Mockumentary

Camcorder Cults
 Mockumentary
● Mockumentaries adopt documentary conventions but are staged, scripted, and acted to create the appearance of a
genuine documentary as well as leaving clues that they are not. Part of the pleasure they provide lies in how they
let a knowledgeable audience in on the joke: we can enjoy the film as a parody and gain new insight into taken-for-
granted conventions.
● The classic mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984) builds this type of institutional framing into the
film itself in a mischievous or ironic way: the film announces itself to be a documentary, only to prove to be a
fabrication or simulation of a documentary. Much of its ironic impact depends on its ability to coax at least partial
belief from us that what we see is a documentary because that is what we are told we see.
● If we take This Is Spinal Tap’s self- description seriously, we will believe that the group Spinal Tap is an actual rock
group. In fact, one had to be created for the film. The band members are real in the same way the actors who play
characters in a film are real: they are real people but they are playing roles rather than presenting themselves.
● A mockumentary is a satirical film or television show that combines documentary-style filmmaking with fictional
subject matter. But although mockumentaries feature fictional events, they differ greatly from traditional narratives.
And this can manifest in a mockumentary script.
 Mockumentary
● Improvisation is often a major aspect of the mockumentary. In this case, the dialogue is secondary to the topic and
characters. For example, the Christopher Guest classic THIS IS SPINAL TAP is based on a four-page script and a
character bible, meaning it was almost entirely improvised.
● The structure of mockumentary scripts is also subordinate to other elements like tone and style. Think of
BEST IN SHOW, which spends most of its runtime introducing and developing the dog-owners rather than
focusing on plot.
● However, the mockumentary script is underrated and often ignored. Often times mockumentaries, whilst seeming
to rely on improvisation, will have a script guiding them.
● In terms of comedic filmmaking, one mode has proven to be steadfast in both its popularity and relevance: the
mockumentary. A style of filmmaking that blends the narrative structures and story of fiction film with the style and
presentation of non-fiction film, mockumentary remains one of the most prevalent forms of satire in the filmmaking
world. The format is utilized in both long-form and short-form styles, feature films and television.
● As a blend between these two modes of filmmaking, mockumentary represents a fascinating insight on how the
visual style of documentary films offer audiences a sense of reality, and how narrative films can take advantage of
these techniques.
 Mockumentary
● Cinéma-vérité sought to depict reality in its truest form, by foregoing many of the standards of filmmaking. In
attempting to create this sense of reality, cinéma-vérité filmmakers often used techniques such as handheld
camerawork, natural lighting, and location shooting, are attempting to capture what happens, to move with our
characters without interfering in what they are doing.
● This style is perhaps the most often imitated by mockumentary. Most mockumentaries choose to utilize this style as a
means to emulate reality, just as the cinéma-vérité sought to present reality in its most objective form. The major
difference here, is the distinction between the non-fiction stories of cinéma-vérité, and the fictional stories of
mockumentary.
● Mockumentary uses the audience’s familiarity with the conventions of documentary filmmaking, particularly cinéma-
vérité, to fool audiences into thinking the film they are watching is entirely truthful. To this end, mockumentary
represents almost the polar opposite of cinéma-vérité in terms of end goal. While cinéma-vérité seeks to show an
objective truth, mockumentary seeks to show a completely fictional story disguised as reality.
● Examples of Mockumentary come from the United Kingdom. The 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night, also notable for its
influence on the birth of music videos, presents a (somewhat nonsensical and bizarre) depiction of a day in the life of
The Beatles. The style of the film is noted as creating a sort of “reality effect” through its style . This reality effect
would later be utilized as the basis for mockumentary in the future..
 Mockumentary
● The release of This is Spinal Tap in 1984. This film, a parody of musical documentaries, follows the fictional British
band Spinal Tap on their tour through the United States of America. The film initially fooled many filmgoers into
believing that Spinal Tap was a real band, partially due to how realistic its depiction of touring life was. To create the
same “reality effect” as A Hard Day’s Night, This is Spinal Tap utilized techniques such as “hand-held traveling shots,
available lighting, off-the-cuff interviews, and the fabrication of dated screen grains”
● Visual conventions of mockumentaries: there is the frequent use of natural lighting and location shooting. By avoiding
the use of pre-designed sets and soundstages, mockumentaries avoid the look of standard narrative films, opting for
the more "in the trenches" style of documentary filmmaking. The use of natural lighting requires camera operators
and directors of photography to be more aware of the changing light conditions, which can lead to many
mockumentaries choosing to shoot in consistent lighting scenarios. An obvious example of this would be the 2014
film What We Do in the Shadows, which is shot almost entirely at night. While this is obviously useful for narrative
purposes, as the main characters are all vampires who cannot enter sunlight, it also serves another purpose by
allowing the filmmakers to have consistent lighting throughout.
● Handheld camerawork is the most notable feature taken from cinéma-vérité by mockumentary. Camera movement
tends to be marked by quick pans and zooms. With these quick pans and zooms, the filmmakers give the illusion of
not knowing what will happen next; they move to new subjects as they appear, with the occasional jerky movements
to give a sense of surprise. In most of these cases, the camera is moving with the characters as they go through a
 Mockumentary
● To support this, many mockumentaries utilize longer takes than most narrative films. Cuts tend to happen less
frequently, with pans and zooms acting as a means of changing shots and presenting new information for a scene.
● Handheld camerawork and long takes also support the improvisational humor many mockumentaries implement,
as they allow for camera operators to follow action that is unplanned.
● Genre conventions are the last of the major visual elements of the mockumentary, but are perhaps the most
important. As mockumentary often falls into the category of satire, the genre of their plots often informs their
visual aesthetic as well. The utilization of genre conventions obviously differs wildly from film to film.
● While This is Spinal Tap may use a rhythmically driven style and a great deal of performance footage, What We Do
in the Shadows opts instead for chase sequences and shaky camerawork evocative of horror films.
● Utilization of genre conventions is important for the satire mockumentary attempts to create, but it can also be
difficult to achieve. Recognizing the necessary pieces of a genre, and implementing them alongside the necessary
pieces of the documentary style, requires a great deal of planning.
● In order to create an aesthetic that appears unplanned, mockumentaries rely on a number of visual elements that
require both intense planning and quick thinking.
● https://industrialscripts.com/mockumentary-script/
A Hard Day’s Night
 Camcorder Cults

