Different modes of representing reality: Theorical approaches to the Rockumentary

Abstract

Rockumentary sets up direct links with the organization of popular music in genre narratives. Artists, and their distinctive music styles, are placed within a symbolic context –of sounds and performative conventions– associated with a specific social context.

In this paper we propose a characterization of rockumentaries according to different modes of “telling” and “showing”, based on the premise that a documentary is a metahistorical narrative and, as a literary device, it produces certain discursive forms to generate an “explanatory effect”. Our thesis proposes that filmmakers involved in a rockumentary communicate a stylistic identity through their own visual readings of the object and, in making so, reproduce cultural codes of popular music (the organization in genre labels) and the ideological values related to them (the problem of authenticity). Consequently, a genre analysis in popular music and its transposition into the documentary film form can be addressed from a narrative perspective. Taking into account some rockumentaries as examples for this theorical approach we aim to justify the adequacy of the musical narrative to the narrative of film image through the ways of telling and showing.