Mockumentary

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A mockumentary (a portmanteau of mock and documentary) is a type of film or television show depicting fictional events, but presented as a documentary. [1] The term originated in the 1960s but was popularized in the mid-1990s when This Is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner used it in interviews to describe that film. [2] [3] [4]

Contents

Mockumentaries are often used to analyze or comment on current events and issues in a satirical way by using a fictional setting, or to parody the documentary form itself. [5] While mockumentaries are usually comedic, pseudo-documentaries are their dramatic equivalents. However, pseudo-documentary should not be confused with docudrama, a fictional genre in which dramatic techniques are combined with documentary elements to depict real events. Nor should either of those be confused with docufiction, a genre in which documentaries are contaminated with fictional elements.[ citation needed ]

They are often presented as historical documentaries, with B roll and talking heads discussing past events, or as cinéma vérité pieces following people as they go through various events. Examples emerged during the 1950s when archival film footage became available. [5] A very early example was a short piece on the "Swiss Spaghetti Harvest" that appeared as an April Fools' prank on the British television program Panorama in 1957.[ citation needed ]

Mockumentaries can be partly or wholly improvised.

Early examples

Early work, including Luis Buñuel's 1933 Land Without Bread , [6] Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds , various April Fools' Day news reports, and vérité-style film and television during the 1960s and 1970s, served as precursor to the genre. [2] Early examples of mock-documentaries include various films by Peter Watkins, such as The War Game (1965), Privilege (1967), and the dystopic Punishment Park (1971). [7]

Further examples are "The Connection" (1961), A Hard Day's Night (1964), David Holzman's Diary (1967), Pat Paulsen for President (1968), Take the Money and Run (1969), The Clowns (1970) by Federico Fellini (a peculiar hybrid of documentary and fiction, a docufiction), Smile (1975), Carlos Mayolo's The Vampires of Poverty (1977) and All You Need Is Cash (1978). Albert Brooks was also an early popularizer of the mockumentary style with his film Real Life , 1979, a spoof of the 1973 reality television series An American Family . Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run is presented in documentary style with Allen playing a fictional criminal, Virgil Starkwell, whose crime exploits are "explored" throughout the film. [8] Jackson Beck, who used to narrate documentaries in the 1940s, provides the voice-over narration. Fictional interviews are inter-spliced throughout, especially those of Starkwell's parents who wear Groucho Marx noses and mustaches. The style of this film was widely appropriated by others and revisited by Allen himself in films such as Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971), Zelig (1983) and Sweet and Lowdown (1999). [8]

Early use of the mockumentary format in television comedy can be seen in several sketches from Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974), such as "Hell's Grannies", "Piranha Brothers", and "The Funniest Joke in the World". The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour (1970–1971) also featured mockumentary pieces that interspersed both scripted and real-life man-in-the-street interviews, the most famous likely being "The Puck Crisis" in which hockey pucks were claimed to have become infected with a form of Dutch elm disease.

All You Need Is Cash , developed from an early series of sketches in the comedy series Rutland Weekend Television , is a 1978 television film in mockumentary style about The Rutles , a fictional band that parodies The Beatles. The Beatles' own 1964 feature film debut, A Hard Day's Night , was itself filmed in mockumentary style; it ostensibly documents a few typical (and highly fictionalized) days in the life of the band as they travel from Liverpool to London for a television appearance.

Since 1980

In film and television

Since the beginning of the 1980s, the mockumentary format has gained considerable attention. The 1980 South African film The Gods Must be Crazy (along with its 1989 sequel) is presented in the manner of a nature documentary, with documentary narrator Paddy O'Byrne describing the events of the film in the manner of a biologist or anthropologist presenting scientific knowledge to viewers. In 1982, The Atomic Cafe is a Cold-War era American "mockumentary" film that made use of archival government footage from the 1950s. [9] [10] Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig stars Allen as a curiously nondescript enigma who is discovered for his remarkable ability to transform himself to resemble anyone he is near, and Allen is edited into historical archive footage. [8] In 1984, Christopher Guest co-wrote and starred in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap , directed by Rob Reiner. Guest went on to write and direct other mockumentaries including Waiting for Guffman , Best in Show , and A Mighty Wind , all written with costar Eugene Levy. [8]

