The Image of the Holocaust in the Television Documentary Drama Trilogy “The Chronicle of the Minsk Ghetto”

The prevailing view in modern film studies is that television documentary drama (docudrama) is either a hybrid, a synthesis, or a documentary film genre. The author of the article hypothesizes that docudrama has long exceeded the boundaries of documentary films and asserted its own place in the system of screen arts on par with feature films, documentaries and animated films. The author claims that docudrama is a unique phenomenon generated by television and it combines all the modern innovations in cinema. Docudrama allows for the text information to be reformatted into an audio-visual experience in an emotional, spectacular and accurate way, therefore possessing the inherent features of other screen arts. Like other forms of screen arts, it forms an image capable of evoking certain emotions and makes the viewer think and draw their own conclusions. The combination of artefacts and quotes adds volume and artistic value to the image. The article explores the genesis and development of television docudrama and gives it a definition based on key characteristics. It shows how films of various genres can be created within docudrama, proving that docudrama is not a subgenre within the genre of documentary film but a new independent branch of screen arts. The author highlights that the reason for the popularity of docudrama lies in the fact that the historical and informative material, which can be interesting and useful to the viewer, is presented in a spectacular and lightweight form. This idea is supported through the analysis of the documentary drama trilogy The Chronicle of the Minsk Ghetto, in which an image of the Holocaust, the unspeakable tragedy of the Jews during the Second World War, is shown.

Features and specificity of creating a script for a television documentary drama

The author analyses the specifics of writing a script for a television documentary drama (hereinafter referred to as docudrama), which combines the characteristics of the feature and documentary films. The article points out that many books have been written about the rules of scriptwriting for a feature film. However, there is no literature on the art of scriptwriting for a docudrama despite the fact that there are numerous docudramas being created worldwide. The opinion is given that the mastery of the docudrama scriptwriting is in choosing the most interesting and paradoxical moments in a hero’s life and showing his or her character through the resistance to life challenges: how the hero overcomes them, the motivation behind their actions and why a particular choice is being made. While in feature films the narrative is presented through action and actors’ performances, the article emphasises that docudramas explain the hero’s motivations through an additional figure such as an expert or co­participant in the events. While the difficult moments in the hero’s life and their overcoming are usually depicted through the staged episodes, an exploration into the hero’s character is supported by historical documents, a chronicle or other genuine historical sources. Docudrama is inherently narrative and the author investigates how the best practices of television journalism are used in scriptwriting, in addition to the cinema laws that are used in creating an image. The author explores the methodology of the docudrama scriptwriting in the project “Countdown” (“Vladimir Bokun’s Workshop”,Belarus) as an example.

THE CANADIAN DOCUMENTARY DRAMA: TRAJECTORY OF ITS GROWTH AND SALIENT FEATURES

The Canadian documentary drama is a unique genre of dramatic art in terms of its conceptual growth, its objectives marked by post-colonial hues and its insistence to explore truth of a given issue holistically. The present paper attempts to discuss as to how a Canadian docudrama differs from the other dramatic genres like history play, problem play or commitment play- in spite of the fact that it certainly weaves into its structure historical data, discusses contemporary social problems and exposes the politics of socio-economic and racial colonization. Although this region-specific dramatic art had become remarkably popular in Canada in 1970s and 1980s, its artistic potential certainly transcends spatio-temporal boundaries because it has the capacity to de-colonize any community by interrogating and undermining the hypocrisy of its existing myths of human progress. Hence, while tracing the development of this stage art, this paper also aims to discuss various features of this art form.

Thinking Europe from the margins and through marginal cinema: The case of The Nothing Factory (Pinho, 2017)

A Fábrica de Nada (The Nothing Factory) (Pinho, 2017) tells the story of a group of workers struggling to keep their jobs at a lift factory in Portugal about to be relocated. Awarded the FIPRESCI prize at the 2017 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the film was received by critics as a 'compelling oddity', an 'enigmatic epic' and 'something genuinely new in cinema'. Almost three hours in length, and a mix of fiction and documentary, drama and musical, The Nothing Factory rehearses, also through its style and production history, the uncertainty that characterizes contemporary European society. As it depicts austerity in Portugal through a post-national lens, what does The Nothing Factory tell us about European identity? This article examines the contradictions of globalization and neo-liberalism, in tandem with the difficulties in sustaining narratives and creating meaning in contemporary European film. The Nothing Factory is a prime example of the cinema of small nations currently produced in Portugal, and a consideration of marginal and peripheral cinemas such as this one is crucial for the understanding of what is left of European identity, in geographical, political and cultural terms.

