Drama and Journalism — a new course that drives audiences.
If you’ve been hooked by the drama, a reconstruction of the UK Post office scandal: Mr Bates vs Post office, one of the recurring questions is why doesn’t journalism affect viewers in the way drama does?
They’re not mutually exclusive, but the decision to create news journalism as vignettes of life, an attempt to eschew emotion was taken in the 1950s at the birth of TV News.
In the 1920s an attempt to capture cinema’s drama in Non-fiction production gave rise to documentary, a complex genre aided along by John Grierson. Hitchcock recognised Grierson as a great Cinema maker.
Back to the 50s. As TV began to take hold, execs were desperate for viewers and fearful of being boring. That’s how the 2 min or thereabouts news report takes root. The distinction between TV and cinema (which could be fiction and non-fiction) was necessary. TV news took cinema’s langue, for example “a producer” or camera shots like Wide shot”, but TV was a medium without cash. It scrapped itself along.
In the 1960s various groups emerged to challenge TV journalism’s ways of doing. One of the BBC’s most powerful women Grace Wyndham Goldie helped create current affairs. This was TV news elongated, but it largely built on a “weaker” langue TV news was pursuing.
But outside of news were other groups. One of them was Robert Drew. Working with friends he went back to journalism aping cinema — a particular model of cinema. Primary (1960) featuring a young presidential hopeful Kennedy is one of his standouts. Drew wanted to influence news. He spoke to me as part of my doctorate in 2011. Yet the news industry shut him out.
The grip the news industry had on how things MUST be done, holds until the 1990s. The rise of self-shooting cameras, video journalism and cable helps individuals take charge of what they’re doing. Some consciously adopt cinema’s language, like Dimitri Doganis Head of Raw TV which made The Imposter (2012).
In 2005 I made a news film about how I trained Britain’s regional newspapers to become video journalists I called it, 8 days. It won the international award for Video journalism in Berlin where judges likened it to cinema.
In 2010 as an journalist and academic I was invited to join the Southbank Centre as an artist-in-residence by Jude Kelly CBE. Jude was intrigued in the mix of journalism, art and cinema and encouraged more.
That’s when I decided to go deeper and explore this as a PhD, looking at cognitivism, emotions, impartiality, structures, OMG an array of things. I watched so many films as well my supervisor warned me I was doing two different PhDs in one and I needed to prune.
But I’d found out something
Journalism can marry with cinema, and the impact is phenomenal. A few household news names from the BBC and outside are doing it. I’m an RTS judge and have had the pleasure of talking to many of the new practitioners.
So, Mr Bates vs Post office as cinema journalism, think about it? Journalism of the 21st century.
