Copyright information

The final and definitive version of this manuscript has been accepted for publication as an entry in:
International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. Please cite as: Paschalidis, G. (2019).
“Documentary and Docudrama”. In T. P. Vos (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Journalism
Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Documentary and Docudrama

Gregory Paschalidis
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
paschagr@jour.auth.gr

Abstract: This entry provides an outline of the historical development of documentary, the theoretical debates
regarding its generic identity as the art of the real, as well as future directions for research. In tracing the major
traditions and forms of documentary filmmaking, including the controversial format of the docudrama, special
attention is paid to its constant reinvention from the film to video and finally the digital age, as well as its
complex interactions with journalism. Throughout its evolution, documentary emerges as a critical pillar of the
modern public sphere, inextricably tied to the major social, cultural and political experiences and
transformations of contemporary societies.

Keywords: Documentary, docudrama, direct cinema, cinema verité, infotainment, investigative journalism

Making its first appearance as a film genre in the 1920s, the documentary opened up
the still inchoate art of cinema to the possibilities of nonfiction filmmaking, all the while
marking the emergence of one of the most compelling and stimulating forms of modern
journalism. Combining the visual authority and narrative power of film with the vision and
boldness of civic-minded investigative journalism, documentary has profoundly expanded the
scope of public information, testimony and debate, all the while forging new, more involving
and critical forms of audience engagement.
Nonfiction film encompasses a wide range of genres, such as newsreels, educational
and training films, travel and propaganda films, experimental and art films. The spate of films
that mark the beginnings of documentary, like Nanook (Robert Flaherty, 1920), Man with the
Movie Camera (Djiga Vertov, 1923), Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926), Berlin.
Symphonie of a City (Walther Ruttmann, 1927), Drifters (John Grierson, 1929), A propos de
Nice (Jean Vigo, 1929), evince its manifold debts to all these genres, as well as some of its
most sustained characteristics up till today. First, that it hosts a diverse range of subject,
intention, form and approach, and second, that its practitioners employ techniques and
expressive resources drawn from both nonfiction and fiction cinema. Running through this
variety is a common commitment to the historical world of actual events, people and
situations, lived issues, experiences and challenges. This is what sustains documentary’s
promise of offering insight for the world we live in.
The emergence of documentary is part of an era of avant-garde experimentation and
desire to integrate art and life. Its formative years, though, were shaped by the socio-
economic hardships, ideological antagonisms and armed conflicts of the 1930s-early 1940s.
The language of documentary was consequently forged by films intended to propagate a
government’s agenda, like Housing Problems (Arthur Elton & Edgar Anstey, 1935) and The
Plow that broke the plains (Pare Lorentz, 1936), advocate a political ideology, like Borinage
(Joris Ivens, 1934) and Triumph of Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), or contribute to the war
effort, like The Spanish Earth (Joris Ivens, 1937), Der Ewige Jude (Fritz Hippler, 1940),