Mobility and Marginalization: Arne Sucksdorff’s Documentary Authorship in India and Brazil

This chapter studies the Swedish documentary filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff’s work in India and Brazil by mapping the production and circulation of The Flute and the Arrow (1957) and My Home is Copacabana (1965). The former film represented a growing interest not only from international documentary filmmakers and experts in India but also the Nehru administration’s desire to both formally and informally support foreign filmmakers’ ventures in the country. Furthermore, Sucksdorff’s film bears traces of the expository documentary mode and a naturalist, anti-modernist sentiment. Alienated by the Swedish film establishment, he moved to Brazil, teaching film production for UNESCO and mentoring filmmakers who later became key figures in the Brazilian New Wave “Cinema Novo.” He also directed in Rio de Janeiro the documentary drama My Home is Copacabana (1965), thus occupying a privileged position within Brazilian film culture during an important transformative period.

The history of television documentary drama genesis, its ontological characteristics

The article analyses the genesis of television documentary drama and its dual nature that causes much controversy among film theorists. The ontological characteristics of docudrama are considered, in particular its intrinsic connection with documentary theatre. Docudrama originated at the junction of feature films and documentary films at the time when directors raised important social and historical issues that occurred in the state. The docudrama prototype emerged long before the invention of television and is associated with the first newsreels and films of E. Curtis and R. Flaherty. This experiment had developed greatly with the advent of television, which is characterized by a combination of intimacy, focus on close-ups and the ability to tell stories based on real events. The article highlights the formation of documentary drama on BBC that explored all spheres of life with great interest - from British culture and history to social and political topics. The article traces the popularity and relevance of docudrama at the present stage and its settlement into a stable form. This allows to establish docudrama as an independent form of screen arts. The article studies also the formation and development of docudrama in Belarus that is first of all connected with the director Vladimir Bokun.

Dermot Healy and memory

The essay focuses on Irish author Dermot Healy’s involvement with memories of old people within two collaborative projects: the making of a film based on the documentary novel I Could Read the Sky by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke (1997), and the development of a documentary drama with the clients of a day care centre in Co. Monaghan, entitled Men to the Right, Women to the Left (2001). It examines the methods used to record the material and its subsequent creative use, particularly in comparison with the technique of British verbatim theatre, and in the context of the imperfections of individual memory that are deftly explored in Healy’s memoir The Bend for Home (1996). The essay ultimately argues that notwithstanding problems concerning authenticity, Healy’s play, alongside O’Grady and Pyke’s book and Nichola Bruce’s film version of it, should be regarded as vital contributions to the formation of Ireland’s cultural memory, particularly as they powerfully reconstruct “the mundane everyday” that is so often lost.

Thatcherism and South Yorkshire

This chapter traces the effects of Thatcherism on Hines’s work, and on the region and communities he depicts. His screenplay for the 1981 film Looks and Smiles takes an art-cinematic form to explore the pressures of the era’s unemployment on young people, in his fourth and final collaboration with Ken Loach, while the unproduced play Fun City offers a blackly comic view of the era’s schooling. Unfinished Business (1983) examines the possibilities of social freedom for women, while 1984’s Threads is an exceptionally bleak documentary drama about the effects of nuclear war. Tracing the screenplay’s archival history reveals the detail of Hines’s aesthetic and political practice.

Poetyka współczesnego teatru faktu – Rozmowy z katem oraz Golgota wrocławska jako znaczące realizacje gatunku

The Poetics of Contemporary Non-fiction Theatre – Conversations with an Executioner and Wrocław Via Dolorosa as Significant Representations of the Genre The aim of the article is to examine the specificity of theatrical performances based on historical documents and carried out as part of a Television Theatre.The author of the paper observes the described phenomenon from a broad perspective and ponders on current and past characteristics of a nonfiction theatre. She endeavours to bring the reader close to the origins of a TV Non-fiction Theatre and to the idea of this enterprise. The first part of the article focuses on the historical development of a theatrical genre, which is a documentary drama (docudrama). A special attention is drawn to its links with a political theatre, for instance to Piscator’s and Brecht’s artistic activities.The discussion about a contemporary phenomenon of the Non-Fiction Theatre is based on the description of the two selected stage performances – Conversations with an Executioner and Wrocław Via Dolorosa. Similarly to many other spectacles of this genre these plays rediscover the Stalin era. The action of the spectacles takes place in Poland at the end of the 1940s and their protagonists are people persecuted during that system. Conversations with an Executioner directedby Maciej Englert (the premiere was in 2007) is the adaptation of a widely known Kazimierz Moczarski’s book under the same title. Wrocław Via Dolorosa written by Piotr Kokociński and Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, and directed by Jan Komasa (the premiere: 2008) recounts the story of a ruthless investigation and a fabricated process that took place in Wrocław. The ruminations on both these stage performances lead to the conclusion that a theatrical reconstruction of true events may currently play key roles. The critics draw the attention to the fact that both the spectacles have not only educational and documentary dimensions. They, first and foremost, revive the interest in the most recent history provoking the debates over stalinism. By showing an individual drama they make the viewer identify with historical characters and therefore the very history appears closer to him/her. The author assumes that if the non-fiction theatre avoids certain mistakes that are imputed to it (such as conventionality, martyrdom, direct didacticism) it will still constitute a significant element of contemporary culture.