A Genre Made for New Times
This book is predicated on the idea that the screen genre docudrama became ubiquitous during the latter part of the twentieth century. It argues in general that the genre was made for new times. Fact-based art burgeoned during this period, part of a millennial zeitgeist. It is tempting to relate this to Francis Fukuyamaâs controversial 1992 concept of the âEnd of Historyâ, which posited a new world order at the close of a century in which the capitalist system seemed triumphant. While the coming of this order seems less likely in the second decade of the new century, it is clear enough that Greater Europe has been radically reconfigured in the past quarter-century, and that more change must come. Initially, the new era was heralded by striking workers in Poland, by Gorbachevâs glasnost policy in the USSR, and, crucially, by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even before the fall of the Wall, the forests of aerials pointing westwards in East Germany, remarked by many visitors from the West during the long Cold War period, were testament to many things, including the desire for a âfreeâ media in the East that would open up proscribed subjects.1 The extent to which any medium can actually be free will, of course, always be debatable. But the Wall and its collapse became a powerful symbol of contrasting desires arising from opposed political systems. If keeping some things out was uppermost on one side of the Wall, letting some things in was surely the aim of those aerials. On both sides was a consciousness of a Europe still troubled by its twentieth-century past and becoming confused by the looming twenty-first-century future. The ramifications of the break-up of an uneasy Pan-European postwar settlement that had seemed for two generations to be set in stone, the emergence of a new, and unsettled, Europe, triggered many thingsâas the subsequent two-and-a-half decades have shown.
By 2000, the âoldâ Cold War had (effectively) ended, the former Eastern European power bloc had (apparently) collapsed, and its organising ideology had (again apparently) become discredited. It was not just that âsatelliteâ nations formerly sealed into an alliance with the Soviet Union could suddenly secede from the previous union (for example, Poland, Romania, East Germany); the USSR itself also quite rapidly fragmented into its constituent parts. A New Europe seemed to be, if not born, at least emerging as the old millennium tipped over into the new. Docudramaâat its investigative journalistic best a profoundly democratic screen genreâoffered, we will argue in the chapters that follow, a means in many European countries of supplying a real need for information, explanation, and reflection at this time of uncertainty and dizzying instability. The genreâs history is embedded in anglophone and Western European television cultures, and its development is inevitably inflected by British and American influences. But the subject of this book is the emergence of docudrama elsewhere in Europe. The genreâs spread can even be detected in countries from the old Eastern Europe, as Chaps. 2 and 3 will show.
In an article in 2000, John Corner identified what he called a âpost-documentaryâ turn in screen culture, occurring as millennial events played out. Indeed, âdocu-hybridityâ has played a major role in representing these times to film and television audiences. Much inventive mixing of formerly discrete television genres has been evident. The âintermateabilityâ of factual and imaginative ways of seeing (literally, the mixing of separate components) has been viewed with much suspicion in the past, being seen as an unnecessary and confusing âblurring of boundariesâ.2 But in the new era it has become almost de rigueur, and fact-based approaches have been evident across the performing and expressive arts.3 Docudrama began as a distinctively post-World War II televisual genre (as I argued first in my 1990 book True Stories?). The tectonic shifts of the late twentieth century fuelled a new interest in facts and information that was altogether different from the earlier, post-Enlightenment âfaith in factsâ that had spawned early docudrama. Improved technology, too, has had a role in widening access to information.4 Screen docudramaâs newfound status served to bracket the genre off from the excesses of other forms of fact-based (some would say âdumbed-downâ) television, such as âreality TVâ. With status came increased production activity, and instead of being, as I stated in 1990, an âoccasionalâ feature of broadcast television scheduling, docudramaâs presence became frequent as well as significant. This has made the form more difficult to attack for lacking the heavyweight, âdiscourse of sobrietyâ claims of documentary.5 Indeed, its range of generic possibility has been hugely expanded as the result of synergies between the formerly rival film and television industries. Thus the âbiopicâ and the âbased-on-factâ areas of the film industry, each with their own traditions of practice, have fed off television docudrama to emerge as more and more important parts of the modern cinema industry too. The pace of these changes was remarkable, and in my later No Other Way to Tell It, I proposed the idea of a âcontinuumâ of docudramatic practice to account for the burgeoning spectrum of fact-usage. And I attempted to highlight all this by using the phrase âscreen dramaâ to reflect the fact that docudramatic strategies were now at play in both film and television (2011, p. 3).
