Word: docudramas
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...enactment as a narrative tool. Aesthetically, such methods can always be debated, but I cannot follow the article's suggestion that the film seeks to manipulate its audience by pretending to be a montage of purely authentic material while, according to Marshall, it is in fact a "docudrama." It is correct that there are reconstructions in the film. But we certainly have made no secret about it. All thinkable efforts have been made to make sure these representations of reality are as truthful and precise as possible. Indeed, they have been created under direct guidance from the Burmese video journalists...
...there's a but. Burma VJ is pitched as a documentary, when it is actually a docudrama relying heavily on dramatic re-enactments. It begins with a disclaimer: "This film is [composed largely of] material shot by undercover reporters in Burma. Some elements of the film have been reconstructed in close co-operation with the actual persons involved." Mixing documentary footage with dramatic reconstructions is said to be a hallmark of ?stergaard's films. With Burma VJ, that hallmark is a handicap, undermining the film's credibility and dishonoring the very profession its subjects risk their lives to pursue...
...Burmese troops; blood-drenched protesters on the streets back in 1988, when the last democracy uprising was snuffed out and thousands were killed. Twenty years of suffering is compressed into a few searing seconds. But it is still hard to simply recategorize Burma VJ as a well-made docudrama and leave it at that - not as long as its makers insist that it is a documentary, or that it is composed largely of the work of undercover reporters, when at least half of it seems re-enacted. The cause of Burma's democrats is ill-served by hyperbole...
...these vectors are at play in Lee's novel, which after all is cast not as a Scottsboro Boys-style docudrama of racial injustice in the '30s but as a daughter's loving evocation of her dad, seen through a child's eyes. This is the perspective that Foote's Oscar-winning script faithfully transposed to the screen, and that Mary Badham, who played Scout Finch, embodied with such unaffected clarity that, at 10, she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. As for Mulligan, no one has cited him for anything but the sensitive handling of story, actors...
...White is so compelling and conflicted a figure that the trick of any Milk project is to keep him from abducting it. The 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk devoted its whole third act to White's trial, which was the entire subject of Emily Mann's panoramic docudrama The Execution of Justice, also from 1984. Josh Brolin plays him here and has much more to work with than he did as George Bush in W. This is a portrait, from the inside, of a man who fought the validation of homosexuality because his Catholic faith and his constituents...