Mockumentary and Fake Documentary
16 min - no lies
51 min - Dark side
67 / 43 min left...
No Lies
Mitchell Block
1973
What manner of film have we just watched?
IS THIS A DOCUMENTARY?
NO? It's fictional...
What do you think the director's intentions were in making this
film.
Mitch Block: "True Lies is a fictional film about rape. But it is a
documentary about documentaries."
Why does it elicit the kinds of anger it does in audiences?
Does this film bear any relationship to Daughter Rite?
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What about flaherty, curtis? What about nightmail and target
for tonight?
Didn't we sort of agree that these fell within the broad
definition of Documentary?
What features of this film aligns it with other documentaries
we've watched?
What is it saying or implying about both the subject and the manner
of representing the subject?
What is it saying about the truth claims of documentary film in
general?
SHOW DARK SIDE OF THE MOON...
We began this class by discussing the fact that
all documentaries are to some extent fictions
IN THAT they are cultural construction:
they attempt to represent the world and engaging us in
various types of discourse about that world through
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thru a conscious framing and manipulation of images
and sounds...and rhetorical stances.
Throughout this course we've seen numerous instances of
documentary practice that have played particularly fast and loose
with the representation of the historical world.
From Flaherty's phony walrus hunt and
Curtis' romantic restaging long-defunct Kwakiutl ceremonies.
To
The restaging and fakery of early newsreels -- Teddy Roosevelt
hunting big game in the wild's of new jersey; the sinking of the
Battleship Maine in a bathtub with cigar smoke explosions.
To
Nightmail's restaging of real activities with real workers...
In which recreation was used for dramatic ends (the creative
treatment of reality) and because of technological expediencies
of the day)
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Generally, early documentary resorted to such artifice and illusion as
a way
less as a way of tricking the audience
than as a means of enhancing believability and credibility
...of giving audiences a sense of the real when the real
was not available for filming for technical, economic,
or other reasons.
Barnouw contends that early film audiences were accustomed to the
liberties taken with the news."
They didn't really care...or think much about it...
They didn't make much of a distinction between
`the real, the almost real, and the openly fictional.
It was all an exciting evenings entertainment...
Fast forward to the 1960s and after...
As we've seen, in the last thirty years or so, an increasing number of
documentary filmmakers have begun to question
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documentary claims of priviledged access to the real
They have began to point our attention
 to the significant differences between the historical world
(the "real world") and documentary representations or
constructions of the historical world.
They have also began to
 Question documentary practice...particularly...the ethics of
representing social actors...the ethics of non-intervention in
profilmic events.
In some instances, this questioning has taken the form of
turning the camera reflexively on the process of
documentary filmmaking itself --
In other instances we've seen, doc filmmakers have turned to
fictional narrative strategies,
performance,
creative recreation,
restaging of events
and a host of other techniques
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to point our attention the fact that knowledge of the world, the
representation and reception of truth and reality, are almost always
subjective...
That knowledge of the world involves more than
laying out facts and hard evidence...
Another form of questioning or generally poking the ribs of
documentary tradition has also arising in the past thirty years or so:
the rise of films which in one way or another appropriate the
strategies and tools that docs often use to produce "knowledge"
or "truth" concerning the historical world for purely fictional
ends.
These films--known variously as mockumentaries, fake
documentaries, faux documentaries, and docufictions...
Mockumentaries and their ilk
 Often parody our assumptions as an audience.
particularly our abilities to separate between fact and fiction in
an era when the two are increasingly interchanged and blurred.
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Again: These faux docs are unlike earlier documentary forgeries
and fakeries...
Earlier works use fictional or faked elements to enhance their
believability. Despite the fictive elements, They maintain their
assertive claims of representing the real.
Similarly, performative and self-reflexive documentaries that
arose in the 70's also maintain their fundamental claims on the
real.
Faux and moc docs, on the other hand, frequently make no
pretense about being anything but fiction.
What is it about NO LIES that leads us to believe this film is a
documentary?
--verite style: wobble cam
--we see the filmmaker
--"social actors" -- non-recognizable; performances are "natural"
-- look unstaged.
--casual references to individuals outside the frame of the story,
to real places, to everyday events
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--treating a dire subject in a matter of fact manner -characteristic of verite.
Film becomes a second rape: a metacommentary on the act of
filmmaking: we're put in the same position as the young
woman. Subject to manipulations of the filmmaker...
No Lies: a fiction film about rape...or a documentary about
documentaries
What happens when we apply Dirk Eitzen's documentary litmus test:
Might It Be Lying? (Dirk Eitzen)
Or conversely Could it actually have happened?
Contemporary Fake or mock documentaries have taken a number of
forms
1. Faked documentaries -- films that use documentary
conventions and codes for intentionally false or misleading
representations.
These films often set out consciously to trick us...
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They provide plausible but ultimately false or misleading
readings of real or imagined history and historical events.
2. Mockumentaries -- fictional texts that incorporate or
appropriate documentary conventions and codes in order to
represent purely fictional subjects.
In such films the people and events--alto they may be
largely fictional--exist within the frame of a world that
could be true or may be true (just like actual
documentaries)...
Their success depends, in fact, on our belief that
the world portrayed is possible and plausible...
Zelig -- there are documentary elements: the real jazz
age, real personalities and events. What would we have
if we took the fictional characters out of Zelig?
Other appropriations of documentary codes...
3. Fictional narratives that use documentary conventions to establish
a sense of the "real" or "authentic"
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