Drama Features оf Documentary: Movie, TV Film, Streaming Platform

Abstract

The article examines dramaturgical and directorial characteristics of non-live-action TV movies and documentary films. Using two films as examples — a renowned movie “Katyusha” (dir. V. Lisakovich, 1964, USSR) and a television film “Katyusha Big and Small” (dir. I. Firsova, 2008, Russia) the author examines the fundamental differences between large-screen and television stylistics.
These films have been chosen for a comparative analysis because they share the same plot – the battle path of the nurse Ekaterina Demina, her reflections on the War past from the peacetime perspective; at the same time, both films are marked by different directorial choices.
In the first case, we are dealing with a masterpiece where innovative techniques are used to present the characters, while the second one is a highquality but standard television production. The author analyses the stylistic peculiarities of the movie and the TV production, taking into consideration the use of the voiceover, the treatment of fact and imagery, the ways of creating the on-screen characters and many other directorial tools. The author also explores the dramaturgical features of non-live-action films produced specifically for the Internet platforms, and makes predictions about future transformations in the film language.
The author analyses the director's techniques and methods using the documentary movie “This is Eddie. The Tale of a Lost and Stolen Childhood” (dir. R.Super, 2020) as an example. Documentary film is gradually getting access to new ways of distribution through global on-demand video streaming services where the viewer can watch documentaries.
As in the case of feature series, the documentaries should update their language. However, it is assumed that the real documentary film will again be on the periphery of mass culture, and the expected renewal of the film language will be a borrowing of the TV language of American documentaries, which is characterized by the use of dramaturgically structured interviews instead of an informative voiceover text, which is the main technique in our national TV documentaries. The article compares these two TV formats.