In Central Europe, the first time that viewers were exposed to mockumentary was in 1988 when the Czechoslovakian short film Oil Gobblers was shown. For two weeks, TV viewers believed that the oil-eating animals really existed. [11]

Tim Robbins' 1992 film Bob Roberts was a mockumentary centered around the senatorial campaign of a right-wing stock trader and folksinger, and the unsavory connections and dirty tricks used to defeat a long-term liberal incumbent played by Gore Vidal. Man Bites Dog is a 1992 Belgian black comedy crime mockumentary written, produced, and directed by Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde. In 1995, Peter Jackson and Costa Botes directed Forgotten Silver , which claimed New Zealand "director" Colin McKenzie was a pioneer in filmmaking. [12] When the film was later revealed to be a mockumentary, Jackson received criticism for tricking viewers. [13]

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan from 2006, and its 2020 sequel Borat Subsequent Moviefilm , are two controversial yet successful films that use this style, as does Brüno , a similar film from 2009 also starring Sacha Baron Cohen. Sony Pictures Animation released their second animated feature, Surf's Up in 2007, which was the first of its kind to incorporate the mockumentary style into animation. REC , a 2007 Spanish film by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, uses journalism aesthetics to approach a horror universe set up in a real building in Barcelona. The film was remade in the United States as the 2008 film Quarantine. [14]

Ivo Raza's 2020 mockumentary Reboot Camp is a comedy about a fake cult that uses an ensemble cast of celebrities from the film (David Koechner, Eric Roberts, Chaz Bono, Ed Begley Jr.), performing arts (Ja Rule, Billy Morrison), and TV (Lindsey Shaw, Pierson Fode, Johnny Bananas) to play fictional versions of themselves. [15]

In television, the most notable mockumentaries in the 2000s have been ABC Australia's The Games (1998–2000), the Canadian series Trailer Park Boys (1999–present), the British shows Marion and Geoff (2000), Twenty Twelve (2011–2012) (which follows the fictional Olympic Deliverance Commission in the run-up to the 2012 Summer Olympics), and W1A , which follows the main characters of Twenty Twelve as they start work at the BBC, as well as The Office (2001) and its many international offshoots, and Come Fly with Me (2010), which follows the activity at a fictional airport and its variety of staff and passengers. British comedy duo Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French often presented short mockumentaries as extended sketches in their TV show French & Saunders . Discovery Channel opened its annual Shark Week on 4 Aug 2013 with Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives , a mockumentary about the survival of the megalodon. The Canadian series Trailer Park Boys and its films (1998–present) were one of the first mainstream examples of Canadian mockumentaries. Popular examples in the US include sitcoms The Office (2005–2013), Parks and Recreation (2009–2015), and Modern Family (2009–2020); the American improv comedy Reno 911! (2003–2009); Derek (2012–2014); the comedy series The Muppets (2015); People Just Do Nothing (2011–2018) and the Australian Chris Lilley shows Angry Boys , Summer Heights High , We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year , Ja'mie: Private School Girl , Jonah from Tonga and Lunatics . Shows currently running in this format include What We Do in the Shadows (2019–2024), Abbott Elementary (2021–present), and St. Denis Medical (2024–present). Strictly speaking, a mockumentary refers to films, while the term comedy verite refers to TV series, though term is widely used here. [16]

The series Documentary Now! (2015–present) on IFC, created by Saturday Night Live alumni Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, and Seth Meyers, spoofs celebrated documentary films by parodying the style and subject of each documentary. Hight argues that television is a natural medium for a mockumentary, as it provides for "extraordinarily rich sources of appropriation and commentary". [17]

In 2018, the BBC released the series Cunk on Britain created by Charlie Brooker and starring Diane Morgan about British history with Philomena Cunk, an extremely dim-witted and ill-informed interviewer, asking various experts ridiculous questions. The follow-up Cunk on Earth featuring a similar plot was released by BBC Two in 2022 and is available on Netflix.

