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

Jessie Dong, Yale University

This paper conceptualizes "unscripted narrative", an 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 the historical emergence of “storytelling” in independent documentary. Further, I am interested in exploring how the two imperatives – storytelling and documenting reality – 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 draws from discourse analysis of core industry materials (e.g. grant application guides, seminal documentary filmmaking guidebooks) and influential industry talks and articles over the course of the past four decades. My findings suggest that “storytelling” emerged out of an unintended alignment between moral and corporate stakeholders in the entertainment industry. Storytelling became a modality that could both offer “voice” to marginalized communities, and remain competitive in an increasingly oversaturated media landscape. The implications of this trend is the elision between “good stories” 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”.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 131. Community, Consumption, and Creative Industries