Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality

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Manchester University Press, 2001 - Performing Arts - 222 pages
The first major study of mock-documentary - one of a number of screen forms that play with the assumed boundaries between 'fact' and 'fiction'. Examines mock-documentary through the specific relationship which the form has with documentary. Part of a wider discussion of the increasingly fragile association between factual codes and conventions and the discourses which underpin the documentary genre. Includes detailed discussions of a number of key mock-documentary texts, ranging from Woody Allen's Zelig, Peter Greenaway's The Falls, and the Beatles spoof The Rutles through to such classic examples as Bob Roberts, This is Spinal Tap and Man Bites Dog. Opens out this relatively new media form and by doing so throws light on the status of the documentary itself.
 

Contents

Factual discourse and the cultural placing of documentary
6
Recent transformations of the documentary genre
24
situating
42
Building a mockdocumentary schema
64
A suggested genealogy
76
parody
100
critique and hoax
131
deconstruction
160
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About the author (2001)

Jane Roscoe teaches in the School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia Craig Hight is a Lecturer in the Department of Screen and Media Studies, Waikato University, New Zealand

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