The Other Documentary Tradition: Early radio documentaries in Canada

Hogarth, David George

doi:10.1080/01439680120051479

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Andrew Crisell describes these radio docudramas as “distant ancestors of the modern TV docudrama” (Crisell 2002, 41). In Canada, radio documentary became an “everyday” component of broadcasting by the mid-1930s offering “a uniquely educational, entertaining and efficient way of telling stories about the nation” (Hogarth 2001, 124). While there is less English-language scholarship about documentary drama in other parts of the world, evidence from Mexico, Argentina and South Korea suggests that radio docudrama played a similar role in telling engaging and educational stories about the nation (Ehrick 2015; Hayes 2020; Kim 2019).…”

Section: Locating the Origins Of Docudramamentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Docudrama and its Origins From Radio and Film to Streaming Media

Hayes

2023

Television & New Media

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This study offers a new perspective on documentary drama in the television, cable and streaming eras by mapping the trajectory of US media industry discourse about docudrama from the early twentieth century to the present. It uses aggregate data from eight entertainment trade journals to show that docudrama emerged in broadcasting and film in the 1930s and has played a significant role in US media culture ever since. It analyzes trade journal commentary and radio broadcasting practices to demonstrate that the two key components of docudrama—dramatization and a discourse of factuality—developed in the network radio era. The key radio innovation was dramatization, which required producers to re-create actual events, conform to generic expectations, and promote a particular ideological perspective on social events.

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Section: Locating the Origins Of Docudramamentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Docudrama and its Origins From Radio and Film to Streaming Media

Hayes

2023

Television & New Media

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“…Bridson brought with him a model of how a features department in Australia might operate in 1948-49: writers and creative producers should work across boundaries of drama, poetry, journalism and documentary (ABC 1948;Madsen 2017). Sustained interaction between BBC and CBC Canada in features and drama staff occurred from the war through the 1950s (eg John Reeves 1956 worked with BBCs Features/ Cleverdon), although CBC had been very active in documentary making from its earliest programs (Hogarth 2001). The BBC's post war mission embodied in features also influenced other broadcasters formerly of occupied Europe (Whitehead 1989: 10).…”

Section: Transnational Influence Of the Bbc Model Post War 'Feature'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational Encounters and Peregrinations of the Radio Documentary Imagination

Madsen

2018

Edition Medienwissenschaft

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Ample evidence attests to the emergence of a 'documentary project' in radio by the 1930s, located in multiple sites of creation, many of which developed concurrently, or in dialogue, with the documentary movement in cinema gathering momentum in these same years. Across diverse sites practitioners built bodies of work, some influencing other authors through their ideas, approach or sensibility towards the subjects they chose to explore and reveal. As in the world of film making, a small number of key individuals-auteurs-and centres of production-workshops, studios-helped shape the wider field and offered a vision, as well as encouraging considerable institutional support. Becoming aware of experiments in documentary in cinema, these new radio 'producers' also developed techniques to explore all kinds of subject matter in an array of new forms. They took their microphones and new recording apparatus 'en plein air', gathering the 'acoustic expression of life' to compose a whole new auditory field for documentary creation. More than the "creative treatment of actuality" (Grierson and Hardy 1946: 11), this also included work close to the radio drama. As with cinema, this expansion of the documentary in radio and sound evolved in relation to other arts and literature, and with the rise of another new field: broadcast journalism and reportage. We can encounter a host of new terms employed in the first decades of radio which refer to this emerging international field for documentary; some of these terms also announced a new art form which drew on radio's own distinctive qualities. Here we encounter the 'sound picture', 'actuality', 'acoustic film', 'radio-film' and 'feature'-with terminology in German and Danish ('Hörfolge', 'Hørebilleder', 'Hörfilme',) mirroring some of these terms; in French the 'suite radiophonique', 'mosaïque', and 'film radiophonique' reveals these influences and echoes other media art forms.

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“…The roots of this practice in documentary cinema can be traced to radio programming, and David Hogarth offers a compelling account of the device's role in Canada's radio documentary tradition in the decades preceding the arrival of the host on film and in television. 13 Occupying a uniquely liminal textual space in documentary programming, a host's appearance within the story environment aids claims of the "performance-free" participation of speaking subjects. It is, in fact, the host's placement within the environment of the story that gives value to the testimony of his interview subjects: the host's access to these individuals is offered as further evidence of the validity of the film's central thesis.…”

Section: Antecedents Of the Talking Headmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dresden Story and the Emergence of the Talking Head in the NFB Documentary

Baker¹

2008

Canadian Journal of Film Studies / Revue Canadienne d'etudes ci

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Peu d’histoires du cinéma documentaire délimitent clairement l’apparition du sujet interviewé comme dispositif rhétorique standard des films de nonfiction. En concentrant notre étude sur le développement de la « tête parlante » dans les documentaires de l’Office national du film du Canada, nous pouvons identifier les circonstances qui ont entouré l’émergence de ce procédé à l’intérieur du vocabulaire et de la culture filmiques. Plusieurs théories de la voix et de la performance dans le documentaire informent notre analyse de Dresden story, une production peu connue de l’ONF pour la CBC, portant sur les tensions raciales grandissantes dans une petite ville ontarienne au début des années 50. Ce film de nonfiction comporte diverses formes d’énonciation directe, incluant la narration en voix off, un animateur de télévision, des entrevues devant la caméra et des tables rondes. Tout cela illustre un point tournant dans l’histoire de la « tête parlante » dans le documentaire canadien.

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The Other Documentary Tradition: Early radio documentaries in Canada

Cited by 6 publications

References 2 publications

Rethinking Docudrama and its Origins From Radio and Film to Streaming Media

Rethinking Docudrama and its Origins From Radio and Film to Streaming Media

Transnational Encounters and Peregrinations of the Radio Documentary Imagination

Dresden Story and the Emergence of the Talking Head in the NFB Documentary

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