The Rise of “Unscripted Narrative”: Production Cultures in Independent and Commercial Documentary Filmmaking

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8: Narratives

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes "unscripted narrative", an ongoing trend where the central concern of documentary filmmaking has become the achievement of “story” – compared to, say, “truth”, “factuality”, or “social justice”. This shift is evident in both “commercial” and “independent” scenes. Of course, these contexts are also becoming increasingly interchangeable (Morfoot 2024), which may contribute to the rise of “story” – a quintessential part of “classical Hollywood cinema” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985). Moreover, major figures in the field have levelled critiques on unscripted narrative’s implications for participant care (Shane, n.d.) and the commodification of documentary (Story 2022). My research question is understanding how the two aesthetic imperatives – storytelling and truth-telling – interact, and its consequences for achieving authentic representation.

This paper applies meaning-centered analysis integral to cultural sociology (Alexander and Smith 2003) to “production cultures” in “art worlds” (Becker 1982). My unique positionality as an independent documentary filmmaker has offered access to industry conferences, workshops, and first-hand understanding of the storytelling’s centrality in documentary work. My data is ethnographies from industry conferences and workshops, interviews with documentary filmmakers, core industry materials (e.g. grant application criteria, guidebooks), and ethnographic data on the documentary filmmaking process.

My findings suggest that “storytelling” remains the dominant mode through which the documentary community receives recognition and artistic merit. At the same time, documentary filmmakers are rarely able to reflexively evaluate the implications of choosing “good stories” over authentic representation. That is not to say that storytelling and authenticity are mutually exclusive. However, the imperative of “good storytelling” has become a proxy for “good documentary work”, and by extension obfuscates the vicissitudes of “documenting reality”.

Author

• Jessie Dong, Yale University