MM
Documentary in the 21st Century
From the herring fishermen of the 1920s to today’s exploitation of South-East Asian tuna workers by the fast food industry: similar subjects, but worlds apart in presentation, viewpoint and audience. Modern documentary forms are frequently castigated for tabloidisation, dumbing down, and celebrity-led narratives. Carly Sandy analyses some recent examples to explore how ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ has adapted to the changing media landscape and to audiences often believed to be switched off from current affairs.
10 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre The documentary form has come a long way
since the pioneering films of John Grierson in the 1930s. Grierson’s film-making evidenced a strong public service ethos, and had an emphasis on education and raising awareness, rather than entertainment values. It was Grierson who originally coined the term documentary describing it as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. Early Grierson documentaries such as Drifters (1929), an account of a North Sea fishing fleet trawling for herrings, and Night Mail (1936) charting the Royal Mail’s delivery service from London to Glasgow seem a world away from Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men, Ross Kemp on Pirates and Blood Sweat and Takeaways, but what similarities do they share? How have the core principles of documentary making evolved in an age of rating wars, channel proliferation and audience fragmentation? What issues do documentaries raise about the institutions that produce them and the audiences who consume them?
Critics often point to the dreaded ‘dumbing
down’ debate when discussing recent documentaries, suggesting the documentary form has been tabloidised with a stronger emphasis on sensationalism and voyeurism in order to make them more palatable to mass audiences. This article aims to draw together an analysis of the modern documentary form whilst also looking at issues of audience and institution, in particular the rise of narrowcasting, as opposed to more traditional forms of broadcasting.
The rise of narrowcasting Narrowcasting refers to broadcasting that
targets smaller, more tightly defined audiences such as 16-34-year-old men (Dave) or 8-12-year- old children (Nickelodeon). The ratings for some of these channels may be small in comparison to more traditional broadcasters such as ITV1 or BBC1 (QI on Dave attracting 0.61million viewers compared with ITV1’s Coronation
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