School of Film and TV - Theses
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ItemInspired by a true story: an assessment of how the dramatic elements of pity and fear can be applied by a producer seeking to transform historical events into narrative drama for television: based on a case study of the production of the telemovie, Sisters of War (2010)( 2011)This thesis argues that, as one of a team of authorial agents, the producer of a television historical drama should understand the challenges, limits and benefits of shaping the dramatic elements of pity and fear in order to sustain historical veracity within the work whilst meeting the narrative requirements of mass-broadcast media. Accordingly, this research assesses how Aristotelian descriptions of particular emotive indicators in drama, specifically pity and fear and pitiable and fearful incidents, may be considered and applied by a television producer seeking to adapt oral histories to the specific needs of a telemovie inspired by historical events. Using Aristotle’s treatise, the Poetics (and to a lesser extent, The Art of Rhetoric) as a framework, an assessment is made of the dramatic properties of pity and fear with a focus on the cognitive base of these emotional indicators and their role in linking the rational and the figurative. The research then examines key creative and financial decisions in the development and production phases for the Australian telemovie, Sisters of War (2010). Through this process the research assesses the producer’s authorial role and manipulation of emotional elements as he attempts to reconcile the application of dramatic and emotive effect – the imaginative and figurative requirements of story – with the empirical matters and eyewitness accounts associated with the historical referent that inspired the story. The two women who provided the oral histories that inspired the telemovie are Sister Berenice Twohill and Mrs Lorna Johnston (nee Whyte). Sections of transcript from their primary research interview (March 27th and 28th, 2008) are mapped as they are developed in the written documents and subsequently filmed and edited. The dramatic elements of pity and fear in the completed telemovie are then identified and tested for their ability to implement the producer’s stated objectives. This thesis asserts that, with critical qualifications, far from being antithetical to the goals of conventional historical practice, television drama can utilise the key emotive elements of pity and fear to create an intense and meaningful correspondence between our understanding of past events and our desire and need for an imaginative representation of those events.