 Seven theses about border genres / five modest proposals about docudrama Five modest proposals about docudrama
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I'm wondering if I've given up on the term 'dramadoc', much less my clumsy 1998 neologism 'dramadoc/docudrama' (in my book No Other Way To Tell It). There is a level at which this form is still a 'duty-genre' (Brian Winston) whatever a national TV system's orientation towards the concept of 'public service'. Steve Lipkin* and I, researching docudrama in the UK and the USA, have reached the conclusion that convergence between UK 'dramadoc' and US 'docudrama' is not all about the dumbing down of serious subjects. The best examples (as with C19 melodrama) take a cultural crux or anxiety, structure it around the 'well-made play' as a witnessed-evidential, claim it as reconstruction, hope to have it received as a kind of experience. Amongst maker-intentions - however dubious these may be to the 'Over-Cautious Critick' (Ben Jonson) - there's still an element of the dutiful? Even in 'Disease of the Week' made-for-TV docudrama? * Steve Lipkin's excellent Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice was published this year by Southern Illinois University Press. It is indispensable for an understanding of the modern docudrama. As Lipkin rightly asserts, docudrama's perennial power inheres in the rhetorical nature of its practices. |
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