Contemporary British and Italian Sound Docudrama

Sabina Macchiavelli

Description

The book focuses on radio and sound docufiction and docudrama through comparative analysis of the British and the Italian output from post war years to the 2010s, from both a historical and formal point of view. It sheds light on a rather neglected area of study providing a systematic survey of the development of the form and of its current status and perspectives, and at the same time constructing viable analytical tools that can be used to investigate individual productions.

Considering the different docudramatic output in formats and quantity in the two countries, the book explores case studies from BBC Radio, which continue to air a high number of programmes with a great variety of formats and subgenres, and Italian case studies from both independent bodies and the Radio RAI, whose docudramatic production has declined since the late 1980s.

Specifically, the study seeks to explain how radio language in its purely acoustic dimension allows access to unpredictable layers of truth often complementary, when not overtly alternative, to the documental truth of declaredly journalistic or scientific programmes.

A well-researched resource for university students, scholars, researchers and educators in media, sociology of media and history. In-depth analysis of an original topic.

Introduction 

Preface

1. The Formation of Trends in Radio Docudrama: Case Studies from Italy between Documentary Urge and Postmodern Paradoxes

2. The Development of Continuities in Radio Documentary: Ideology, Biography and Collective Creation in British Programmes

3. The Warping Action of Sound on Facts in BBC Broadcasts: Documentary Intent and Fictional Deviations

4. Modalities of Sound’s Action in Italian Productions: The Bellaria Film Festival

5. Storytelling, Narration and Symbolic Resonances in Docudrama

Notes 

Bibliography

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Arts Numériques
• Techniques
• Ingénieurie et sciences appliquées
• Ingénieurie et sciences appliquées
• Electronique & télécommunications
• Sciences et techniques
• Película fotográfica
• Sound
• BBC Radio
• General officer
• Radio drama
• Technology
• Engineering
• Acoustics
• General
• Radio
• BBC Radio 1
• Film
• Media
• Ingénierie
• Sciences appliquées
• Sciences appliquées
• Ingénierie
• Sciences appliquées