By the time the team that has produced this book were working together in the early twenty-first century, docudrama had established sufficient levels of industrial production, broadcast visibility, audience loyalty, and even academic respectability within the spectrum of hybrid fact/fiction television and film practices to demand further examination and analysis. This book seeks to explore docudramaâs emergence and importance in a number of European television ecologies, and to examine the ways in which the genre has adapted to particular national sensibilities and interests. It seeks simultaneously to be an introduction to a potential research area (for there are more exclusions than inclusions in our âSelective Surveyâ), and a blueprint for further investigation. It appears at a time when the precise contours of European re-alignment seem every bit as problematical as they have been at any time since the end of World War II; a time when the âNew Europeâ is a place of doubt and difficulty rather than a stable point at the End of History. Geopolitical alignments and realignments, complicated further by religious extremism, population diaspora from within and beyond Europeâs frontiers, and global economic uncertainty have added to the historical problems already evident in the very concept of âEuropeâ. It seems more than likely that fact-based screen drama will continue to be a means of trying to make sense of social, political, cultural, and indeed geographical, change within the continent well into the future.
The âSelective Surveyâ
Selection is the inevitable result of two pragmatic factors. Firstly, the core of the team that has produced the book came together at various international conferences through a common scholarly interest in the dominant screen traditions of Anglo-American docudrama.6 Distinctively British (investigative journalistic) and American (entertainment-led) traditions of docudrama have been influential since at least the 1960s. Anglophone co-production has caused these traditions to dovetail since at least the 1980s, and international âco-prosâ with channels and production companies in Europe have extended the formâs reach and grasp. It is important in this Introduction to acknowledge the hegemonic implications of anglophone screen culture. For all the contributors to this book it was a necessaryâbut manifestly insufficientâfirst step in the work that followed. The transfer of our common interest in anglophone docudrama to the screen cultures of each personâs home nation was a more important step towards conference presentations that sought to gauge to what extent, if any, the distinctive features of the âtwo traditionsâ could be traced in indigenous production in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, and to what extent, if any, there were âlocalâ, nuanced, differencesâevidence, perhaps, of distinctive national concerns and senses of identity. The core group, then, already represented five major language communities of old Western Europe. The nations represented in the panels could in addition be claimed as hosting the continentâs earliest, most highly developed, and sophisticated television systems and cultures. The docudramatic models of British and American practitioners have been both available and influential almost from the inception of these European nationsâ television systems. This has been ratcheted up by international co-production, and the influence of Arte and Canal+ in Europe is also an important factor. Our âcompare and contrastâ approach in conference presentations offered an early opportunity to open up the subject further, to try to establish what might be distinctive about each nationâs approach to docudrama, and to speculate on what this might mean for the wider European culture.
Secondly, we felt we had not only to acknowledge the fissuresâhegemonic and otherwiseâin our coverage, we had also at least to have a policy towards those gaps. A comprehensive survey taking in all European nations was highly tempting for âcompletistsâ (myself included). But it had to be recognised as impossible in practical termsâno publishing house would wish to finance such a large volume. Having said all this, it was still logical to try for as broad a base as possible. We wanted at least some coverage from outside the nations already represented. To this end, we sought out fellow academics elsewhere in Europe, and succeeded in drawing perspectives from Sweden and Poland. Thus there is at least some limited consideration of situations obtaining in countries outside the dominant language groups; one from a country formerly part of the old Communist bloc, and one from a Scandinavian country newly emergent as a âplayerâ on the European television scene thanks in particular to the rise of so-called âNordic noirâ TV drama.
