Discourses of Power and Representation in British Broadcasting Corporation Documentary Practices: 1999-2013

Abstract

This dissertation re-evaluates the ways in which contemporary television documentary practices engage their audience. Bringing together historical frameworks, and using them to analyse a range of examples not considered together within this context previously, the main finding is that the use of spectacle to engage the audience into a visceral response cuts across all of the examples analysed, regardless of the subject matter being explored. Drawing on a media archaeological approach, the dissertation draws parallels with the way in which pre-cinema engaged an audience where the primary point of engagement came from the image itself, rather than a narrative. Within a documentary context, which is generally understood as a genre which is there to educate or inform an audience, the primacy of spectacle calls for a re-evaluation of the form and function of documentary itself. Are twenty-first century documentary practices manufacturing an emotional connection to engage the audience over attempting to persuade with reasoning and logic? The answer contained within this dissertation is that they are.