The Rise in Popularity of the History Documentaries - Essay Example

Historical Documentary essay What were the reasons for the rise in popularity of the history documentary at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s Discuss with reference to the notions of co-production and political economy As the flow of Current Affairs documentary ebbed, and the global and competitive nature of television increased, one form of documentary suddenly became more popular than it had ever been before - history documentary. In this essay I would like to have a look at where history documentary came from, and why it 'boomed'. In the Paper called Investigating the UK Television History Boom, 1980 - 2004, the author says that, "docu-soap was on the decline, due to an association with fakery and dumbing-down. With it came documentary on history, condemned to a pattern of reducing budgets and obscure slots. But one form of documentary was on an upwards curve even into the new millennium - the history documentary" Documentary films are non-fiction films which portray the events which have already happened and which are happening at the moment. This developed in time to be the historical documentaries which have entered a golden age in the literal sense of the word. This boom is attributed to many factors like the political changes, the crucial event in a country, the anxious arrival of the millennium, the unpredicted development of technology, and the accessibility of information. It is also due to freedom of information, favourable political and economical factors, the establishments of film archives, the regular transformation of the filmgoers and producers, prevailing nostalgia of what we left behind and the demand for more real historical events. Over and above these causes, the other noteworthy change was the co productions of history documentaries and political and economical conditions which added to the flourishing of these types of documentaries. What are historical documentaries "The documentary--whether it is a written account, a photograph, or a film--has long served as one of the primary sources for historians writing about the past as well as one of the key forms, historians use to communicate their stories about the past." (Professor Jill Watts -History 300B, spring 2007) Documentary film was actually born of the written and photographic tradition Initially, documentary films were just current events which had certain significance for the people living at that particular period of time. This created a genre of films which have a say not for the universal time but for only a period. This type of documentary would have had its heyday only when certain pulverizing events such as wars and political controversies took place. When the heat of the debate wears off, there is no more interest on the specific documentary anymore. History Documentary films have reflected attitudes and internal changes in British society for a century. British documentary as a notable movie genre surfaced around 1906. From then on documentary films began establishing a theme. The theme usually focused on the way of life of British working class and rarely touched on other types as well. An apt example of this is 'The Drifters' by Grierson The growth of Documentaries It is essential to note that the government and national agencies funded the production and distribution of such documentaries in the 1920s and 1930s. Popular agencies which got involved in this type of film making are the Ministries of Transport, Trade, Information, the General Post Office and Empire Marketing Board. The British documentary directors were all socialists and their documentaries such as Workers for Jobs by Arthur Elton in 1934, and then by Edgar Anstey in 1935 to devastating effect in Housing Problems for the Gas Light and Coal Company were technically advanced, using the latest film equipment in novel and exciting ways. They used synchronized sound-recording on location. Another important factor to note is that the 16mm film became standardized by Eastman and Bell & Howell in 1923 and the films were exhibited at cinemas as a mini film to the main movie attraction. Obviously, the audience was large in number. The advent of war social documentaries took the front of the stage. The well known 'Listen to Britain' is a classic and poetic vision of Britain at war by Humphrey Jenkins. He was also the founder of British surrealism and participated in a movement called Mass Observation. This period between 1930 and 1950 is regarded as the golden age of the British Documentary films. In the post war period commercial agencies like The Shell Film Unit, founded by Edgar Anstey started to produce documentaries. The Ford Motor Company employed directors like Karel Reisz to make 'We Are the Lambeth Boys' for a series 'This is Britain.' Technological advancement has transformed the film equipment into a very small unit and it was apparent when film crew could become invisible in film making. John Achesinger's outstanding observational classic Terminus is an example of this aspect. While these technological changes were on, another transformation has also been taking place. BBC radio documentaries pioneered a different and tough film which set a varied form and tone to the documentaries in general. BBC produced a documentary on BBC in 1935 called 'The Voice of Britain by Stuart Legg and another called 'Operation Hurricane'. By now ITV and BBC were the exclusive financiers of documentaries. Documentaries were nick named 'Fly on the Wall' by now and 'The Family" by Paul Watson became a national event in 1974. Documentaries received a tremendous boost in November 1982 with the arrival of Channel Four. Thus the second golden age has started for documentary films. Until the year 2000, documentaries prospered in Channel four. John Ellis, in his essay Channel Four, Innovation in Form and Content, mentions that the channel provided a 'platform for left wing ideas being squeezed out of other media' and the government was actually conservative. The right wingers tolerated the left wing producers. Channel Four started off with a documentary called Vietnam. Though it was not very successful, it continued to produce The Leader, his Driver and the Driver's Wife by Nick Broomfield. And At this time, there were many investigative journalism films like Babitsky's War and another