 Seven theses about border genres / five modest proposals about docudrama Seven theses about border genres
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Mainstream documentary (travel, nature, history) is still the DOMINANT factual form for the popular audience (Raymond Williams). Once this had a sober-serious/masculinist appeal for an elite minority. In EMERGENT new factual formats, there is a playful-ironic/feminised appeal for a democratic majority audience. New factual formats retain RESIDUAL elements of old documentary, but forms emerging throughout television in the major industrialised countries may have something to do with feminised patterns of consumption within wider cultures? Documentary is not collapsing, either under pressure of post-modern doubt/denial or of digital technology/fakery. Is it? Dispersed [dissipated?] into the human scale of drama, the flowers/weeds - the new hybridised 'not-docs' - have instead centred some of the epistemological, ethical and political cruxes of the times. Partly this is to do with new accommodations between the literate and the visual and TV has tended historically to value the literate over the visual (John Caughie). The power presently being negotiated rests on Louis Delluc's concept of 'photogenie', a quality of 'visuality' equivalent to Brecht's theatrical 'gestus'? Images 'provide experiences which are constitutive of human ethical and political judgements - epistemologically valuable and potentially occasions of ideological resistance' [Janelle Reinelt]. |
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