Docudrama
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A docudrama is documentary-style genre of radio and television programming and staged theatre that features dramatized re-enactments of actual historical events. A docudrama may be filmed or written.
In the core elements of its story a docudrama strives to adhere to known historical facts, while allowing a greater or lesser degree of dramatic license in peripheral details, and where there are gaps in the historical record. Docudrama producers sometimes choose to film their reconstructed events in the actual locations in which the historical events occurred. Dialogue may include the actual words of real-life persons, as recorded in historical documents.
As a neologism, the term docudrama is often confused with docufiction. However, unlike docufiction – which is essentially a documentary filmed in real time, incorporating some fictional elements – docudrama is filmed at a time subsequent to the events it portrays. Docudrama is also called documentary drama or it can be called Documentary Theatre.
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Characteristics
Docudramas tend to demonstrate some or most of the following characteristics
- Focus on the facts of the event, as they are known
- Use of literary and narrative techniques to flesh out the bare facts of an event in history to tell a story
- Some degree of license may be taken with minor historical facts for the sake of enhancing the drama
- Uses Historical events and puts it on the stage.
A good docudrama does not abuse dramatic license, and avoids overt commentary and explicit assertion of the creator's own point of view or beliefs.
Docudramas are distinct from historical fiction, in which the historical setting is a mere backdrop for a plot involving fictional characters.
History
The impulse to incorporate historical material into literary texts has been an intermittent feature of literature in the west since its earliest days. Aristotle's theory of art is based on the use of putatively historical events and characters. Especially after the development of modern mass-produced literature, there have been genres that relied on history or then-current events for material. English Renaissance drama, for example, developed sub-genres specifically devoted to dramatizing recent murders and notorious cases of witchcraft.
However, docudrama as a separate category belongs to the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II, Louis de Rochemont, creator of The March of Time, became a producer at 20th Century Fox. There he brought the newsreel aesthetic to films, producing a series of movies based upon real events using a realistic style that became known as semidocumentary. These films (The House on 92nd Street, Boomerang, 13 Rue Madeleine) were widely imitated, and the style soon became used even for completely fictional stories such as The Naked City. Perhaps the most significant of the semidocumentary films was He Walked by Night, based upon the serial killer Erwin "Machine-Gun" Walker. Jack Webb had a supporting role in the movie and struck up a friendship with the LAPD consultant, Sergeant Marty Wynn. The film and his relationship with Wynn inspired Webb to create what became one of the most famous docudramas in history – Dragnet.
The influence of New Journalism tended to create a license for authors to treat with literary techniques material that might in an earlier age have been approached in a purely journalistic way. Both Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were influenced by this movement, and Capote's In Cold Blood is arguably the most famous example of the genre.
American television
Some docudrama examples for American television include Brian's Song (1971), and Roots (1977). Brian's Song is the biography of Brian Piccolo, a Chicago Bears football player who died at a young age after battling cancer. Roots depicts the life of a slave and his family.
Docudramas
Historic evolution
Radio
- The March of Time (1931–1945)
Films
- The March of Time (1935–1951)
- A Night to Remember (1958)
- The Gallant Hours (1960)
- Culloden (1964)
- The War Game (1965)
- Cathy Come Home (Drama documentary) (1966)
- Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)
- The Missiles of October (1974)
- All the President's Men (film) (1976)
- Pumping Iron (1977)
- King (TV miniseries) (1978) <ref>KING, 1978 film</ref>
- Death of a Princess (1980)
- The Elephant Man (1980)
- Threads (1984)
- Canada's Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks (1985)
- Seacoal (1985)
- Life Story (1987)
- Goodfellas(1990)
- Dien bien Phu (1992)
- Baraka (1992)
- Schindler's List (1993)
- Ed Wood (1994)
- Nixon (1995)
- Hillsborough (1996)
- Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
- The Insider (1999)
- Erin Brockovich (2000)
- Thirteen Days (2000)
- The Pianist (2002)
- Bloody Sunday (2002)
- The Laramie Project (2002)
- Catch Me If You Can (2002)
- The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)
- Touching the Void (2003)
- The Last Dragon (2004)
- Cinderella Man (2005)
- End Day (2005)
- Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
- Supervolcano (Drama documentary) (2005)
- Bobby (2006)
- Hollywoodland (2006)
- Krakatoa: The Last Days (2006)
- The 9/11 Commission Report (2006)
- The Road to Guantanamo (2006)
- United 93 (film) (2006)
- Rescue Dawn (2007)
- Breach (2007)
- Charlie Wilson's War (2007)
- A Mighty Heart (2007)
- Zodiac (2008)
- Che (2008)
- The Beckoning Silence (2008)
- John Adams (TV miniseries) (2008)
- The Lena Baker Story (2008)
- The Informant! (2009)
- Public Enemies (2009)
- The King's Speech (2010)
- The Fighter (2010)
- The Social Network (2010)
- 127 Hours (2010)
- Fair Game (2010)
Television series
- Washington Heights (TV series)
- Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire
- Heroes and Villains
- Egypt (TV series)
- House of Saddam
- Space Race
- Moonshiners (TV series)
See also
- Docufiction
- Dramality
- Ethnofiction
- Mockumentary
- Fly on the wall
- Factual television
- Reality television
- Peter Watkins, a pioneer of docudrama
- List of historical drama films
- List of Asian historical drama films