1
Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings, 1942) and Why We Fight (Frank Capra, 1942-45). It
was in these turbulent times, where visual media of public address became politically
expedient and current affairs news acquired special urgency, that an early form of journalistic
documentary appeared in the form of The March of Time (1935-51). Inspired by the like-
titled radio news-commentary program of CBS and sponsored by Time Inc, it consisted of a
monthly series of 20-minute films, shown in movie theaters before the main feature, which
combined visual reportage, dramatic reenactments, interpretive interviews and a distinctly
opinionated voiceover. Revolutionizing the truncated, descriptive and uncontroversial format
of the newsreel, The March of Time gained wide popularity with its brand of muckraking
journalism. Its success convinced Time’s publisher Henry Luce to launch Life magazine
(1936) with an exclusive focus on storytelling via the kindred genre of photojournalism.
Tainted by its longtime association with patronizing didacticism and propaganda,
documentary was reinvented in the post-war years, with the aim to reaffirm its value as an
instrument of truth. Following up the pursuit of cinematic realism by the novice directors of
Italian neorealism, the French new wave and the British Free Cinema, the postwar generation
of documentary filmmakers aspired to a new sense of authenticity. Their vision was enabled
by the new light, handheld 16 mm cameras, faster film stock and synchronous sound
recorders, the combination of which allowed them to capture the drama of social action with
an unprecedented degree of true-to-life immediacy. The new language of documentary was
effectively defined by two pioneering films shot almost concurrently in 1960.
Schooled as photo-editor in the candid photojournalism championed by Life, and
especially Alfred Eisenstaedt’s street photography, Robert Drew teamed up with like-minded
cameramen and filmmakers Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, David and Albert Maysles
to create Drew Associates. Their first project was Primary (1960), an uncommonly intimate,
behind the scenes coverage of the two candidates in the Wisconsin Democratic presidential
primary, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in April 1960. Their groundbreaking style
which, dispensing with interviews and voiceovers, combined highly mobile camerawork and
location sound, was labelled ‘direct cinema’. Few weeks later, in Paris, the anthropologist
Jean Rouch in collaboration with the sociologist Edgar Morin and the pioneer of the handheld
camera aesthetic cameraman Michel Brault made Chronique d’ un été (1961). They
investigated life, work and happiness in contemporary France on the basis of in-depth
interviews with a range of young people. The two filmmakers figure prominently on camera
with their insistent and frequently vexing questions, while the sincerity obtained through the
camera is constantly under debate, infusing their project with a self-reflexivity characteristic
of Rouch’s innovative ethnographic films. This alternative approach was labelled ‘cinema
verité’.
Drew’s Primary inaugurated a prolific tradition of documentary-making, where the
observational approach to grasping the real as it unfolds was exploited with remarkable
effect. Films like Salesman (David and Albert Maysles, 1969), Titicut Follies and High
School (Frederick Wiseman, 1967 & 1968), Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976),
The War Room (Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, 1993), Children Underground (Edet
Belberg, 2001), My Country, My Country (Laura Poitras, 2006), Rough Aunties (Kim
Longinotto, 2008) and Armadillo (Ronnie Fridthjof, 2010), have brought an acute awareness
of marginalized forms of life, of the underlife of social and political institutions, of the real
face of social conflict and war. Equally influential proved the cinema verité of Rouch and
Morin, setting off a tradition of documentaries like Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985),
Nobody’s Business (Alan Berliner, 1997) and 12 Angry Lebanese (Zeine Daccache, 2009),
which, while focusing on the interaction between the filmmaker and his subjects, also make
us think about the nature of reality and truth.
The term verité (truth) is commonly applied to both these documentary styles.

2
Although confusing, this practice underscores their common ambition to get as close as
possible to their subjects in order to capture their spontaneous, unscripted truth. Evidently,
though, they employ different strategies to achieve this. The direct or observational approach,
with its emphasis on on-site human action and voice, on showing rather than telling, aspires
to the impartiality of the uninvolved eye-witness. The more probing approach of cinema
verité, on the other hand, acknowledges the filmmaker’s role as an active participant and
catalyst in the process of producing a truth that is often elusive and uncertain. From this
perspective, direct cinema’s disregard for the inevitable subjectivity and obtrusiveness of the
camera makes its claims for natural intimacy and immediacy seem rather naive.
Drew’s conviction that Primary offered “a whole new basis for a whole new
journalism” proved too great a challenge to the prevailing norms of television journalistic
documentary. The March of Time had ended in 1951 but left a lasting legacy to the kind of
journalistic documentary that developed subsequently for television. Starting with Edward R.
Murrow’s See it Now (CBS, 1951-58) and continuing with programmes like CBS Reports
(CBS, 1959-71), White Paper (NBC, 1960-80), 60 Minutes (CBS, 1968-), World in Action
(ITV, 1963-98) or Frontline (PBS, 1983-), the emphasis is on formal interviews, talking
heads and narrated reporting. At their best, these programmes which have shaped the canon
of current affairs documentary with their hard-hitting and high-impact style of investigative
journalism, come closer to the more intrusive verité style. The technique of the unobtrusive,
‘fly on the wall’ filming had a more discernible impact on television documentaries dealing
with human-interest stories, like those Drew made for the Bell and Howell Close Up! series
(ABC, 1960-63) and The Living Camera (1964) syndicated series. It was employed, for
example, by Alan and Susan Raymond’s pathbreaking television documentary An American
Family (PBS, 1973) which chronicled the day-to-day life of a middle-class family over a
seven-month period. Replicated by the BBC documentary series The Family (1974), the
American Family changed the way modern family was depicted in television shows and is
considered as the precursor of contemporary reality series.
The international expansion of television in the 1980s and 1990s vastly increased the
slots and the funds allocated to documentary, particularly in the popular programme
categories of nature and science, biography and history, travel and culture. The rise, in
addition, of specialized cable and satellite television channels, like Arts and Entertainment
Network (1984), Discovery (1985), History (1995), Animal Planet (1996), Science (1996) and
National Geographic (1997) greatly augmented the market and audience for documentary.
The emphasis of this highly commercialized ‘infotainment documentary’ industry on
spectacle, artifice and drama has been widely criticized for compromising documentary
realism. Similar accusations have been levelled at television for fostering the growth of
pseudo-documentary and docudramas.
The pseudo-documentary style, involving badly lit, artificially made grainy footage
and the handheld or ‘shaky camera’ technique, was originally associated with avant-garde
films, like The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) and The Faces (John Cassavetes,
1968). Subsequently, it enjoyed a major revival not only as the hallmark of New Iranian
Cinema or the Danish Dogma 95 movement (e.g. Thomas Vinderberg’s Festen, 1998), but
also across the spectrum of popular cinema and television genres, and even in advertising. In
the case of docudramas, however, we are dealing not with the conventionalization of the
emblematic features of direct cinema as reality effects in fiction films, but with the
intermingling of documentary conventions – such as voiceover, captions, archival news
footage, handheld camera – with the emblematic resources of fiction – such as actors, sets,
scripted dialogues, dramatic plotting – so as to make self-proclaimed faithful reenactments of
real events and people.

