A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended
to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction
or maintaining a historical record. Documentary has been described by many as a
‘filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception’
that is continually evolving with it’s clear boundaries becoming disregarded.
There are three fundamental definitions’ to look upon when
discussing documentary, John Grierson, who coined the term in 1926 defined it
as ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (1966), which has gained some position of
divergence with Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s provocation to present ‘life as
it is’, life film surreptitiously and ‘life caught unawares’, life provoked by
the camera. More present definitions include that of Nichols (2010) who states
that ‘documentary film speaks about situation and events involving real people,
social actors, who present themselves to us as themselves in stories… The
distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this story into a way of seeing
the historical world directly rather than into a fictional allegory’ and also
Ellis (2011) who defines documentary as ‘an activity that consists of filming
without fiction… Documentary is also a task. Its task is that of presenting
reality, showing and explaining the world. Documentary has an ethical task laid
upon it, bound up with the difficult questions of whether of not truth can ever
be shown’.
The term ‘mockumentary’, which originated in the 1960s, was
popularised in the mid-1980s. A mockumentary is a type of film of television
show in which fictional events are presented in a documentary style to create a
parody. This style of filmmaking is often used to analyse or comment on current
events and issues by using a fictional setting, or to parody the documentary
form itself. Mockumentaries are partly, or wholly improvised as an unscripted
style of acting helps to maintain the pretense of reality. Comedic
Mockumentaries rarely have laugh tracks, also to sustain the atmosphere,
however there are some exceptions. Mockumentaries are often presented as
historical yet witty documentaries, with talking heads discussing past events,
or as cinema verite pieces that follow people as they go through various
events.
Fake documentaries do and undo the documentary form, the
film’s subject (theme, topic, storyline, characters), and the moral and social
orders. They are formally rich as well as uniquely situated to reveal the
certainties, as well as the lies about history, identity, and the truth that
have sustained both documentary and the world it records. As Juhasz &
Lerner (2006) suggest in F is for Phony,
‘fake documentaries imply, sometimes state, and often critique the crucial
relations between documentary and the textual and actual authority it assumes,
reflects and constructs. This send up may be in the service of a good laugh at
authority, but it as often serves as a serious critique of power.’ (pp. 2-3)
The Office (Gervais,
2001) is a mockumentary sitcom about the day-to-day lives of employees in the
Slough branch of the fictitious Wernham Hogg Paper Company. As well as
directing, Gervais also stars in the series, playing the central character,
David Brent. The show centres on the themes of social clumsiness, the
trivialities of human behaviour, self-importance and conceit, frustration, desperation
and fame. The Office notably
attracted wide audiences and critical acclaim, with its success leading to a
number of adaptations, resulting in somewhat of an international Office franchise. As Rhodes &
Springer propose, ‘a series such as The
Office was a site for social and cultural commentary.’ (p.24). The central
conceit of The Office is its
‘mockumentary discourse’ (Hight, 2010), the central narrative device of the
format is a camera crew observing the employees of the fictitious paper company
in their work routines and conversations in a typically open-plan office,
observing them and intercut with personal interviews (talking heads). As such,
being a perfect mimicry of the conventions of reality television in which the
protagonists get to reflect on their behaviour and the events the viewer has
just witnessed.
Another aspect of the dissection of The Office’s distinct performance style points to the general
challenges of performing and acting in order to create ‘the illusion of
authenticity and improvisation’ (Schwind, 2014). The performance is based on
more than just the written dialogue in the show and points to the necessity of
scripting for an unscripted feel, in order to meet the requirements of the
mockumentary discourse. The Office can
be read as critique and parody of the intrusive paradigms of reality
television, as well as ‘the mediums compulsive need to make performers out of
people, and as Francis Grey suggests in her analysis of The Office as a mockumentary reacting to the imprint left on
television by reality television, ‘the characters were not only aware of being
televised; they were also are of humour as a discourse’ (in Schwind, 2014).
Eventually, the format assumes that, after decades of
reality television, both the Wernham Hogg branch in Slough and the audience
watching are aware of the fact that they live in a mediated society where ‘more
of the events in everyday life are performances for which there is an audience
and in which more people see themselves as performers being watched by others’
(Abercombie and Longhurst, 1998, p.96).
The multi-layered conception of the format’s type of
performance is of course enabled by the generic conventions of the mockumentary
discourse. Mockumentary, in mimicry of documentary, plays with the notions of
‘truthfulness’ as far as the depiction of ‘authentic human beings’ is concerned.
