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Italian Docudrama: From the Experimental Moment to Biography as Text of Identity

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Docudrama on European Television

Part of the book series: Palgrave European Film and Media Studies ((PEFMS))

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Abstract

Suggest making ‘storytelling’ one word as the OED has it. OK to amend or revert?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I shall use the term ‘docudrama’ for simplicity’s sake, even though I am aware that it ‘often hides important differences in the conception and execution of works’ (Corner 1996, p. 91).

  2. 2.

    All translations from Italian are mine.

  3. 3.

    All issues of this magazine are currently available on the online platform of Teche RAI (Italian public television’s archive).

  4. 4.

    The originale was also called teledramma, a somewhat more specific term which made direct reference to the English and American teleplay.

  5. 5.

    ‘Medea’s Children’ started in the guise of a stage play set in ancient Greece, to be interrupted after a few scenes by the official announcement—in breaking-news style—that the child of the renowned actress who performed the lead role of Medea had been abducted by his father; the man refused to disclose where the child, who was in need of medical care, was hidden and threatened to commit suicide unless his reasons were explained on television. Police officers and psychologists repeatedly appeared on the screen to invite people at home to actively cooperate in searching for the child, so that most of the viewers believed that they were witnessing a family tragedy that was unfolding live.

  6. 6.

    It was probably more influenced by the 1938 ‘panic broadcast’ The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles than by the contemporary works of Reginald Rose or Rod Sterling.

  7. 7.

    It is worth recalling that six years earlier TV broadcasts had been inaugurated with a live broadcast of a theatre performance.

  8. 8.

    The cinema version, produced some years after the television screening, was included recently in the list of ‘100 Italian Films to be Saved’. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_film_italiani_da_salvare)

  9. 9.

    It is to this subgenre that my case study in the following section, Perlasca. Un eroe italiano/Perlasca. An Italian Hero (2002), belongs.

  10. 10.

    The cinema version of the biopic won a prize at the Montreal Film Festival.

  11. 11.

    See also Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann’s chapter on biographical d/d on German television in Bell and Gray eds (2010).

  12. 12.

    There are similarities here with the difficulties the French—indeed any formerly occupied nation – experienced in naming their Resistance heroes/heroines in the postwar period.

  13. 13.

    In early 1990 a wide-ranging judicial investigation on political and financial corruption subverted the Italian political system; this case is referred to in Italy as Tangentopoli, i.e. Bribesville, ‘tangente’ being a word for ‘bribe’.

  14. 14.

    Ennio Morricone had been nominated for five Oscars from 1979 to 2001. In 2007 he received the Academy Honorary Award.

  15. 15.

    However the scholarly literature that flourished in subsequent years in the context of memory studies did not seem so unanimous (see for instance Marcus 2007; Jansen 2008; Perra 2010; Gordon 2012; Clifford 2013 to name just a few).

Chapter 4: Italian Docudrama

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication and Social Research, La Sapienza, Milano, Italy

    Milly Buonanno

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  1. Milly Buonanno
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  1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem , Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann

  2. University of Reading , Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom

    Derek Paget

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Buonanno, M. (2016). Italian Docudrama: From the Experimental Moment to Biography as Text of Identity. In: Ebbrecht-Hartmann, T., Paget, D. (eds) Docudrama on European Television. Palgrave European Film and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49979-0_4

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