Mockumentary

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Mockumentary is a film genre and the name for a fictional documentary that parodies a true documentary or the whole genre. In doing so, apparently real processes are often staged or actual document parts are placed in a fictitious context. It is a common cinematic genre medium for parody and satire and is often used to create greater media-critical awareness.

The term is a suitcase word from English (to) mock = 'pretend' and documentary  = ' documentary film '.

Pseudo-documentaries ( scripted reality ), in which documentaries are not parodied but imitated, are not to be regarded as mockumentary .

general characteristics

Mockumentarys present themselves e.g. B. often as historical documentaries from previously unpublished material with talking heads that discuss past events or appear as cinéma vérité to accompany people through various events. The relatively new genre of documentary soaps is also often parodied by mockumentary series.

The representations

  • refer to true circumstances,
  • refer to rumors that some viewers are already familiar with,
  • must be consistent, there must be no discernible internal contradictions,
  • may only mention rebuttable counter-evidence, other counter-evidence is not mentioned,
  • must correspond to current clichés,
  • must be easy to tell and easy to understand.

Less commonly used characteristics

  • Interviews with real and well-known personalities are shown, but also interviews with actors who play fictional roles.
  • The interviews are put together in very short, ingeniously selected snippets, so that the other context gives them a completely new meaning that was not intended by the interviewee.
  • In the case of interviews in languages ​​that are foreign to the viewer, the subtitles or the dubbing do not match the content of the interviewee's actual statements.
  • The presentation mixes authentic sound and image recordings with untrue statements that are spoken by a narrative voice that is perceived as authoritative and that is accompanied by coordinated music.

In mockumentarys that pretend to be a report or contain report-like components, the following stylistic devices are also used:

  • bad lighting that looks like improvised
  • restless camera, coarse resolution to simulate cheap film material
  • consciously amateur representation on the part of the actors, improvised dialogues
  • bad tone

Examples

"Headlines"

Movies

Series

Web links

literature

  • Charles L. Cassady: Videohounds Reality Check: Documentaries, Mockumentaries and Related Films. Visible Ink Press, Canton 2007, ISBN 978-1-57859-177-0 .
  • Craig Hight: Television mockumentary. Reflexivity, satire and a call to play. Manchester Univ. Press, Manchester 2010, ISBN 978-0-7190-7317-5 .
  • Christian Hißnauer: Possibility PLAYROOM . Fiction as a documentary method. Notes on the semio-pragmatics of fictional documentation. In: MEDIENwissenschaft, Issue 1/2010.
  • Alexandra Juhasz, Jesse Lerner (Ed.): F is for Phony. Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2006, ISBN 0-8166-9541-5 .
  • Carolin Lano: The staging of suspicion. Considerations for the Functions of TV Mockumentaries. Ibidem-Verl. (Film and Media Studies, 15), Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-8382-0214-3 .
  • Fabian Probst: Films that lie: Mockumentaries. Forgotten Silver as an example of a hybrid form between fiction and non-fiction. In: Kornelia Imesch (ed.): With Klio's eyes. The picture as a historical source. Athena-Verlag, Oberhausen 2013, pp. 219–236.
  • Maren Sextro: Mockumentaries and the Deconstruction of the Classic Documentary. In: Berlin writings on media studies. No. 10/2009, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-7983-2199-1 Full text available online (PDF; 648 kB).
  • Jane Roscoe, Craig Hight: Faking it. Mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality. Manchester / New York 2001, ISBN 0-7190-5641-1 .
  • Gary D. Rhodes (Ed.): Docufictions. Essays on the intersection of documentary and fictional filmmaking. McFarland, Jefferson, NC 2006, ISBN 0-7864-2184-3 .