Docudrama

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Docudrama

• The British Tradition

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Table of Contents

• 1) What is docudrama?
• 2) The British tradition in docudrama
• 3) The British docudrama tradition in the 60s
• 4) Recent British docudramas

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British Cinema

• There is a certain incompatibility between the
  words British and cinema.
• Early François Truffaut
• Gave Truffaut and many of us the impression of GB
  as an un-cinematic nation
• Realist film British national cinema

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What is docudrama?

• A film that re-creates and dramatizes real
  events, real situation or occurrences in history,
  often recent history, by blending facts and
  fiction.
• Movies that purport to be factual a re-creation
  of newsworthy people or occurrences.
• Popular staples in TV in the 60s and 70s.

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What is docudrama?

• More accurate interpretations of reality than
  other fiction films
• Non-fiction drama (oxymoron) indicates that the
  docudrama borders on the fields of invention and
  reality, and of imagination and fact.

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The British Tradition

• The documentary movement in the 30s led by John
  Grierson and the war-time documentaries of
  Humphrey Jennings, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry
  Watts, Basil Wright, etc.
• ? Inspirations for the post-war docudrama
  filmmakers

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The British Tradition

• Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950), painter, poet,
  filmmaker, journalist and historian
• Maker of experimental and creative documentaries

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The British Tradition

• His tightly scripted documentaries blend real
  footage with reconstructed and restaged scenes.
• This process often blurs the line between
  documentary and fiction

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The British Tradition

• Fires Were Started (1943) about a fire unit
  working through the blitz
• Shot during the days of the blitz combining the
  newsreel footage with restaged scenes.

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• The Dramatised Documentary Group in BBC
• ? story documentary
• we wanted to stretch reality Ken Loach

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• Peter Watkins (1935-)
• Established an innovative style combining a drama
  acted out by real people with newsreel
  techniques

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• Culloden (1964)
• A modern TV crew (anachronistic) follows the
  build-up, the fighting and the bloody aftermath
  of the 1764 battle of Culloden.

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• Bold montage, revealing close-ups and hand-held
  camera deconstruct the myth of the battle and the
  conventions of costume drama

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• The War Game (1965)
• Does not reconstruct but preconstruct the nuclear
  fallout in southern England.
• Juxtaposes interviews, graphics, raw data with
  staged horrific images

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• What Watkins refers as you are there style.
• Banned till 1985 but won the special award in
  Venice and the Oscar for the Best Documentary

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• The film is in the guise of a documentary and
  the action sequences are broken by the
  commentaries of doctors, psychiatrists, churchmen
  and strategists. While the presentation seems
  authoritative, the film is straight propaganda
  for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
  Evening Standard, 8 Feb. 1966

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• Ken Loach (1935 - )
• Maker of TV drama turned filmmaker
• Realist filmmaker par excellence
• Makes a drama like a documentary

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• Cathy Come Home (1968)
• Made for the Wednesday Play
• Drama completely made on location and harnessed
  to documentary techniques

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The British Tradition (in the 60s)

• Unknown actors achieve uncanny naturalism through
  improvisation.
• The outcome is a drama film as close to
  documentary as it can be.

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The British Tradition (contemporary)

• Paul Greengrass (1935 - )
• Worked as a director in ITV for World in Action
  (investigative documentaries)
• Co-author of Spycatcher with Peter Wright (former
  MI5)

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The British Tradition (contemporary)

• Greengrass moved to TV drama creating The One
  That Got Away (1996) about SAS in the Gulf War
  and The Fix (1997) about the fictional story of
  corruption in football.
• The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (1999) the story
  of a black youth, whose murder was not properly
  investigated by the police.
• Bloody Sunday (2002) about the 1972 massacre of
  Catholics in Northern Ireland by the British
  security force.

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The British Tradition (contemporary)

• United 93 (2006) - the highjack of the United
  Airlines Flight 93
• The filmmakers claim that it was produced with
  full support of the families of passengers.

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The British Tradition (contemporary)

• Kevin Macdonald (1967 - ) - grandson of Emeric
  Pressburger and brother of Andrew Macdonald
  (producer of Trainspotting)
• Documentary filmmaker - One Day in September
  (1999)

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The British Tradition (contemporary)

• Touching the Void (2003) - Joe Simson and Simon
  Yates attempted to climb the Peruvian mountain
  Siula Grande in 1985. They reached the summit
  but during the descent Simpson fell and broke his
  leg and Yates had to make the agonizing
  decision to cut the rope.