Creating Reality in Factual Television by Manfred W. Becker

Author:Manfred W. Becker [Becker, Manfred W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy
ISBN: 9781000202021
Google: s8P4DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-10-07T05:04:24+00:00

The dictatorship of story

At one time, narrative in traditional documentary had less prominence than it does now and was seen merely as a facilitating device used to explain difficult contexts. But a shift has occurred away from the factual. For a traditional documentary, the challenge lies in filtering and distilling many elements to produce a compelling narrative. A documentary goes into the historical world to find characters, facts, and evidence that already exist, organizing those elements into a coherent narrative. While traditional documentary formats are mainly organized according to a hierarchical pattern of main ideas and supporting details, current documentary television dramatization is organized according to a pattern of events that follows the conventions of a fictional story. Sheila Curran Bernard (2007), author of a popular text on the process of documentary production, affirms that the goal of documentary has now become a dramatic story. In discussing how to structure a documentary, Bernard quotes filmmaker Jon Else: “I’ve never seen an even vaguely successful documentary film that does not move forward through time…. This whole business of a plot moving forward, I think, is just so inextricably embedded in our cultural DNA” (75).

The parallels with plot building do not end here. Just as fictional works and reality programs cast their participants, documentarians do not randomly meet their subjects. They research, judge, and choose whom they might work into their project’s narrative. Recognizing that ordinary life has a dramatic element, the final structures of contemporary documentary television are the result of editing choices made largely in cutting rooms. Here, the sociohistorical world captured by the camera is assembled into a series of sequences with a shape, order, and rhythm. This act of construction is a (re)creation. To create a forward thrust is to treat the documentary as a kind of dramatic narrative in which an event or series of events progresses toward a conclusion. From this perspective, contemporary documentaries borrow a great deal from fictional stories. Both introduce a series of causally related events and seek a conclusion to their development, offering a trajectory that motivates and justifies many of the practitioner’s teleological choices. Since stories in contemporary documentaries are created and shaped in the editing, by the editor, it is the edit room where ethical dilemmas in factual programming play out.

Walter Fisher (1987) argues that “all forms of human communication need to be seen fundamentally as stories – symbolic interpretations of aspects of the world occurring in time and shaped by history” (xiii). This understanding of the fundamental human propensity to tell and hear stories is in part grounded in narratology, also known as narrative theory, developed by folklorist and scholar Vladimir Propp (1971) and other Soviet scholars in the 1920s. Since then, narrative theory has been applied to literary criticism across various genres and disciplines.

Figure 3.1 Propp’s narrative morphology.

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