Dominant, subordinate, radicalA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWof immediacy – indeed making the claims
of authenticity made for reality TV pale in
comparison.
Immensely popular on both sides of the
Atlantic have been Michael Moore’s docu-
mentaries, Bowling for Columbine (2002), a
savage indictment of the US gun culture, and
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a critical exploration of
the Iraq war of 2003 and alleging links between
President George Bush and top Saudi families
including the Bin Ladens. Fahrenheit 9/11 won
the prestigious Palme d’Or award for best fi lm
at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the fi rst time
that a documentary had won the top prize since
Jacques Cousteau’s award for Silent World in
1956.
Inevitably drama-docs have stirred contro-
versy. Th e BBC’s Dirty War (2004), for example,
was too close for comfort for some critics, being
about a ‘dirty bomb’ explosion in London, while
a few faint voices of protest were raised when
Channel 4’s Th e Taking of Prince Harry (2010)
simulated the abduction of the Prince while
on military duty in Afghanistan. See cinema-
tography, origins; cinéma vérité; direct
cinema; fly-on-the-wall; radio ballads;
soaps: docu-soaps; web or online drama.
▶John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modern-
ism and British Culture (Oxford University Press,
2000); Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, eds, New
Challenges for Documentary (Manchester University
Press, 2005); Sheila Curran Bernard, Documentary
Storytelling (Focal Press, 3rd edition, 2011).
Dolly A trolley on which a camera unit can be
soundlessly moved about during shooting; can
usually be mounted on rails. A ‘crab dolly’ will
move in any direction.
Domestication of the foreign See news:
globalization of.
Dominant culture See culture.
★Dominant discourse In a general sense,
discourse is talk; converse; holding forth in
speech and writing on a subject. Refers both to
the content of communicative exchanges and to
the level at which those exchanges take place,
and in what mode or style as well as to whom the
discourse is addressed. A dominant discourse is
that which takes precedence over others, reduc-
ing alternative content, subordinating alterna-
tive approaches to ‘holding forth’. All public
discourse is socially and culturally based, thus
it follows that the dominant discourse is usually
that which emanates from those dominant in the
social and cultural order. See elite; hegemony;
ideology; power elite.
Dominant, subordinate, radical Th ree catego-German dramatist Rolf Hochhuth won world-
wide attention with his documentary drama
Th e Representative in 1963, on the subject of the
Papacy and the Jews during the Second World
War (1939–45). He followed this up with Soldiers
(1967) based upon the alleged involvement of
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the
wartime death of the Polish General Sikorski.
In the UK, Peter Brook’s highly successful US
(1966) was an indictment of American involve-
ment in the Vietnam war.
On-stage documentaries, in the US often
termed the Theatre of Fact, have frequently
been presented with the aid of offi cial and press
reports, original diaries, projected photographs,
tape recordings and newsreel fi lms. In the case
of the Royal Court production Falkland Sound
(1983), a moving and damning recollection of
the Falklands War (1982) was presented through
the letters home of a young naval offi cer killed
in action.
Faction or drama-doc are terms mainly associ-
ated with TV documentaries in which actors
re-create historical lives, such as in the BBC’s Th e
Voyage of Charles Darwin (1978), or play the part
of famous people of the immediate past, such as
Th ames Television’s Edward and Mrs Simpson
(1978), Southern TV’s Winston Churchill – Th e
Wilderness Ye a r s (1981), and ITV’s Kennedy
(1983). To TV producers, faction has come
to represent an ideal synthesis of education,
information and entertainment, albeit highly
selective and deeply coloured by contemporary
perspectives.
Just as documentary has borrowed from
fictional narratives, so fiction has taken on
the ‘guise’ of documentary. Such works are
described as ‘mock’ documentaries and they aim
to examine the borderline between the real and
the invented. A memorable example is Woody
Allen’s Zelig (1983) in which he achieved remark-
able results by combining newsreels, stills and
live footage (see Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe’s
Faking it: Mock-documentary and the subversion
of factuality, Manchester University Press, 2001).
Early UK TV drama-docs of note are Ken
Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1965) and Peter
Watkins’s Cullodon (1964) and Th e War Game
(1965). Th e popularity of reality tv has in the
New Millennium been matched by increased
interest on the part of audiences in the genre,
outstanding examples being Kevin Macdonald’s
Touching the Void (2003), Errol Morris’s The
Fog of War and Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the
Friedmans, both of 2004, each with powerful
stories to tell and conveying a dramatic sense