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 22 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789387278
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contemporary British and Italian Sound Docudrama
Contemporary British and Italian Sound Docudrama
Traditions and Innovations
Sabina Macchiavelli
First published in the UK in 2023 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2023 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2023 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production manager: Debora Nicosia
Typesetter: MPS
Hardback ISBN 978-1-78938-725-4
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-726-1
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-727-8
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Introduction
Preface
Considerations on genre
The sound matter discovered
The inheritors of the faith in sound
A comparative perspective
Italy: Terminological insubstantiality for a narrative originality
Britain: Framing efforts and institutional debates
On the air or on the net? Docudrama as a radio and an audio thing
The nature of the document
Documents exploited in sound
A narratological model for audio case studies
Indications from comparative criticism
A historical perspective
The use of the archives
Infusing new life into broadcasts: The audio and the written archives
Intertextuality as tradition
A diversified approach to the history of docufiction in Italy and Britain
An outline of radio documentary in post-war years
The structure of the book
1. The Formation of Trends in Radio Docudrama: Case Studies from Italy Between Documentary Urge and Postmodern Paradoxes
The post-war years and the need to document
Madmen with a cart: The journalistic approach
Journalistic reportage on the fringes of social life
Lyrical transfigurations in experimental documentary
The bourgeoning of docufiction at the crossroads of ideological debate and technical innovations
Destructuring the narrative: The complex hearing of documentary
Deceptive speech and unrelated noises for a political discourse in sound
Sinister undertones in allegorical tales
Writing reality on tape
Conventional language and representational needs: Pasolini s view
The dialectics between popular speech and institutional pronouncement
Docudrama in the light of a postmodern approach to art
Questioning conventional wisdom on issues of violence through the prism of docudrama
The myth of fact of True Stories and the ecstatic truth of documentary
The hazardous truths of the mind
Mutant bodies, coalescent words: The hyperboles of a genre
Uncovering the falsification of consumer society
The sonic universe in a docudrama
Making sense of sound: The listening experience of docudrama
The great absentee? Documentary and docudrama in the 2000s
The importance of stylistic choices: The authorial documentary
The vicious circle of the archives
Seriality
Conclusive remarks
2. The Development of Continuities in Radio Documentary: Ideology, Biography and Collective Creation in British Programmes
The formation of lines of persistence in post-war docudrama
Paradoxes of the documentary intent in post-war radio
Montage editing in the service of marginal stories
Peopling and over-crowding: The socio-political feature
Understatement and intimacy: Features d'auteur
Complexities of the authorial approach
The all-too-present: Stylization and persistences in the early twenty-first century docufiction
Poetry of sound, poetry of fact: The authorial feature
Conclusive remarks
3. The Warping Action of Sound on Facts in BBC Broadcasts: Documentary Intent and Fictional Deviations
Authenticating devices in British classical documentary
The aim and scope of documentary: The BBC institutional guidelines
Classical documentaries open up to fiction
Docufiction between institutional regulations and sound s deceptions
Unfolding histories: The voice of the destitute in the mirror of the archives
Legitimated knowledge and sound s deviations: The two truths of radio
4. Modalities of Sound s Action in Italian Productions: The Bellaria Film Festival
The significance of a festival for radio documentary
Italian contemporary radio documentary in the mirror of a festival
The undetectable sound in classical documentaries
The effaced sound in self-revelatory documentaries
The echoing sound in experimental documentaries
Conclusive remarks
5. Storytelling, Narration and Symbolic Resonances in Docudrama
The contribution of narratology to an analysis of sound docudrama
Sound s double level of signification
Metaphorizing in sound
An allegorical journey in sound
The condensed narrator
Acousmatic sound in the dream narrative
The authenticating strength of sound metaphors
Research perspectives for enquiries into contemporary audio docudrama
Notes
Bibliography
Introduction
Preface
In 1974, a curious title appeared in an article of Radiocorriere Tv , the Italian equivalent to the Radio Times . It read Pray come out of history and speak to the microphone! (Libera 1974: 16-17, translation added) and the article celebrated the launch of a new Radio Audizioni Italiane (RAI) radio series, Interviste Impossibili ( Impossible interviews ) (1974-75), in which great contemporary writers and intellectuals - Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Pier Paolo Pasolini among others - carried out fake interviews to outstanding figures of history of all times and all countries (1974: 17, translation added), as the subhead recited. The occurrence is doubly intriguing. The 1970s are an age of great experimentation on Italian radio, particularly in the area of documentary and drama, and the programme is situated within this budding trend. Even more importantly, the article suggests the oxymoronic nature of this series and other formats which span different typologies almost inextricably.
According to radio producer and critic Lorenzo Pavolini, the invitation contained in the title is a rhetorical device - a metaphor (2018, translation added) - introducing the audience to a new experience in historical investigation, and he himself quotes it at the beginning of his essay prefacing the Interviste impossibili printed collection (Pavolini in Pavolini 2006: ix) to illustrate the mechanism in action in the programmes. The original good wheeze (2006: ix, translation added), unique in the panorama of post-war Italian culture (2006: xxii), consisted of a recorded dialogue between the writer playing the part of themselves as the interviewer, and an actress/actor playing the historical character. Technically, being entirely scripted and acted out, the programme can be categorized as radio drama and indeed Pavolini (2013: 62-70) includes the Interviste in a chapter on radio drama in his memoir Si sente in fondo? .Yet conceptually the series raises a paradox that, as we shall see, lies at the core of all audio docudramatic productions, and that the title of the article aptly epitomizes: the possibility to draw people and events out of the discourse of historicism and let them speak directly to our ear, in a one-to-one relationship. The words also implicitly suggest that, if we let them do so, they might gift us some unheralded revelation. Contextualized within the interviews in which the man of Neanderthal or Charles Dickens do actually talk to an interlocutor, the quotation encapsulates the belief that through an act of imagination the sound matter can distil a form of truth from documented reality. A similar notion lies at the basis of the present study which aims to demonstrate that the coming together of factuality and fiction through treatment in sound may disclose unexpected meanings not only emotionally involving but also conceptually engaging.
Interviste impossibili is part of an outstanding tradition that has steadily evolved since the 1950s, yet radio (audio) crossbreed forms remain a neglected field. In recent years media have witnessed a surge of interest in productions which purport to portray real situations and people through a form of re-enactment of historical or biographical events involving the manipulation of documentary material with varying degrees of dramatization, adaptation and fictionalization, and blending together strands of meaning from different districts of human knowledge. In film and television and, to a lesser degree perhaps, in the theatre, a genre in its own right has taken shape under the critics magnifying glass, endowed with various names, the most comprehensive of all probably being docudrama or docufiction . In a 2006 article for the Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film , Paget traces the roots of the debate about what he considers a sub-genre in television broadcasting - documentary drama or drama documentary - back to 1980. 1 Very little exploration has so far been conducted into the radio equivalent, a type of programmes that, situating itself along the opaque and unstable boundary between fact and fiction, seems perfectly suited to a medium which makes the ephemeral nature of sound and the evanescence of perception its main strengths. Arguably, despite the number of remarkable productions throughout the history of radio, their fluctuating quality coupled with the natural impermanence of sound has made audio docudrama at the same time too vast a subject to explore and too complex a concept to encapsulate. But such comprehensiveness and ambivalence also account for the challenge radio docudrama re