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THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 187-190
© 2001 National Communication Association

Why Docudrama?

Thomas Rosteck

Alan Rosenthal, editor. Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. xxi + 387.  $60.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

The border separating fact from fiction is leaky and shifting; indeed, the idea of presenting reconstructions or dramatized versions of real events is as old as the cinema itself.  Nowadays we know of the filmed restagings of incidents from the Spanish-American War for domestic consumption.  Henry Luce’s groundbreaking March of Time newsreel mixed recreation with real events (Luce took credit for the paradoxical claim that March of Time could be more “true” by being more “false”).  Even Robert Flaherty suggested that being “true” to the real often meant “recreating” that “reality.”

So the intriguing question “Why?” posed in the title of Alan Rosenthal’s collection of essays is an especially central and always timely one.  Yet what actually animates his collection is a prior and perhaps more intriguing query: what is docudrama?  And Rosenthal spends some considerable effort in fixing the importance and the boundaries of this definitional issue and in redressing what he describes as the “academic neglect” (xvii) of the genre.

Readers will certainly recognize Alan Rosenthal’s name from his prior excellent work on documentary. A filmmaker himself, Rosenthal is the author of five other books, including the formidable New Challenges for Documentary.  For this current project, Rosenthal assembles twenty-eight essays (all but five have appeared earlier elsewhere), which look at the dominant questions and controversies confronting docudrama.  Certainly, Rosenthal has it exactly right in his introduction when he points out that reality based stories, taken from topical journalism, are the most popular drama genre on U.S. and British television today, whether you call them docudramas, drama-docs, or fact-fiction dramas. He may even be correct in asserting that docudrama has a greater effect on society than more traditional documentary forms. 

But as soon as he launches out upon the related questions of what and why, Rosenthal is beset by difficulties.  Primary among them is that the term docudrama is notoriously difficult to pin down to one and only one meaning and that any sense of docudrama shifts as the culture industries continually combine program genres and types in the quest for popular audiences.  A cursory survey of the artifacts considered as “docudramas” in the volume makes the difficulty of defining the form quite clear:  Schindler’s List, JFK, In the Name of the Father, Malcolm X, Reds, Mississippi Burning, Roots, Battleship Potemkin, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Ed Wood, Nixon, and Braveheart.

After considering and rejecting several possibilities, Rosenthal eventually casts the widest possible net for defining the form.  Docudrama, he concludes, covers a variety of dramatic forms, bound together by two things: they are all based on or inspired by reality, by the lives of real people, or by events that happened in the recent or not too distant past, and they “would seem to have a higher responsibility to accuracy and to truth than does fiction” (xv).  Most importantly, however, in making this generic claim, Rosenthal recognizes that the form is unique in that it has a “quintessentially social” function (xx).

The very readable essays in this collection are divided into three parts, taking up in order the ontology of docudrama, the production of docudrama, and the criticism of docudrama.  There are, of course, corresponding limitations to the project.  The works considered are limited to British and U.S. films and television, and Rosenthal tried not to include material easily available elsewhere (with the result of an almost total exclusion of essays having to do with the popular recent U.S. films Malcolm X and JFK).

Part 1 of Why Docudrama? is composed of nine essays that take up the history of the form and the nature and definition of docudrama.  The best of these essays place the defining characteristics of the docudrama in some historical context.  John Corner’s “British TV Dramadocumentary” and Derek Paget’s “Tales of Cultural Tourism” locate the development of the form in the need to connect serious political and social purpose with large popular audiences. Together these essays make clear that institutional conditions of production of the docudrama have much to do with its form.  In the British model, docudrama production usually was sited in the news departments, while in the U.S. docudrama became the province of the entertainment divisions of the major networks.  The result is that where the British docudramas typically reconstruct political and social matters as objects of investigation, in the States most docudramas are entertainment biographies or based on sensational scandals.

This section also includes essays on the popularity of the docudrama with film and television audiences.  Some of the essays are rather more critical: Paget calls docudrama an “easy” way to present social matters, and Jerry Kuehl’s essay argues that the fictionalizing impulse and the desire for ratings reduces “reality” to stereotype and predictability.

But it also seems the case (as Paget astutely argues) that when critics attack the docudrama as a form, for many, what they are more disturbed about is the opinions being expressed. Paget sees that every system has limits on what is accepted both in form and in content; when docudrama makers exceed the appropriate boundaries in political or social stance, the “good” critic is prone to couch a “political” counter-attack in terms of the difficulties of the form or to raise questions about “fictionalizing” and “distorting.”

Part 2 looks at some of the implications of the production of docudrama, especially in the U.S. system of Hollywood film studios and the major television networks.  The writers in this section seem especially interested in the way power works to limit the choices of subjects and treatment.  But some of the essays also suggest how some docudrama producers have been able to use those constraints that the commercial and advertising pressures exert on docudrama production. The chapters that make up the bulk of the eight essays in this section concentrate on how programs move through the selection, funding, and marketing apparatus of the communication industry to the public. Rosenthal includes several previously unpublished, and very interesting, interviews with docudrama makers who discuss their work and the pressures upon it.

Each of the eleven essays that make up Part 3 takes on a single film or miniseries and isolates it for in-depth criticism and examination. These essays are case studies of the texts, which try to connect effect, questions of truth-status, and the program’s power to stimulate thought, discussion, and action.  While many of these film and miniseries might more typically be described as “historical films” or “biopics” — Braveheart, Apollo 13, Gandhi — (again the nagging question of “what” we are looking at surfaces), nevertheless, the best of these essays recognizes that history in docudrama is not a simple one-way reflection of the past but is rather a complex representation of history—a reconstruction of the past that draws upon what its audience knows and believes as a way to confirm and sometimes to challenge those beliefs. 

There are a good many aspects to recommend Why Docudrama?  Best of all, Rosenthal has put together a volume that takes a multi-perspectival look at the history, production, and reception of docudrama.  But it also has what some may perceive as liabilities: nearly all the essays are already in print elsewhere and the incompatibilities in synthesizing existing essays—a difficulty of nearly all such collections—is a problem that Rosenthal has not completely solved.  But there are more specific issues that arise as inconsistencies.  Some of these have to do with the generic claim that Rosenthal advances in his introductory essay.  As the essays make clear, there are very great differences between the U.S. and British output, which weakens the strong claim for the genre made at the outset, and secondly, some of the films don’t seem to naturally go together in the popular mind as being very “similar” (Eisenstein’s classic films coupled with U.S. programs such as The Burning Bed). Also, while Rosenthal says that stories from current events are influential and popular forms, the majority of the films discussed in the essays do not fall into that “current events” category.

So, finally, why docudrama?  Rosenthal argues that docudrama is available to do social work where traditional, more conventional forms cannot.  For instance, docudrama is able to espouse controversial contemporary ideas in relatively safe historical formats, and retains the potential to make strong political and social statements about current affairs.  Agreed.

But in the end, Rosenthal’s contributors don’t always seem to be talking about the same generic artifacts, and they never talk about them in quite the same way.  Certainly, what this collection makes very clear is that questions of why and what concerning docudrama are complex and quite difficult to keep sorted out.  Indeed, all efforts at definition and function must be an ultimately messy and untidy business—but at the least the essays assembled by Rosenthal prompt us to think about such taken-for-granted matters and provide a provocative try at “fixing” this elusive popular form.