Everybody likes a laugh. After all ‘he who laughs, lasts.’ But what if a good yarn comes at the expense of keeping ourselves alert to the truth?
After Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002) won the Oscar for best documentary, some critics and filmmakers publicly questioned whether it would have been better for the film to have been categorized as a mockumentary. Not because they were jealous of its success, but because they were genuinely concerned that Columbine was actually more fiction than fact.
The line between fact and fiction is what separates a documentary from a mockumentary. Mockumentaries might look the same, employing a similar loose or non-existent narrative structure (to give the impression that the film is being shaped by ‘real’ unscripted events), containing interviews with subjects cut with ‘reality’ footage, but at the heart of a mockumentary lies a made-up story, whereas a documentary is necessarily based on fact.
So why should Columbine be thought of as a mockumentary when it was about real events? Because, writes veteran director Mara Wallis, the premise and emphasis of the film is fictional. “The opening announcement, that you are about to see an NRA film is not factual,” she says. “The old canard that the U.S. gave the Taliban $245m in 2001 is replayed, even though this money went only to humanitarian groups, and Moore knows it, but repeats a lie.”
Wallis argues that Moore has hijacked the documentary style to create a mock/doc hybrid. Columbine looks like a documentary but is actually a vehicle to drive home Moore’s personal political opinions.
Passing off fiction as documentary fact is dangerous according to former NBC Bureau chief in Saigon, Ron Steinman. He was outraged by an admission made by makers of the 2004 Oscar-winning documentary, Mighty Times: The Children’s March, that they employed a cast of 700, had faked scenes, and relied heavily on re-enactment. “We must act to preserve the integrity of filmmaking,” says Steinman. “Do I dare ask what next? Will documentary filmmakers move into the world of mockumentaries? Will we further foster the notion that dishonesty is preferred in this, one of the possible last frontiers of truth-telling?”
With the level of success that has been achieved by mockumentaries there is no doubt the form, once labeled the last film genre to have been invented, is here to stay. The highest grossing mockumentary is Best in Show (2002), which after a very slow start has earned over US$18 million just in the U.S.
Mockumentaries have entered reality and expanded beyond the medium of film, where it all began. Considering the public can’t seem to get enough of reality TV, it should come as no surprise that the mockumentary is attracting increased attention from filmmakers and advertisers. It is a way of presenting information that people ‘get’ and is therefore a legitimate medium for expression for those who have a serious point to get across.
Australian visual artist Lucy Roberts is about to embark on an ambitious international project that involves filming office workers regressing into behaving like chimps out on the streets in front of office blocks in six countries across three continents. At the end she will assemble the footage as a mockumentary about a condition that is sprouting up all over the world that seems to be in response to the pressures of modern life – working title “Humenageriosis”.
The project will attempt to use a fictional satire presented using standard documentary techniques to say something important. So if the message is worthwhile, does that make it OK to subvert the traditional documentary form? Steinman’s argument is that by using the documentary structure to present fiction we are confusing audiences’ expectations to the point that they will become desensitized to the truth. If it’s not fact, turn it into blatant fiction and label it very clearly as a mockumentary with no pretensions about truth telling.
Steinman is adamant that filmmakers must, “always let the audiences understand where truth ends and fancy begins”.