Renditions from the inside: Prison Songs, documusical and performative documentary

ABSTRACT

Produced for SBS Television, Kelrick Martin’s Prison Songs is unusual as a documentary in which the participants convey their stories through songs that were written for the film. Centring on inmates of Darwin Correctional Centre, known as Berrimah Prison, and described in its press kit as ‘Australia’s first ever documentary musical’, Prison Songs involved a collaborative production process in which inmates contributed to writing the musical numbers. As a documusical, the film belongs to a documentary subgenre that originated in the United Kingdom and forms part of a wider landscape of convergence between non-fiction and fictional television. Prison Songs expands Australian documentary, contemporary Indigenous film-making and stories about incarceration. The film’s presentation of participants’ experiences through music, story, dance and humour can be situated within the performative documentary mode, in which orthodox screen discourses of sobriety are supplanted by poetic expression. Its use of songs and musical performance as partial alternatives to interviews and narration traverses boundaries between avant-garde and television forms, expression and information, and prison and the wider society.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary
• prison
• Indigenous
• music
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The documusical also differs from ethnodrama, in which performance is used to present research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lesley Speed

Lesley Speed is aSenior Lecturer in Humanities at Federation University Australia. Her research areas include popular screen genres, youth cinema, Australian and international screen comedy, ethnic humour on screen, age and generational difference, and cultural value in relation to screen genres and popular culture. She is the author of the books Australian Comedy Films of the 1930s: Modernity, the Urban and the International and Clueless: American Youth in the 1990s. Her research has also been published in books by Intellect, Edinburgh University Press and Rodopi, and in such journals as Studies in Australasian Cinema, Screening the Past, The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Continuum, International Journal of Cultural Studies, The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, Senses of Cinema and Metro.