controversial film such as The Dying Rooms. Death on the Rock was the considered the most powerful film produced by ITV during this period. Causes of the popularity and boom of the history documentaries David Cannadine in the conference called 'History and the media' wonders about "the reasons behind the history boom: was it New Labour's 1997 election victory The death of the Queen Mother The Millennium The Internet In this book, we have the considered thoughts of some of the leading lights who were in attendance; eleven chapters, arranged to alternate between the worlds of academic history and the media." (History and the Media, ed. by David Cannadine ) Just as David Cannadine suggested, there was a change of labour government and the death of the Queen mother might have been indirect inducements to the ever expanding world of the history documentaries. The new government with its new ideas made it feasible for the documentary directors and producers and there is more freedom of thought and tolerance was given new scope. These events were the inspirational incidents of great history lived and also history in the making. This might have also helped the boom in history documentary due to freedom in gathering and using the information gathered. Since Winston Churchill's death, the Queen Mother's death was the event which brought the public on its foot to mourn the loss the well respected and loved lady in the UK. The anxiety about the arrival of the millennium with all the rumors, good and the bad, prophesies and forecasts made people look at the arrival in a unique way which let people expect the unexpected. In addition, technology has been developing in leaps and bounds and this has given scope to the exposure of the pubic to new gadgets. The new gadgets were not only available to all classes of the society and the class system is being levelled out again. A sense of equality prevailed which helped the common man the desire to imprint his ideas where he lived. Anybody could be a historian and you only need a camcorder which is as good as any other gadget. Furthermore the common man is driven by a desire to know his roots and the past events to put himself in the proper perspective. In the article, 'Investigating the UK Television History Boom', the author discusses three main reasons for the boom in the History Documentary. The author says that "it suggested new solutions to the same old epistemological problems which have always dogged the documentary." It goes on to say, "First of all history documentary is a more commercially feasible than other forms of media. In the 1990s there were soaps which were popular, but these soaps, though attracting large audiences, had a boundary or a culturally specific territory which would be able to relate to the material. However, as per the journal article, "The same history television text is seen all around the world, by millions of people, gathering money as it travels, and creating new markets for itself all the while. Contemporary documentaries' use of topicality also affects their shelf-life as media products. History television texts can remain relevant for decades, such as The World At War (LWT, 1974), which has been in almost perpetual circulation somewhere on the globe since 1974."(Investigating the UK Television History Boom) The next reason for the boom could be the accessibility of the archives and the inexpensive nature of those archives. History is often described by history documentary producers as 'an unquenchable repository of stories'. Producers of History Documentaries can plunder the resources of archives, and they are able to make use of the collective memory of the audience. They, then resort to the fiction film style and create cohesive, stimulating stories which seem to have happened in the past. Everyone of the viewer has something to relate himself to in such a historical production. The producers tend to opt for a sensation storyline which would be an absorbing story to keep the number of viewers intact. The author claims that "Griersonian documentary made claims regarding its effects on its viewers' attitudes towards contemporary life and social issues in order to achieve funding, a claim that has lived on ever since in the PSB remit to educate and inform. Instead, history television represents itself as a tapestry of different historical portraits of the past, only indirectly referring to contemporary events by way of analogy and comparison, thus escaping the litigious scrutiny brought to bear on documentaries after the faking scandals of the 1990s." (Title of Paper: Investigating The UK Television History Boom, (1980-2004.)) The television Archivist, Adrian Woods asserts the use of colour archive footage of the Second World War as a step along the path towards a seamless mixing the effects of camera and eye. (Title of Paper: Investigating the UK Television History Boom, 1980-2004.) This is called the ocular centric position and almost all the documentary producers give great importance to this. Adrian Woods praises of visual greatness in the works of the History producer Taylor Downing. It can be connotative, carrying myriad meanings and in the details of clothing, uniform, expression, gesture and tone can enhance understanding of an event in an entirely different way in various documents. Downing also conveys that television's visuality allows it to be the best medium to communicate historical messages and Robert Rosenstone , an academic also supports this argument. What are the changes in the history documentary Television stands at the vanguard of all media's increased outputs of either factual or documentary. The value of the history titles in the TV media have gone up during this periods. For instance, "from the top 25 history titles in terms of sales value in 2001, four were published by the BBC, two by Channel 4 books, and at least three others were tie-ins with television programmes." (Departmental Conference, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth, 15-17th March, 2005.)"Of course, television can usefully stimulate public debate but, as Hastings points out, such debate is never exclusively in the public's interest: it also stimulates what might be otherwise unimpressive book sales." (Book Title: History and the Media Author David Cannadine ed. Reviewer Marc Morris Publisher - London Palgrave 2002.) "It is very seldom