ABSTRACT
This final chapterwill discuss the performative documentary, amodewhich emphasises-and indeed constructs a film around-the often hidden aspect of performance,whether on the part of the documentary subjects or the filmmakers.Whenone discusses performance and the real event, this fusion hasmore usually been applied to documentary drama, where amasquerade of spontaneity can be seen to function at an overt level. It is useful to note the discrepancy between performative documentaries and dramas that adopt the style of a documentary by using, for instance, hand-held camera work, scratchy synch sound recording and ad-libbed dialogue as one finds in Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home. Loach, the exponents of Free Cinema at the end of the 1950s (Lyndsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and others) and the British tradition of gritty drama that ensued – for instance BBC social issue dramas such as The Spongers (1978, directed by Roland Joffé, written by Jim Allen) or Granada Television’s docudrama output of the 1970s to early 1990s – all approach ‘realness’ from the opposite perspective to the filmmakers to be discussed here, assuming proximity to the real to reside in an intensely observational style.Thedocudramaoutputof thepast thirty years is predicated upon the assumption that drama can legitimately tackle documentary issues and uncontentiously use non-fiction techniques to achieve its aims. It thus becomes possible for drama to perform a comparable function to documentary: Cathy Come Home raised public awareness of homelessness and prompted the founding of Shelter, whilst Granada’s Who Bombed Birmingham? (1990) led directly to the re-opening of the case of the Birmingham Six. Continuing in this tradition, JimmyMcGovern’s more recentDockers (1999), about the Liverpool dockers’ strike, confused the boundaries between fact and fiction further: dockers and their wives collaborated with McGovern on the script and some appeared alongside actors in the cast.1 Within such a realist aesthetic, the role of performance is, paradoxically, to draw the audience into the reality of the situations being dramatised, to authenticate the fictionalisation. In contrast to this, the performative documentary uses performance within a non-fiction context to draw attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation. The performative element within the framework of non-fiction is thereby an alienating, distancing device, not one which actively promotes identification and a
straightforward response to a film’s content. There is, however, an essential difference between films that are performative in themselves and those that merely concern performative subject matter (arguably some straddle the two), and this discussion will distinguish between them. The argument posited throughout this book has been that documentaries are a negotiation between filmmaker and reality and, at heart, a performance. It is thereby in the films of Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen or Nicholas Barker that this underlying thesis finds its clearest expression.