This book, then, argues only for representative potential within a directed but partly serendipitous selection. Collectively, we accept that some aspects of this must have the appearance of âtokenismâ, but with a study that is, effectively, the first of its kind, this has the kind of operational inevitability that is regrettable but unavoidable.7 Our hope is that this collection is a first step in encouraging academic studies of all kinds across the continentâtheses, articles, booksâbecause we are convinced that the docudramatic mode has been, is, and will continue to be vital to the representation, narrativisation, and understanding of difficult times. The best examples of docudrama have always gone beyond print and broadcast news and documentary; they possess a reach and grasp unavailable to other modes of public address. The worst examplesâso-called âdisease of the weekâ docudramas, or those featuring tabloid crime, for exampleâfurnish another kind of perspective on mass culture that is also potentially valuable. Examples from across the spectrum will be found in the chapters that follow, all have a relevance to the future potential of the genre and the future trajectory of its study (and I will return to this subject in the final section of this Introduction). Partial, then, our coverage is, but we hope that the selection we have made, the approach we have taken, and the examples of practice on which we focus will serve to point the way.
Our Approach: An Academic Backstory
Docudramaâs generic characteristics have been formed via traditions in theatre as well as film, and its claims to documentary authenticity are additionally underscored by practices in both film and print journalism. Television networks throughout Europe have used and are using docudrama to examine key events in national histories, and to review the lives of individuals central to unfolding national histories. At the lower end of the scale, there is what might be seen as a pandering to the kind of tabloid culture that has bedevilled an industry somewhat in thrall to the quick fix of reality TV and âcelebrityâ. The celebrity biographical docudrama could be an element of this, but it need not beâas some writers show in their chapters. Worthy, serious docudramaâwith something new to say about history, current affairs, and the place of important people in themâis the aspect of the genre to which many academics are drawn. But we do not avoid commentary on the tabloid just because it is tabloid.
At this particularly crucial point in a perennially troubled European history, screen docudrama is one of the means cultures have to work through issues, including difficult, even traumatic, elements of experiences shared both within national borders and in a pan-European context. The burgeoning of the genre across the âquality-of-subjectâ spectrum is a good indication that it has a part to play in the task of making sense both of complex current events, and of cultural obsessions. Its inherent exploration of representational boundaries as creatively permeable in wholly new ways is one of the many reasons why we claim docudrama as a âgenre for the timesâ. This bookâs overarching theoretical position, then, is one grounded in the surveying of specific national contexts and practices, but one always alive to those relational issues that offer nuanced points of departure towards wider, international perspectives. To some extent the approach taken to docudrama is a common one; it is an approach founded on a distinctive academic backstory which, I hope, will partially excuse the personal tone of this Introduction.
If much of the history and tradition of docudrama developed via an anglophone screen culture that has somewhat dominated the genreâlargely because of American/English-language screen hegemonyâsomething similar is true of the academic attention that docudrama has received. This too has been dominated by British and American scholars. Work mainly from the last half of the twentieth century established the distinctiveness of the genre as residing in a combination of âheadâ and âheartâ treatments of âevents that really happenedâ. The âheadâ approach derives from forensic, investigative journalism, and legalistic applications of the notions of âresearchâ, âevidenceâ, and âproofâ. The âheartâ approach stems from the emotional and behavioural dimensions available through performanceâdramatic writing and structuring, realist film technique, and actor skill. Dramaâs capacity to offer second-order experience can never be discounted (see Paget 2011, pp. 287â289). Study of docudrama has emerged from many academic pathsâstudies in theatre, film, television/media, historyâall with distinctive approaches. But in the early days of commentary on the form, things were rather different. Beginning work on docudrama more than a quarter of a century ago, I w...