Docudrama

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Not to be confused with docufiction.

A docudrama (or documentary drama) is a genre of radio and television programming, feature film, and staged theatre, which features dramatized re-enactments of actual events. On stage, it is sometimes known as documentary theatre.

In the core elements of its story a docudrama strives to adhere to known historical facts, while allowing a greater or lesser degree of dramatic license in peripheral details, and where there are gaps in the historical record. Dialogue may include the actual words of real-life persons, as recorded in historical documents. Docudrama producers sometimes choose to film their reconstructed events in the actual locations in which the historical events occurred.

As a neologism, the term docudrama is often confused with docufiction. However, unlike docufiction – which is essentially a documentary filmed in real time, incorporating some fictional elements – docudrama is filmed at a time subsequent to the events it portrays.

Characteristics

Docudramas tend to demonstrate some or most of the following characteristics

  • Representation of actual historical events
  • 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 is often 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.

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.

American television

Some docudrama examples for American television include Brian's Song (1971), and Roots (1977). Brian's Song is the biography of Brian Piccolo, a Chicago Bears football player who died at a young age after battling cancer. Roots depicts the life of a slave and his family.[1]

Docudramas

Historic evolution

Radio

Films

Television

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Docudrama". The Museums of Broadcast Communications. Retrieved 28 June 2012. 
  2. ↑ KING, 1978 film

Bibliography

  • Hellmann, John (1981). Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252008472. 
  • Kazin, Alfred (1973). Bright Book of Life: American Hot Dogs and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Boston: Little, Brown. ISBN 0316484180. 
  • Lipkin, Steven N., ed. (2002). Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama As Persuasive Practice. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-2409-5. 
  • Lukács, György (1962). Mitchell, Hannah; Mitchell, Stanley, eds. The Historical Novel. London: Merlin Press. 
  • Paget, Derek (2011). No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/docudrama on television (2nd ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-8446-1. 
  • Rhodes, Gary Don; Springer, John Parris, eds. (2006). Docufictions: Essays on the intersection of documentary and fictional filmmaking. London: McFarland & Co. ISBN 978-0-7864-2184-8. 
  • Roscoe, Craig; Hight (2001). Faking it: Mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-5641-3. 
  • Rosenthal, Alan (1995). Writing Docudrama: dramatizing reality for film and TV. Boston, Mass.: Focal Press. ISBN 0240801954. 
  • Rosenthal, Alan (1999). Why Docudrama?: Fact-Fiction on Film and TV. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-2186-5. 
  • Siegle, Robert (1984). "Capote's Hand-Carved Coffins and the Nonfiction Novel". Contemporary Literature 25: 437–451. 
  • Stavreva, Kirilka (2000). "Fighting Words: Witch-speak in Late Elizabethan Docu-fiction". Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30: 309–338. 
  • White, Hayden (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801821274. 

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