3
 The growth of television docudrama has fuelled a regularly rekindled controversy
over its fondness for facile melodrama, unwarranted inventiveness and licence with facts.
Placed at the boundaries between fact and fiction, docudrama is condemned for softening or
even totally obscuring them. Others, though, consider its liminal character especially suitable
for problematizing documentary realism and deconstructing these boundaries. The critique of
docudrama from the perspective of an idealized conception of documentary as an unmediated
record of life appears exaggerated if we take into account that reenactment has been a staple
of documentary filmmaking right for the start, along with dramatic techniques like story-
driven editing, continuity cutting, manipulation of time and camera, extradiegetic mood
music, special effects etc. The indispensible value of the dramatic approach to the
documentary method is explictly acknowledged by Grierson’s foundational definition of
documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” (1933). This is quite at variance, though,
with the docudrama form, where everything is reenactment.
Docudrama’s typical defense is its ability to represent events and people that have
gone unrecorded (‘no other way to tell it’), to give a fuller and more in-depth picture of them
(a better way to tell it), or to effectively highlight critical social situations and issues (the best
way to tell it). In all cases, its reliance on a comprehensively scripted, preordained design,
makes it prone to “serve persuasion rather than argumentation” (Lipkin 2002). This is
especially evident in the case of the widely popular cinematic docudrama, which, despite its
notoriously lax interpetation of its ‘based-on-fact’ premise, rarely fails to neutralize the
disbelief of the audience. By contrast, moreover, to the traditional focus of documentary on
the overlooked, the marginal and the ordinary, the commercial imperative steers both
television and cinema docudrama towards the famed and the famous. The importance of
institutional constraints is demonstrated by Paget (2011) in his study of the development of
docudrama in the different contexts of American and British television, and their varied
emphasis on dramatic potential and public service, respectively. Avoiding to resurrect the
issue of clear-cut boundaries, Paget suggests that there is a continuum between the end poles
of fiction and nonfiction that allows us to account for the recent swell of docudramatic
formats in television and cinema, like doc-soap, reality shows, biopics etc.
At the same time that television fostered the development of a new ecology of factual
programming, documentarists begun to break away from the direct/verité dilemma. Starting
with films like Koyaaniskatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983), Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee,
1986), The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1987) and Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989) they
experiment with mixed modes, developing more subjective, experiential and performative
forms of representation. Documentary seemed to rediscover the spirit of experimentation and
innovation that had marked its birth. Following up on this dynamic, the spectacular box-
office and critical success of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Fahrenheit
9/11 (2004) helped usher into a veritable resurgence of documentary. Proving that it can be
both popular and profitable, documentary regained its place in the theatrical release circuit,
while, the concurrent worldwide proliferation of documentary festivals furthered its reach in
new social spaces.
The social base of documentary had dramatically expanded after the compact and
portable video camera in the 1970s, and subsequently the camcorder, had made it the genre of
choice for all kinds of non-professional civil society actors, social reformers and political
activists. This expansion was reflected in BBC’s Video Diaries (1991-93) and Video Nation
(1995-2000) series, which offered a venue for crowdsourced short videos on people’s lives
and experiences. The rise of the digital age amplified this decades-long trend to an enormous
degree. Widely accessible and easy to use digital technologies of recording/editing and web-
based distribution have given a new impetus to independent documentary filmmaking. A host
of web-native platforms, like Viceland, Cinelan or Vimeo, as well as online platforms created

