Stylistic choices in true-crime documentaries: the duty of responsibility between filmmaker and audience

ABSTRACT

Documentary films and the law make a well-suited pair, due to four key similarities. Firstly, the accessibility of criminal law and its reliance on familiar concepts of good and evil. Secondly, the narrative structure: the arc of accusation, evidence and judgement within a criminal trial mirrors the arc of set up, confrontation and resolution found in cinema. Thirdly, the use of evidence, particularly the use of ‘evidence verité’ and the assumption of truth associated with photographs. Finally, the law and documentaries have a similar understanding of the concept of truth, as a product of persuasion and argument. As true-crime documentaries garner more attention , the stylistic choices of filmmakers carry more weight on the opinions of their audiences and subsequently the criminal justice system itself. Discussion in this paper focuses on the stylistic choices in documentaries such as Making a Murderer (Demos, Moira, and Laura Ricciardi. 2015. Making a Murderer. Los Angeles, CA: Netflix), The Staircase (de Lestrade, 2014), Southwest of Salem: the story of the San Antonio four (Esquenazi, Deborah. 2016. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four. New York: Investigation Discovery), and The Night in Question (Theroux, Louis. 2019. The Night in Question. BBC), and their use of emotion, dialogue and footage, and the necessary transparency concerning these choices as well as production choices, to encourage audiences to understand true-crime documentaries as a subjective performance.

KEYWORDS:

• True-crime
• documentary
• law
• ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Phoebe Morton

Phoebe Morton is a final year undergraduate student at the University of Sussex reading Law and American Studies. She founded the Sussex Documentary Society (https://www.facebook.com/sussexdocumentarysociety). She is the author of documentary review blog ‘WhatDoc?’ (https://phoebe996.wixsite.com/whatdoc/blog), and has been a contributing writer for non-partisan Law, Policy and Society journal, Midwestern Citizen (https://www.midwesterncitizen.com/turning-viewers-into-armchair-detec) Social media handle: Twitter @pcmmorton99