Docudrama performs the past : arenas of argument in films based on true stories / by Steven N. Lipkin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lipkin, Steven N., 1951-

Contributor:

Ellis D. Williams, College 1865, Endowment Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Historical drama--History and criticism.

Historical drama.

Physical Description:

viii, 180 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2011.

Summary:

Docudramas, films and movies-of-the-week based on true stories, offer their audiences performance as persuasion. As docudramas re-create actual people and events, these works perform their material. The premises of docudramas' persuasive arguments operate within the basic settings that stage performances of noteworthy events, the events of war, and the lives of noteworthy individuals.

In performing the past, docudramas offer us a performance of memory. Through docudramatic performance, the memories of others become ours. The performance of memory roots docudramatic representation in actuality, and indicates the responsibility to serve the past that helps make docudrama a distinctive mode of representation. The spirit of obligation to the past also frames the ethical considerations docudrama raises, as performance in docudrama shapes public memory.

Docudrama Performs the Past examines the spectrum of arguments docudramas offer as their re-creations reason from the arenas of events such as the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93, wars ranging from World War II to Iraq, and the lives of actors, athletes, and politicians. The case studies developed in each Chapter show how docudrama's re-creation of "true stories," its performance of memory, warrants the claims it forwards about how to remember the past. The aggregate of examining works made since the late 1990s allows us to see how, as recurring contexts, the arenas of docudramatic argument ground action and identity in the settings that frame performance, structure the moral value of the contestation that ensues, and shape the public memory of the past that docudramas perform. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Arenas of Re-Creation: Events Docudrama, War Docudrama, and the Biopic 1

Chapter 2 Changeling and the Performance of True Memory 11

Chapter 3 Teaching Reverence for the Real: Cautionary Values in Events Docudrama 21

Chapter 4 When the Private Becomes Public: Film and TV Events Docudramas Set the Record Straight 29

Chapter 5 Ways to Watch the Real: Spectatorship Strategies in Pirates of Silicon Valley 39

Chapter 6 The Events Arena Revisits the West, or: Horses, Work and The Seabiscuit Syndrome: Can Equine Exemplars Keep Us On Track? 51

Chapter 7 Sounding Out the Right: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and Constructing Spin in the Name of Justice 59

Chapter 8 This Time It's Personal: The Ethics of 9/11 Docudrama 69

Chapter 9 Docudramatizing the Events of War: Defiance and Flags of Our Fathers 83

Chapter 10 A Feeling For History: Recovering the Past With Sensible Evidence 91

Chapter 11 "Movie-of-the-Week" Docudrama, "Historical-Event" Television and the Steven Spielberg Miniseries Band of Brothers (Derek Paget and Steven N. Lipkin) 107

Chapter 12 The Relatable Real: Docudrama, Ethics, and Saving Jessica Lynch 125

Chapter 13 The Famous, the Exemplary, the Talented, the Compulsive: Trends in Recent Biopics 133

Chapter 14 Brave, Battered, But Not Bartered: Good Night, and Good Luck, and the Arena of the Biopic 143

Chapter 15 Performing the Past: Present and Future 151.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [153]-160) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Ellis D. Williams, College 1865, Endowment Fund.

ISBN:

1443826820

9781443826822

OCLC:

697599859