ABSTRACT
I t is no accident that, as the formal, traditional documentary concerned with social issueshas declined on British television – and was always a rare beast on US TV – screendocumentary has seen something of a renaissance in the twenty-first century. While UK documentary filmmakers despair at the ratings-driven obsessions of television commissioners, formerly their only source of funding, they rejoice at the promised possibilities of making documentary for cinema, and the secondary and DVD markets that come with that exposure. Whereas in the late twentieth century, a documentary would be difficult to find in a mainstream cinema, by 2009 one or two documentaries were getting a cinema release every week. ‘The recent revival of cinema documentary has given the genre a huge boost’, says awardwinning documentarist Marilyn Gaunt.1 But two notes of caution need be struck here. First, the cinema is driven by its box office receipts, a much harsher and more finite judge than UK terrestrial television ratings; the majority of features fail to turn a profit on release, freighted as their balance sheets are with the additional costs of publicity and distribution. Second, the documentary renaissance is not only minimal, but essentially driven by the United States. In the last decade, barely a handful of UK documentary productions have turned a profit in the cinema, not producing any significant changes in the economics of or employment in the industry. As Angus Macqueen, former Head of Documentaries at Channel 4 says:
The feature theatrical documentary – if you want my honest opinion – I think in Britain still doesn’t really exist. Kevin Macdonald with Touching the Void is I suspect the only one that has made any serious money. Very many of the American films are films we wouldn’t even show on our TV. They are not well enough made – and which we have made in different forms less indulgently, more editorially controlled – but which in America speak to a very large country that has a television that doesn’t serve its audience with that sort of material. I just don’t think people are going to go to the cinema [here] and pay £20 for a night to watch a documentary. They might do for Al Gore . . . but very, very rarely.2