that an article or a programme unveils information genuinely unknown to scholars. What happens is that a new generation of editors or television producers rediscover facts hitherto unknown not to science or academe, but to themselves.' (p. 109) In fact, in spite of its professed neophilia, says Hastings, the media is extremely reluctant to reverse old verdicts - a point he illustrates to good effect with examples about the First World War (bad) and the Second World War (good)." He also learnt an interesting factor that television is a visual medium and that the words must follow the pictures and not the other way round. (Book Title:History and the Media Author David Cannadine ed.Reviewer Marc Morris Publisher - London Palgrave 2002.) The consequences of the boom in history documentary The number of viewers has increased and the data gives us a picture of what happened. "In 1984, only five factual programmes achieved an audience of over 5 million, none of which were factual history programmes. Things have changed. The BBC drama-doc 'Pompeii: The Last Day' (October 2003) garnered 9.8 million viewers. Four years earlier, the BBC achieved its highest viewing figures for factual history with 'Walking With Dinosaurs' (October 1999), gathering 18.9 million viewers."(Departmental Conference, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth, 15-17th March, 2005.) Ian Kershaw in 'The past on the box: strengths and weaknesses', New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, 2nd Edition indicates that history has never been more popular like what it became during the boom. History documentary can have a big impact because a picture is worth a thousand words. He also points out its public utility. 'the Open University received an unprecedented number of enquiries after it was broadcast and then students began to take-up of courses on the history of the seventeenth century' (p. 94). In other words, he seems to say that, never mind the quality: feel the width. There is another important change which the researchers noticed was, about the purchase of books. Statistics from the Bookseller's Association show that the sales of the genre of factual history books grew periodically in the UK between 1990 and 2002. This factual history outperformed the children's books and fiction. Even the demand on the internet sites about factual history was on the increase in the boom period. It is believed that producers win commissions and their documentaries go on to attract more audiences and achieve great international sales if only they could create an emotionally charged series of scenes, not merely appeal to a history-literate audience. The consequence is a visually-driven approach to film-making, one which actually downgrades the need for an existing academic thesis. This gives us a choice to create a visual argument from whatever material they get easily, under any storyline that has grabbed the interest of the people who employ the producers and directors. An example of this approach can be seen in the influential group of series made by TWI which was referred to as the 'In Colour' franchise. The first of them, 'The Second World War in Colour' was made from a small amount of colour footage that archivist Adrian Wood and producer Stewart Binns had been able to uncover in their research. The programme's thesis is the archive itself. What was done was just stringing historical events together in a loose chronology, and also choosing the historical factors these events covered. It was based on producer's ability to visualise the clips in the archive footage. When history is portrayed in a history documentary, there is another that attracts the attention. This is the concept of the media's 'present tense.' This immediate sense of history generated by media's presentism and by its intimacy and immediacy is what helps the producers to bridge the gap between the past and present. The media's ocular centrism and presentism are the great qualities of history documentary. History documentary has become a major presence in the media in the United Kingdom. It has undergone a booming period between 1990 and 2000 for wide variety of reasons. The main causes were the change in political and economic spheres, the labour government winning the elections and freedom of thought and opening up new possibilities. Furthermore, there was a great development in the technology and anyone could make a historical documentation due to the great convenient technological options. There was also free access to the archives and the clips from the archives did not cost as much as the other sources. It is essential to note that the history documentary reached more number of people than other programmes through the media and producers and directors resorted to fiction film style to attract the audience. The concept of visuality, and ocular centrism made the history documentary more attractive and carried innumerable meanings to different audiences. Reference 1. Downing, T 'Bringing History to the Small Screen' from Cannadine, David (ed.) (2004) History and the Media, London: Palgrave. 2. Hunt, T. Reality, Identity and Empathy: The Changing Face of Social History Documentary, Journal of Social History, (2006) Vol.39, No.3, pp.843-858 3. Ward, P. 'The changing face of historical documentary', from Documentary: The Margins of Reality, London: (2006) Wallflower Press. 4. .Hunt, T. Reality, Identity and Empathy: The Changing Face of Social History Documentary, Journal of Social History, (2006) Vol.39, No.3, pp.843-858. 5. Downing 'History on Television: The Making of the Cold War', in landy, M. (ed) The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, London(2001): Athlone Press 6. Kershaw, I. 'The Past on the Box: Strengths and Weaknesses', from Cannadine, David (ed.) History and the Media, London(2004): Palgrave. 7. .Bell 'Reality, identity and empathy: the changing face of social history television', Journal of Social History, 39.3 (2007) 8. Aberystwyth - Departmental Conference, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, , 15-17th March, 2005 9. Cannadine. D. History and the Media Author ed. Reviewer Marc Morris Publisher - London Palgrave 2002.) 10. Cannadine, D (2004) History and the Media, London: Palgrave. 11. Investigating the UK Television History Boom, (1980-2004.) 12. Professor Jill Watts -History 300B, spring 2007 Read More