 Seven theses about border genres / five modest proposals about docudrama Seven theses about border genres
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If documentary's historic Griersonian mission was to explain, entertainment kept creeping in thanks to the likes of Cavalcanti and Jennings. Popular factual entertainment has attracted an audience more by mobilising discourses of entertainment than those of sobriety. In a world with new levels of transnational fear and anxiety, the consoling power of entertainment has exceeded the explanatory impulse. Our worst fears of surveillance returned as 'World's Worst Driver' farce; our worst nightmares of obliteration return as 'Survivor'. Since the first repetition of the Zapruder tape of the Kennedy assassination, the visual media have progressively entered this mental landscape whenever a nation-constituting trauma has occurred. In the USA, the Challenger explosion was an example. Will the kamikaze attack on the World Trade Centre outstrip previous disasters in the number of times the images will be repeated and re-seen? The first sign of the trauma in a national consciousness is the repetition of an image; the number of repetitions over time is an indication of the seriousness of the trauma. Whether the number of repetitions is a factor in the explanation or the consolation, or both, I have yet to decide. I am certain, however, that dramatisations, factual and otherwise, will very soon be offering both to audiences. Much of this is about memory and its uses - accessing memory is memory [Joe Kelleher]? Post-9/11, white anglophone cultures in particular must beware of what consolation they seek and take in the past? It is all too possible to 'become trapped by our reverence for World War II as a crusade for freedom' (Peter C. Rollins). |
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