“Point Your Finger and Say, ‘That’s the Bad Guy’”: Performativity in Donal MacIntyre’s A Very British Gangster (2007)

Winner of the Grand Jury prize at the 2007 Sundance film festival, Donal MacIntyre’s A Very British Gangster (2007) is an intriguing example of a critically acclaimed documentary. This article seeks to explore the structure of the film and how the constant allusions to pop culture within it create a frame of reference that is performative and playful. Like any documentary, the film is beyond simple categorization. However, this article engages with processes of labeling and the defining of documentary modes in order to show the film as an expression of reality that is caught up in a very definite desire to entertain rather than educate.

One of John Grierson’s original principles of documentary describes it as “arrangements, rearrangements and creative shapings [of natural material]” (“First Principles” 146). This principle appears to accept certain elements of subjectivity and construction as part of the form and thus suggests a close connection between the factual and fictional forms. However, other work, such as that of Ellis and McLane, asserts that “documentary is purposive; it is intended to achieve something in addition to entertaining audiences” (4), which is related to Grierson’s desire for documentary to “educate and inspire.” Both interpretations are valid, though appearing to be at odds. Documentary can both entertain and educate. It can also be constructed and factual. It is perhaps useful to note, as John Corner does in The Art of Record, that Grierson’s definitions were in fact designed to promote the argument for documentary as a recognized form, rather than to be definitions of the form. Therefore, such definitions should be viewed as discursive rather than fixed. In view of this, it is most useful to see all definitions as the opening of a discussion rather than fixed, in that all films utilize a variety of modes and purposes. The following discussion of definitions is designed to offer such an opening.

The development and popularity of reality TV has continued to blur distinctions between reality and entertainment, and this has had a profound influence on how other forms of documentary are being defined. Bruzzi notes that reality TV as factual entertainment has brought entertainment and drama further into the documentary arena, and John Corner has coined the label “documentary as diversion” to account for the growth in lighter topics or treatments in television documentary (“Performing the Real”). Paul Arthur suggests that one new documentary style “has begun to attract film viewers who before might have chosen a dentist’s appointment rather than pay to see a documentary” (75). The tabloid documentary, often with the filmmaker as visible interviewer, seeks to investigate subjects and entertain audiences through a mix of observational, archival, and interview modes. Such documentaries, Arthur states, focus on “the business of public voyeurism, media celebrity, and the political economy of imagemaking” (74). The label “tabloid” is appropriate, according to Arthur, because this style of documentary filmmaking mainly prioritizes voyeuristic pleasures rather than specifically educational or critical discourse, and consequently its function resembles entertainment as much as, if not more than, actuality.

Arthur uses the term “tabloid” in order to identify such documentaries within a readily understood framework of reference that is associated with the television format that dominates cable TV channels, such as the Biography Channel,¹ or alternatively, broadcast network programs such as NBC’s Dateline (US) and BBC’s Witness (UK). He suggests that this format appears in varying degrees in feature-length, critically acclaimed films such as Berlinger and Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), Nick Broomfield’s Fetishes (1996) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). A basic similarity between the television and film formats is their participatory structure, in that the voice of the text, through presenter or filmmaker, has a significant role onscreen, in voice-over, or both. However, the feature-length documentaries are not just longer versions of this style of television programming; they appear to be drawing from many areas...