Alan Rosenthal, John Corner’s ambition is also to offer a general approach of docudrama. He studies the genre from the point of view of terminology and draws conclusions from the combinations between the abridged and complete forms of the words “documentary,” “drama” and “fiction.” His study is also diachronic and spans the origins of the genre, from World War II propaganda − designed to foster a feeling of patriotism − to the beginning of docudrama on television. 4 The differences in approaches on either side of the Atlantic are also examined in detail by Susan Boyd-Bowman in Popular Television and Film. A Reader. As far as Susan Boyd-Bowman is concerned, the American drama documentary “privileges dramatic fiction over factual documentation.”4 It perfectly fits into the definition of US productions as putting a premium on fiction, which results from the powerful influence of Hollywood over filmic representations in the USA. 5 For Peter Kosminsky, the acclaimed British filmmaker, every film is a fiction film and the difference between the documentary and the docudrama genres is artificial and irrelevant. “There’s nothing inherently objective about documentaries. Every time someone chooses a particular section of an interview and juxtaposes it with a particular piece of music, they are steering the audience,” he confessed to a Guardian journalist in an article entitled Kosminsky Defends Docudrama.5 Among filmmakers, this approach to the filmic material was first supported by Peter Watkins who, in Media Crisis, stated that “We can no longer separate or differentiate films in terms of being artistic, pleasurable, aesthetic vs. those we consider as rubbish – without understanding that nearly all contemporary cinema films, documentaries, and TV programmes (including news broadcasts) which are intended and shaped for a mass audience, share certain common elements: a mono-form structure and a hierarchical relationship to the public. Whenever we watch a film, or even a few moments of TV, we are – with alarmingly few exceptions – participating in a repetitive process of manipulation, whether this was intentional on the part of the filmmaker/producer, or not.”6 6 The debate that occasionally rages over whether films should be labelled as “fiction,” “documentary” or “docudrama” is one that is widespread and fruitful among academics and critics. Although filmmakers are fully aware of the impact taxonomy has on reception, their main concern is getting their message across. Derek Paget, in the second edition of No Other Way To Tell It, aptly sums up the situation: “two things keep the ‘debate’ going and keep fuelling the effort to define as well as describe. The first is a continued demand for clear definition (if not taxonomy) on the part of students, non- academic commentators and, not least, ordinary viewers. This fire is continually stoked by print journalists. Television journalists and programme makers believe the reason for InMedia, 3 | 2013 British Docudrama 3 this is that newspapers feel threatened by the investigative power of television and see the docudrama as a weak point.”7 A Survey of Hybridity 7 Legitimized by their claim to testify to ethnographic and social issues, the acclaimed British documentarists of the early years of the twentieth century offered viewers fictive constructions which were later heralded as documentaries and which have gone down in history as such. L’Angleterre et son cinema : Le Courant documentaire 1927/1965 by Olivier Barrot, Philippe Pilard and Jean Queval abounds in references to British films made in the early years of the twentieth century and which purported to be testimonial. Documentarists roamed the world in an attempt to record on films as much of the diversity of customs and habits only ethnographers had until then approached, an anthropological dimension that still runs through many productions from drama documentarists. John Caughie, in Television Drama. Realism, Modernism, and British Culture offers a diachronic approach of the genre that encompasses its origins and the influence of the British tradition of the documentary; seminal figures like John Grierson, the father figure of the British documentary, and John Reith, the founder of the BBC, occupy prominent places in the debate on the promotion of hybrid forms of representation. 8 The main source of criticism levelled at the productions from the budding years of the British documentary had to do with their escapist dimension. The necessity for filmmakers to be politically committed and to choose topics in keeping with the concerns of the population, whether it was unemployment or housing problems, was John Grierson’s credo. As the pioneer of the British documentary tradition, John Grierson was highly critical of the tendency to lend filmic technique to escapist fantasies. In Grierson on Documentary he is adamant about the need for documentarists to focus on social realities in Britain. Robert Flaherty was directly targeted by his attacks: “Flaherty’s most considerable contribution to the problem is, as always, his insistence on the beauty of the natural. […] He took a year to make his study of the Eskimos and this after ten years’ exploration in the Eskimo country of Labrador and Baffin Land. […] We know our England glibly as an industrial country, as a beautiful country […] but we don’t know it in our everyday observation as such.”8 For John Grierson, the filmic media is a tool that must be wielded to help support social and political causes, a guiding principle that still stands at the core of the British docudrama.