Are You Ready for Some Football? A Monday Night Documentary ?

Abstract

According to three of the most prominent contemporary theories of documentary—those of Gregory Currie, Noël Carroll, and Carl Plantinga—live televised sports broadcasts like Monday Night Football count as members of that category. I begin this article by explaining how each of these theories encompasses live televised sports. Next, I argue that this inclusion is a serious mistake. Attention to it reveals that any adequate account of documentaries must include a condition that Currie, Carroll, and Plantinga ignore. After considering some candidates for this condition, I develop a technical notion of “account” and defend the proposal that documentaries are primarily accounts. Any theory of documentary that incorporates this insight will fit more comfortably with the standard categorical distinctions made in critical and everyday practice.

SportsCenter : The Documentary? A Response to Pratt

“…Pratt might grant that poetic documentaries such as Rain do not provide accounts but argue that they, like actualitiés , should not be considered documentaries. Yet, unlike the actualitiés he mentions, poetic documentaries are not “ancestors of our contemporary documentary category” that are “now relatively uncommon” (, 221) but a well‐established part of the documentary tradition.…”

“…Henry John Pratt's () “Are You Ready for Some Football? A Monday Night Documentary ?” identifies a question that three prominent documentary theorists (Gregory Currie, Noël Carrol, and Carl Plantinga) have failed to address: why are live sports broadcasts (LSBs) not considered documentaries, since they represent themselves as documenting real‐life events and informing viewers about the real world?…”

“…Pratt rightly notes that Currie's theory (that documentaries are indexical records of events) and Carroll's theory (that documentaries are films of presumptive assertion) entail categorizing LSBs as documentaries. But Pratt oversteps when he claims that “live sports broadcasts count, for Plantinga, as prototypical documentaries” (, 215). Plantinga, in fact, says nothing about LSBs and makes clear that he thinks of documentary as a subcategory of film, stating that “the category ‘documentary’ embodies a wide range of films in the various moving‐image media” (, 105).…”

“…A second problem is anticipated in Pratt's article: that the identification of “a significant class of documentaries that are not primarily accounts” would be “damaging to [Pratt's] view” (, 221). While Pratt dismisses several candidates for such a class, he overlooks one well‐recognized documentary genre whose members are not primarily accounts: poetic documentaries.…”

“…Last, I argue that Pratt's proposal is an unsatisfactory corrective to PCC documentary theories because, as even Pratt acknowledges, many works that are not considered documentaries according to ordinary‐language usage otherwise appear to meet Pratt's criteria for documentary status. Pratt supports the claim that LSBs are not documentaries by noting that neither people nor television schedules classify LSBs as documentaries and that lists of recognized sports documentaries are segregated from lists of famous LSBs (, 217–218). Pratt also notes that such sources do not classify as documentaries many other types of works, such as sports highlight shows, nonsports news, reality television, and true‐crime television (221).…”