Acknowledgments
Introduction
PROLOGUE: Nothing New under the Sun – Or on Film (Jerome Kuehl)
LOST HISTORIES
Chapter 1: Making up Mammy: Re-enacting Historical Erasure and
Recasting Authenticity in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (Eve
Allegra Raimon)
Chapter 2: Peter Delpeut’s The Forbidden Quest: Truth in Fiction
(Robert Weiner)
Chapter 3: Mercury’s on the Launch Pad, but Cadillac’s on the Moon:
The Old Negro Space Program (Cynthia J. Miller & A. Bowdoin Van
Riper)
POPULAR CULTURE AS COMMENTARY
Chapter 4: Polka Settles the Score in The Schmenges: The Last Polka
(Linda Kornasky)
Chapter 5: Experiments in Parody and Satire: Short-Form
Mockumentary Series (Craig Hight)
Chapter 6: Commando Raids on the Nature of Reality (Gary D.
Rhodes)
DARING TO BELIEVE
Chapter 7: Aching to Believe: Forgotten Silver and National
Identity (Scott Wilson
Chapter 8: ‘That’s Not Zen!’: Mocking Ethnographic Film in Doris
Dörrie’s Enlightenment Guaranteed (Heather Merle Benbow
Chapter 9: The Proper Care and Feeding of An American Messiah
(Christopher Hansen)
THE WAR THAT WASN’T
Chapter 10: It Might Have Happened Here: How Nazi Germany Won the
War (C. Tibbetts)
Chapter 11: Between What Is and What If: Kevin Willmott’s CSA
(Thomas Prasch)
Chapter 12: The “Serious” Mockumentary: The Trivialization of
Disaster? The Case of Peter Watkins (James M. Welsh)
Chapter 13: The Making of It Happened Here (Kevin Brownlow)
EPILOGUE: Mockumentaries Meet New Media (Spencer Schaffner)
Filmography
Index
About the Contributors
About the Editor
Cynthia J. Miller is the Film Review Editor of Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies and serves as President of the Literature/Film Association, as well as on the editorial advisory board for The Encyclopedia of Women and Popular Culture.
In his prologue to this volume, Jerome Kuehl introduces the Office
Cat, his clever trope to suggest the role of film researcher in
exposing faked, misused, or dishonestly employed footage
masquerading as factual film (e.g., the BBC's Swiss Spaghetti
Harvest, 1957). This historical overview provides a platform for
Miller's motley crew of scholars and filmmakers to launch their
brilliant, insightful, and utterly enjoyable essays on the
mockumentary, that subgenre of media that parodies and subverts the
often-solemn form of the documentary. The collection explores how
the mockumentary functions as social commentary, offering cultural
critiques with humor and transgression. Among the contributors are
cinema pioneer Kevin Brownlow, who discovered that his It Happened
Here had been used as actual archival footage; historian John
Tibbetts, who maps out the counterfactual rewriting of history with
Brownlow's dramatization of the Nazis invading London; and Linda
Kornasky, who treats The Schmenges: The Last Polka, a mockumentary
with its own panache. Of particular delight is filmmaker Chris
Hansen's discussion of the inspiration and making of his satiric
narrative American Messiah. This excellent compilation interrogates
the "truthiness" of mock histories and cultural commentaries.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.
*CHOICE*
Taking BBC Panorama’s classic Spaghetti Harvest of 1957 as a
starting point, Cynthia Miller has collected a number of essays
that examine the ‘mockumentary’, broadly-speaking the art of spoof
documentaries. Perhaps the ones that most of us are familiar with
are the ones associated with Christopher Guest, like This Is Spinal
Tap & Best in Show or even The Office, but a joy of this book is
that it introduces us to other titles not so familiar.
*Archive Zones*
The volume is a valuable compilation of writing on a genre that
will only become more important as new technologies enable
non-Hollywood filmmakers to make their own distinctive cinematic
statements.
*Journal of American Culture*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |