In the midst of pseudo-events – Weekend – Kommersant
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85 years ago, Orson Welles’ famous radio show “War of the Worlds” went on the air, which listeners mistook for real live news and began to call the police. 40 years ago, Woody Allen’s film “Zelig” was released, where Allen drew himself into real archival footage, playing a chameleon man, an ideal conformist, able to blend in with any crowd. 2024 will mark the 40th anniversary of Rob Reiner’s cult film This Is Spinal Tap – it is believed that it was Reiner who coined the word “mockumentary”. What kind of genre is this that has been mocking itself and the audience for so many years, drawing fiction into reality? And is he alive now?
Mockumentary is a game with documentary, pseudo-documentary, in this term “mock” (mock) and “documentary” (documentary) met. This is a genre that laughs – but most often does it with a very serious look. In the film This Is Spinal Tap, the “loudest” British metal band, going through its worst times, decides to put a mock-up of Stonehenge on stage during their next concert. But when drawing a sketch, the heroes confuse the scale, so that during the performance, a tiny and almost weightless Stonehenge descends onto the stage. Dwarfs start dancing around him.
This episode perfectly describes both the basic method of the mockumentary genre and what it does with reality, with the audience, with the stage on which he sings his loud songs. Mockumentary, acting strictly according to the rules of documentary cinema, talks about something obviously non-documentary, changes the scale of this very “document”, invites the viewer to voluntarily become an object of manipulation, look in a distorted mirror, laugh at the reflection. The genre parodies dokkino clichés and invents its own clichés (for example, one of the characters in the mockumentary sitcom The Office keeps looking at the camera with the expression: “No, but did you see that?”). Sometimes a mockumentary is on the brink (or beyond) of parody, as in Borat (2006), sometimes he explores the territory of mystification, as in Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), which deals with the hard lot of graffiti artists. About this film, it is still not completely clear whether the director told the real story. And who is the director?
The very word “mockumentary” implies parody, satire – but in the best films of this genre there are not so many funny plots. Laughter arises from surprise, from watching how the familiar world falls apart, from the certainty that authors can be caught in a lie – or maybe this reality can be caught in a lie?
Mockumentary can, in all seriousness, following all the laws of documentary filmmaking, talk about events and situations that, most likely, did not happen – as in “Real Ghouls” (2014) by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, where the film crew interviews vampires living in one apartment. Pseudo-doc can experiment with secret desires of the public (“The Death of a President” by Gabriel Range, 2006), and with racial prejudices (“Borat” by Larry Charles), and with the Soviet narcissistic persuasiveness of scientific research (“Legs are an atavism” by Mikhail Mestetsky, 2012), and with the very essence of cinema and national self-consciousness (“First on the Moon”, 2005; “The Big Snakes of Ulli-Kale” by Alexei Fedorchenko). “Big Serpents” (2022) mirrors one of the greatest mockumentaries in film history, “Forgotten Negatives” (1995) by Peter Jackson and Costa Bouts: the narrator accidentally finds a certain chest of films, and there are unknown masterpieces. Forgotten Negatives is about the early work of New Zealand film pioneer Colin Mackenzie, an undeservedly forgotten genius. Jackson finds the perfect plot for a declaration of love for cinema, and if there is a mockery in his film, then it is over himself: wow, an adult, but he plays a film designer like a little boy.
Sometimes this doc game becomes not only serious, but also frighteningly convincing: The War Game (1966) by Peter Watkins, which details the nuclear disaster in the UK in detail and rigorously, was the only mockumentary film to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary . Some of the researchers, trying to give an exhaustive definition of the genre, noticed that all mockumentaries have a common feature: the viewer should feel uncomfortable. Mockumentary is always a provocation, an attempt to awaken in the viewer a critical attitude towards “moving pictures” and their “documentary”, it is a parody, satire and deconstruction of both documentary and reality.
Reality is what you believe. Eisenstein in the “revolutionary action movie” October (1927) did not film the real storming of the Winter Palace, Lenin’s speech or the shot of the Aurora, but a myth, epic, mystery, “a tape about the end of things” – but today the footage from “October” is perceived as newsreel and cited in history books. In 1938, Orson Welles, with his radio show The War of the Worlds, caused mass panic – although everyone on that radio show was sure that the story sounded so far-fetched and stupid that no one would take it seriously.
By the way, initially Orson Welles did not know what exactly he would adapt for the radio play, he only knew that there must be some kind of crisis in the book and everyone should think that the crisis is happening right now. It seems that Wells was the first theorist of the mockumentary genre, a genre for which irony, quotation marks, detachment from reality are not a device, but a meaning.
Reality is what you make the viewer believe. Mockumentary shook the boundaries of documentaries, and the boundaries of feature films, and the boundaries of what we call the truth. You can’t watch this kind of movie without putting the word “truth” in quotation marks, and the more of these films we watch, the grander and fancier those quotation marks become. Finally, there is nothing left but them.
Documentation manipulates the viewer: you can adopt the techniques of the dock, and the viewer will believe in any story. Dokkino stylistics, archival materials or pastiche, a good dose of absurdity – and here you have another hilarious film about the fact that nothing can be trusted.
Reality is what happens to others. In discussing Zack Penn’s mockumentary The Loch Ness Incident (2004), where Werner Herzog couldn’t have made a documentary about the monster, critic Roger Ebert asked if there was a point in this film where reality becomes fiction and do all the participants rethink what they really do? Herzog, the author of the great documentaries, in which the document is nothing but the unshakable self-confidence of the author, never considered fact to be synonymous with authenticity.
Today the fact does not exist. Truth is impossible to find. Any expert, any politician, any actor can shoot on a green screen to convince the viewer that he is in the thick of things. What’s more – kudos to the deepfakes – he doesn’t have to be alive to give interviews or star in Seven Samurai.
What remains is the search for authenticity, which is what mockumentary does. Actually, all this time the genre has been trying to show that neither in the chronicle, nor in radio reports, nor in aged film, nor in chests found in the barn, and even more so in GoPro shootings, there is no historical truth. The truth is constructed by the viewer, who is accustomed to a certain form of presentation of “true news”. If the footage is black and white, it means it’s a chronicle, if someone broadcasts something in a serious tone from the screen, it means an expert, if the camera is shaking, it means the operator is not a professional, you can trust him. If the footage is on the phone, then it’s happening right now, right here, right with us.
Marshall McLuhan’s formula “the choice of media affects the meaning of this information” has been reduced to one universal device: news, movies, and TV shows have sunk into the phone screen, exploring the same meanings, and now there is almost no difference between them.
Reality or fiction? News or nonsense? Series or eyewitness account? Fake or true? All at once. Mockumentary turns into MockReality. The improbability of situations or characters, the wildness of actions, satire, madness, bluff, Zelig, inscribing himself in the next chronicle – mockumentary is still trying to use all this, but in comparison with the news, he simply lacks drive. Stonehenge keeps getting smaller, the quotation marks still can’t be closed.
The viewer becomes uncomfortable.
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