On radio

The BBC series People Like Us was first produced for radio in 1995 before a television version was made in 1999. Kay Stonham's Audio Diaries was a similarly short tenured radio mockumentary that premiered the year after People Like Us's run on Radio 4 ended.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Documentary film</span> Nonfictional motion picture

A documentary film is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". The American author and media analyst Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".

<i>Forgotten Silver</i> 1995 New Zealand television film

Forgotten Silver is a 1995 New Zealand mockumentary film that purports to tell the story of a pioneering New Zealand filmmaker. It was written and directed by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, both of whom appear in the film in their roles as makers of the documentary.

Docudrama is a genre of television and film, which features dramatized re-enactments of actual events. It is described as a hybrid of documentary and drama and "a fact-based representation of real event".

Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.

<i>Dark Side of the Moon</i> (2002 film) 2002 French mockumentary by director William Karel

Dark Side of the Moon is a French mockumentary by director William Karel. It originally aired on the Franco-German television network Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune.

Mondo film is a subgenre of exploitive documentary films. Many mondo films are made in a way to resemble a pseudo-documentary and usually depicting sensational topics, scenes, or situations. Common traits of mondo films include portrayals of foreign cultures, an emphasis on taboo subjects such as death and sex, and staged sequences presented as genuine documentary footage. Over time, the films have placed increasing emphasis on footage of the dead and dying.

<i>F for Fake</i> 1974 film by Orson Welles

F for Fake is a 1973 docudrama film co-written, directed by, and starring Orson Welles who worked on the film alongside François Reichenbach, Oja Kodar, and Gary Graver. Initially released in 1974, it focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger; de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art. Far from serving as a traditional documentary on de Hory, the film also incorporates Welles's companion Oja Kodar, hoax biographer Clifford Irving and Orson Welles as himself. F for Fake is sometimes considered an example of a film essay.

A recurring theme in the literary, theatrical, and film tradition of comedy is the use of stock characters representing authority figures, designed to poke fun at officialdom by showing that its members are not immune to entanglement in the ridiculous. This is an old tradition, well illustrated in works such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Voltaire's Candide. This practice arises in part from the desire of those subject to the power of those in authority to use any available means of limiting this power by demonstrating that the authority figure is just as subject to mockery as those lacking power. This represents "the attempt to use aggression to protect oneself from engulfment, impingement or humiliation by diminishing the perceived power and threat of the other", an effort which often takes the form of caricature of those in authority.

A pseudo-documentary or fake documentary is a film or video production that takes the form or style of a documentary film but does not portray real events. Rather, scripted and fictional elements are used to tell the story. The pseudo-documentary, unlike the related mockumentary, is not always intended as satire or humor. It may use documentary camera techniques but with fabricated sets, actors, or situations, and it may use digital effects to alter the filmed scene or even create a wholly synthetic scene.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Docufiction</span> Film genre

Docufiction is the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning narrative film. It is a film genre which attempts to capture reality such as it is and which simultaneously introduces unreal elements or fictional situations in narrative in order to strengthen the representation of reality using some kind of artistic expression.

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<i>No Lies</i> 1973 short film

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Found footage is a cinematic technique in which all or a substantial part of the work is presented as if it were film or video recordings recorded by characters in the story, and later "found" and presented to the audience. The events on screen are typically seen through the camera of one or more of the characters involved, often accompanied by their real-time, off-camera commentary. For added realism, the cinematography may be done by the actors themselves as they perform, and shaky camera work and naturalistic acting are routinely employed. The footage may be presented as if it were "raw" and complete or as if it had been edited into a narrative by those who "found" it.

