"I resented being invited to admire dialogue so close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible." Yeats, on seeing Ibsen's "The Doll House." Lorca would have felt the same way. I just taught "La casa de Bernarda Alba." The actual plot construction is pure Ibsen. There is a scene at the beginning with two servants talking--the classic realist exposition. Yet the way the characters talk is vivid and poetic, largely because Lorca never states a point abstractly. Everything is a concrete image.

"As time passed Ibsen became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever young journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill of abstraction, hated music and style; and yet neither I nor my generation could escape him because, though we had not the same friends, we had the same enemies." (More Yeats on Ibsen)

Lorca has a little squib at the beginning: "The Poet advises that these three acts have the intention of a photographic documentary." This was the 1930s. Social realism was the rage.

I have a hard time seeing the documentary as a genre of "non-fiction." If you film for 100 hours, and produce a documentary of 1 hour, you are selecting 1% of the possible material before you. You can prove pretty much anything you want. Of course, you have already decided what to film, whom to interview, in the first place, so what you shoot in the first place is a totally subjective decision as well. Anything that doesn't accord with your world view, if it gets into the 100 hours you have filmed, can be easily filtered out. Yet when you watch a documentary it seems like you're getting "raw data." We all know this, of course, but if the documentary coincides with our own bias, we are still disposed to accept it as more or less a slice of "reality." Michael Moore, for example, strikes me as a pure propagandist--with whom I agree politically, but whom I distrust profoundly.