Why sports docudrama?: A critical review of the study of docudrama and suggestions for a historical/cultural study of Korean sports docudrama

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify why and how sports docudrama is one of the unique objects for the scholarship of sport history. Methods As a review study, this paper pays attention to, collects, and critically reviews three dimensions of the literatures: 1) ones that claim and argue for a-historicity of historical sport films by pointing out how they are full of actual errors, mistakes, and misrepresentation, and why they are problematic, 2) ones that belong to so called ‘the study of docudrama’ with specific focus on the themes of definition, mode of representation, and cultural memory, and 3) ones that attempt to envision the possibility of visual history or filmic history from the perspective of historiography and some other epistemological issues. Results Following the above review method, the result of this paper is also divided into three parts: 1) how sport historians respond to and criticize historical sport films from the sense based on the modern historiography, 2) how a group of historians argue why historical sport films can be one of the promising way of doing histories, 3) review of the study of docudrama, focusing on what is docudrama, why it can be a mode of representation, and how it resonates to cultural memory. Conclusions As a conclusion, this paper argues that a more collectively academic concerns to sport docudrama paves way for developing and envisioning the scholarship of sport history.