Comedy verite or Comedy vérité is a television format that presents fictional Comedy series in the staged form of a Docusoap. This is a technical term from the field of television studies, introduced in order to be able to make more precise distinctions and differentiations between evening-filling mockumentary-films and 'mockumentary series' with an average episode length of 30 minutes. While mockumentary films play with the idea that what is shown could be true, mockumentary-series or Comedy Verite leave no doubt about their own fictionality.

References

  1. ↑ "the definition of mockumentary". Dictionary.com. Retrieved 15 January 2017.
  2. 1 2 Roscoe, Jane; Craig Hight (2001). Faking it: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester University Press. ISBN   0-7190-5641-1.
  3. ↑ "mockumentary, n.". Oxford Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 2010. Archived from the original on 1 December 2012. Retrieved 1 June 2013.
  4. ↑ Don Giller (26 December 2015). "Paul Shaffer on Late Night, March 20, 1994". Archived from the original on 3 November 2021. Retrieved 17 October 2017– via YouTube.
  5. 1 2 Campbell, Miranda (2007). "The mocking mockumentary and the ethics of irony" (PDF). Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education. 11 (1): 53–62. Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 July 2011. Retrieved 26 July 2010.
  6. ↑ Otway, Fiona. "The Unreliable Narrator in Documentary". Journal of Film and Video, vol. 67, no. 3–4, 2015, pp. 3–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jfilmvideo.67.3-4.0003. Accessed 19 November 2020.
  7. ↑ "This 70s Sci-Fi Mockumentary Predicted Our Current Political Climate". Vice. 18 August 2017. Retrieved 20 December 2021.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Romanski, Philippe; Sy-Wonyu, Aïssatou (2002). Trompe (-)l'oeil: Imitation & Falsification. Publications de l'Université de Rouen. Vol. 324. University of Le Havre Press. p. 343. ISBN   2877753344.
  9. ↑ Latham, Rob (1 September 2014). The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Oxford University Press. ISBN   9780199838851.
  10. ↑ "The Atomic Café (1991)". Horrorview. Archived from the original on 7 February 2020. Retrieved 18 May 2018. Straddling the fence between surrealism and pop culture is this eccentric "mockumentary," subsumed entirely by stock footage from the height of the Cold War. "The Atomic Café" is pieced together with a certain clairvoyant vision that captivates and inspires as the seamless fluency of the film builds to a denouement. In the same neighborhood as "Dr. Strangelove," this cynically festive mock-serious piece /../ Because the documentary is just that, fashioned entirely out of a seamless montage of newsreel footage, government archives, and military training films, the movie itself is just a deadpan reflection of history's charade executed with an assertive wry humor that makes us question the sanity of Cold War politics.
  11. ↑ TV2 (Hungary) Jan. 23 1991 23:35, Napzárta. Interview with the producers of Ropaci and Vilmos Csányi (In Hungarian)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BauXIDKrNyc
  12. ↑ "Colin McKenzie – NZ On Screen". Nzonscreen.com. Retrieved 17 October 2017.
  13. ↑ Hight, Craig; Roscoe, Jane (2006). "Forgotten Silver: A New Zealand Television Hoax and Its Audience". In Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (ed.). F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary And Truth's Undoing. Visible Evidence. Vol. 17. U of Minnesota Press. pp. 171–173. ISBN   0816642516.
  14. ↑ Miska, Brad (6 May 2013). "Exclusive: '[REC]4 Apocalypse' Teaser Poster Sees Red!". Bloody Disgusting. Bloody Disgusting LLC. Retrieved 22 June 2013.
  15. ↑ Pfeifer, Paige. "'Reboot Camp' Will Recruit Even the Most Stubborn Viewers! | Young Hollywood". younghollywood.com. Retrieved 30 May 2021.
  16. ↑ Mills, Brett, Comedy verite: contemporary sitcom form
  17. ↑ Hight, Craig. 2014. "Mockumentary." In Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, Salvatore Attardo, Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 515-516.

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