The multidimensional performance by Gervais and David Brent both emulate and
simulate the switching back and forth from not acting to acting, and it can be
localised in the anxieties around the notions of authenticity and truthfulness
that is visible in the simple actor-cast of reality television formats.
Inserting the documentary camera into the site of mediocrity
does not propel its characters out of the prosaic and insignificance of their
lives, launching them into glamorous careers in the media. If anything, as
(Juhasz & Lerner, 2006) state, the cameras that catch their every office
move compound the workers ‘self-consciousness and an associated resignation
about being stuck as this small time paper company… Rather than elevating their
existence, the documentary evidence confirms their existential inconsequence.
(p.3). The fake strategies of The Office satirize
the ubiquity of the documentary camera on television and in its sister,
reality.
The Office also
provided an examination of work-place politics and psychology, but more
importantly a commentary on the ‘docu-soap’. Mockumentary has been quick to use
parody and satire to reflect on the rapidly changing nature of factual screen
forms, especially in proliferation in ‘reality’ formats. As was the process
through which ordinary people are turned into television stars by performing
themselves, the form is obsessed with the mundane and banal being satirized.
What is absolutely crucial is the relationship that is constructed between the
audience and the text, the audience must be knowing and able to recognise the
parody to be able to access the critiques that it offers. As Frederic Jameson
amongst others has noted, ‘the actual content of parody is critical comment,
although in many examples, the critical edge is muted or left implicit’ (Rhodes
& Springer, 2005, p.24). With a combination of cruel satire and spirited
parody, The Office was a perfect
example of the mockumentary disrupting normal and stern communication to ask
its audience to question both the form and context of the television
documentary formats.
The mockumentary Man
Bites Dog (Belvaux, 1992) ‘set a precedent in the genre for its unusual
fusion of explicit violence, human comedy and social satire in a seamless documentary
simulacrum’ (Coleman, 2009). Man Bites
Dog, is a Belgian black comedy and crime mockumentary directed, produced
and written by Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel and Benoit Poelvoorde, who are also
the films editors, cinematographer and lead actor respectively. The film
follows a crew of filmmakers following a serial killer, recording his gruesome
crimes for a documentary they are producing. At first dispassionate observers,
they find themselves caught up in the increasingly chaotic and nihilistic
violence. ‘It is the deconstruction mock-documentary that brings to the fore an
explicit critique of the doc form’, as proposed by Rhodes & Springer, 2005,
p.17). Documentary texts such as Man
Bites Dog have demonstrated a rather hostile appropriation of documentary
codes and conventions and have utilized them in order to undermine and
deconstruct the very foundations of the documentary project.
Though still compelling, the ‘shocking at the time’ mockumentary
may have slightly less impact now, given the similar and even darker
provocations that followed. However, its verite treatment of a preening serial
killer cagily predicts the current era of reality television, where hollow
fame-seekers get their 15 minutes of fame and the camera spurs them on, turning
there lives into an uncomfortable form of performance. Man Bites Dog isn’t as much a comment on media so much as
filmmaking itself, and the way it forces the moral compromises of both the
people behind and in front of the camera. Man
Bites Dog ultimately about how Benoit’s behaviour changes for the camera,
it is much more about how the filmmakers become complicit in the crimes.
Permitted, the idea of following a serial killer is absurd and riotously compromised,
it does however allow the distance between filmmaker and subject to be bridged
through slow progression.
‘If the protagonist in a documentary, or feature for that
matter has enough charisma, no matter how terrible of irredeemable their
actions, we as the audience will stay with them’ (Schwind, 2014). Humour is
often underplayed in the favour of representations that seek to create ‘ethical
unease’, which undoubtedly leads to critique. The latter quality is very much a
part of the post-documentary cultural movement. ‘The film crew in Man Bites Dog, initially engaging in a
more verite exposé, find themselves drawn more and ore into frame and gruesome
but captivating activities occurring there’ (Juhasz & Lerner, 2006, p.11). The film commences with a
strangulation, which is later followed by gruesome scenes of execution,
dismemberment, attempted murder, robbery and a horrific group sex scene. These
scenes of distressing gore and violence are complemented with scenarios that not
only mock the bourgeoisie insincerity of Benoit and his relatives, but also the
complicity of the film crew and much of Belgian society through the murderous
ways of the films protagonist.
Man Bites Dog is
additionally successful in areas with specific relation to the subversion of
the documentary format. In the protagonist’s various musings, is an apt parody
of the documentary format when the observation of a subject tips over into pure
indulgence. It seems rarely noted by is an aspect that is recurrently present.