4
by news media, like Channel 4’s FourDocs, The Independent’s Joiningthedots.tv, New York
Times’s Op-Docs, Guardian Documentary and The Intercept’s Field of Vision, commission
and publicise short documentaries by both renowned and emerging independent filmmakers.
The Web 2.0 affordances, in particular, have spawned new types of web-based
investigative documentary, most notably the interactive documentary. Its distinctly open text
structure entails user-navigable environments where material can be assessed and explored at
will, often combined with computer game-inspired features designed to engage and promote
agency, as in Symbol Rock (Marie-Laure Ryan & Jon Thiem, 2004) and Fort McMoney
(David Dufresne, 2013). Prize-winning Snowfall (Julian Branch, 2012) and Firestorm (John
Henley, 2013), with their brand of immersive, in-depth multimedia coverage, evince the rise
of a new, compelling form of visual journalism. The crowdsourced Diamond Road (Nisha
Pahuja & Manfred Becker, 2007), on the other hand, is an example of how online interactive
platforms are widely utilized in recent years for the development of citizen or participatory
documentary in the form of collaborative storytelling projects.
In view of the new and diversion-oriented forms of television factual programming,
Corner (2002) fears that we may have entered a post-documentary period in which the
distinctive values of the documentary movement are cast in doubt. These values, however,
had been in doubt since much earlier. During the heyday of anti-realism critique, articulated
by post-structuralist ‘screen theory’ in the 1970s and postmodernism theory in the 1980s,
discussion of documentary was dominated by the questioning of its epistemological premise
to offer a privileged access to reality. The systematic study of documentary only took off
after Bill Nichols’s move to brush aside the issue of objectivity and approach documentary as
an essentially rhetorical genre, whose basic rationale consists in presenting evidence, i.e. both
representations of the world and representations about the world or arguments, in order to
convey a particular viewpoint (Nichols, 1991:125-7, 177). Following up on Nichols’s
pathbreaking work, subsequent contributions by Rabinowitz (1994), Corner (1996), Renov
(1993, 2004) and Bruzzi (2006) went ahead to forge a pluralized conception of documentary
by acknowledging the significance of the representational and aesthetic innovations gestated
by the manifold new social subjectivities, political imaginaries and filmmaking practices. The
post-1990 growth of documentary theory effectively repositioned documentary from a
dispassionate ‘discourse of sobriety’ to highly personal acts of witnessing or advocacy, that
engage us with public life in critical, affective and transformative ways. In this way,
authorship is reinstated as intrinsic to documentary and performativity is admitted at the heart
of its making and its meaning. The once powerful identification of documentary with
journalistic objectivity is effectively replaced by its association with New Journalism’s
legacy of subjective, in depth and immersive storytelling.
Given the explosion of documentary-making since the start of the 21th century it seems
that the golden age of documentary is neither the film or the video age, but the age of
ubiquitous and uniquely versatile digital media, or ‘docmedia’, as Peter Wintonick’s aptly
called them. Documentary theory has not yet caught up with the innovations and possibilities
of the new mediascape. A radically new agenda for documentary studies demands now our
attention: open-ended, multi-vocal, fluid and collaborative texts, multimedia storytelling,
dissolution of the boundaries between filmmakers, subjects and audiences, hyperlocal
communities of production and reception. This development eases the so far strained
relations between documentary and journalism, drawing them closer than ever before. The
reinvention of documentary in the digital age has reasserted Grierson’s trust in the vital role it
plays in the democratization of the public sphere, in public education and debate, in
promoting an active and critical democratic citizenship, in building bridges between citizen
and community.

5
References
Bruzzi, S. (2006). New Documentary (2nd ed.). London & New York: Routledge
Corner, J. (2002). “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions”, Television & New Media,
3(3): 255-269
------ (2006). The Art of Record. A critical introduction to documentary. Manchester:
Manchester UP.
Grierson, J. (1933). “The Documentary Producer”, Cinema Quarterly 2(1): 7-9.
Lipkin, S. (2002). Real Emotional Logic. Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive
Practice. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.
Nichols, B. (1991). Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Paget, D. (2011). No other way to tell it: dramadoc/docudrama on television (2nd ed.).
Manchester: Manchester UP.
Rabinowitz, P. (1994). They must be represented. The politics of documentary. London &
New York: Verso.
Renov, M. (Ed.) (1993). Theorizing Documentary. London & New York: Routledge
------ (2004). The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.

Further Reading
Hardy, Forsyth (Ed.) (1979). Grierson on Documentary. London & Boston: Faber and Faber
Rosenthal, A. (Ed.) (1999). Why Docudrama? Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.
Grant, B. K. & Sloniowski, J. (Eds.) (2014). Documenting the Documentary. Close Readings
of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit: Wayne State UP.
Marcus, D. & Kara, S. (Eds.) (2016). Contemporary Documentary. London & New York:
Routledge.

Brief Biography
Gregory Paschalidis is professor of cultural studies at the Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki, Greece. His research concerns cultural theory and cultural policy, media history
and theory, semiotics and visual communication. With specific regard to journalism, his
publications address the role of documentary, war journalism and photojournalism in the
workings of the modern public sphere. He is director of the Cultural and Visual Studies Lab
and chief editor of Punctum-International Journal of Semiotics.