Benoit, the protagonist discusses politics, femininity, innate racism, the
mechanics of a hit and so on, yet rarely do we see the filmmaker reign in his
self-deluded, philosophising on screen subject. The fact Benoit intimidates the
filmmakers during the footage, the parameters of directorial responsibility
seem to have become blurred, which gives suggestion that this is the cause of
the directors inability to reign his subject in.
The film is a parody, which stretches the accuracies of
cinema verite less than the audience may originally think. Man Bites Dog is rather self-consciously cinematic and looks to engage through satire, in
an aggressive manner with its social context. The reality of the film’s
presentation of reality is based around the subversion of documentary
traditions and clichés, yet the world it aims to depict relies heavily on an
ironically witty, ethnographic version of Belgian society. The blasé attitude
of the protagonist infects his prowess as a killer and he is as careless with
his actions as he is with his choice of words. The purpose of this particular
paradox, that of the unrealistic murder depicted with seeming total
authenticity, draws attention to the narrative manipulation of documentary, and
its need to create the notion of subjectivity tempered by truisms, as a
barometer of truth.
‘In both meanings of the word, technique, in the onscreen
killings and the documentary editing exposes its own device in the paradigm of Man Bites Dog.’ (Coleman,
2009) The
frequency of Benoit’s killings, and the boldness of his technique, is both
obscene and hyperbolic. The ethnography of ‘sheep-like’ civilians and victims
is thorough but ‘unnervingly monolithic (2009) and it is also rather perversely
entertaining. The perverse pleasure in Man
Bites Dog is found in the relentlessness of both its depravity and its
humour, made all the more snappy through its documentary style. Man Bites Dog presents its case rather
forcefully and reveals the lie of documentary ‘objectivity’, the false notion
that filmmakers can be flies on the wall and record life as it really happens.
The term mockumentary ‘more effectively works to signal a
scepticism toward documentary realism, rather than to reauthorize documentary’s
‘truth’’ (Juhasz & Lerner, 2006, p.224). No matter the subject, almost
every mockumentary is multivoiced, speaking about its subject, its target, the
moral, social and historical contexts and the multiple relations among them. A
mockumentary multiplies the documentary by referring parodically ‘to itself and
that which it designates’ (p.7) and at the same time satirically to the ‘mores,
attitudes, social structures and prejudices’ (p.7) found in the world and the
documents that record it. There have been attempts at blurring the boundaries
between fact and fiction, or perhaps more specifically the modes of documentary
and fiction filmmaking, including Man
Bites Dog (Belvaux, 1992). Where Man
Bites Dog differs from its early cinema predecessors, is in its conscious
play with ‘spectorial expectations deriving from the deployment of documentary
conventions’ (p.49), conventions that were not established in cinema’s early
years.
Man Bites Dog aims
to use shock factor and techniques to determine ethical unease in its
documentary style, this stretches the boundaries of mockumentary as we as the
audience resonate mockumentary with comedy, not the use of gore and violence
for humour. The use of the violence is a rather extreme way to establish the
filmmakers viewpoint on documentary critique and parody, however it is very
clever as makes the film perversely pleasurable, the pleasure being found in
the relentlessness of both its depravity and its humour, made all the more
sharp through its documentary style.
The
Office (Gervais, 2001) similarly to Man
Bites Dog uses parody and humour to critique documentary, however it takes
a completely different stand using stardom and satire instead of shock factor
and ethical unease. The Office provides
an excellent examination of work-place politics and psychology alongside the
fake strategies of that satirize the ubiquity of the documentary camera on
television. A significant area in which The
Office and Man Bites Dog differ
is their focus on performance and reality television. Both, in some way or
another give focus to the concepts, yet The
Office plays on them excessively throughout. The Office can be read as critique and parody of the intrusive
paradigms of reality television, as well as the mediums compulsive need to make
performers out of people. The format assumes that, after decades of reality
television, both the characters and the audience watching are aware of the fact
that they live in a mediated society.
Almost simultaneously with the development of the
observational, verite, and autobiographical modes, these styles were the target
of numerous parodies and critique all questioning their assumptions of
truthfulness, key example being The
Office in terms of satire and comedy and Man Bites Dog, in terms of being subversive and unethical. These
parodies and critiques all consciously deploy the tropes of the observational
or verite documentary styles to present a scripted and acted drama.
Bibliography
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