● Major programmes, like You've Been Framed, Video Diaries, Undercover Britain, Emergency 999,
Private Investigations, Horizon, Video Nation, Living With the Enemy, Caught on Camera, have all been based on
the use of low-gauge camcorders or even smaller fibre-optic-based minicams. Camcorder footage has infiltrated
itself into every corner of TV. On This Morning Richard and Judy invite us to send in videos of our ghastly interiors
for ritual humiliation and decor advice; kids’ shows like Alive and Kicking or As Seen On TV invite children to submit
tapes; General Accident and Radion reproduce camcorder style in their advertising campaigns.
● This infusion of low-gauge video is part of a bigger picture, a re-telling of the myth of realism. Its embrace by the
mainstream has coincided with the development of the TV style known as ‘Reality TV’: factual programming which
uses camcorder footage, reconstructions and narrative dramatic techniques in a raw, high-energy and sensational
form, a kind of ‘tabloid TV’.
● Camcorder footage is not a prerequisite for the style. However, it neatly slots into the regime of immediacy which
‘reality’ demands.
● ‘Reality TV’ is driven by the increasing competition for ratings within TV networks, which squeezes the public
service tradition of factual programming into more popular, more immediate forms. ‘Reality TV’ offers its audiences
the most sensational, tabloid, voyeuristic pleasures, which it justifies by proclaiming them socially responsible,
challenging or engaged, or even describing them as ‘access TV’.
 Camcorder Cults

● Within this broader mass-media market framework, the camcorder comes as a godsend to the mediocracy. The
hard-pressed TV executive can programme in camcorder footage knowing that it will pull an audience, that it is
cheap and (currently) fashionable. (Though programme-makers working with camcorders on access-based
projects within the BBC are at pains to protest that their programmes are just as expensive as anybody else’.
● People may even be able to get away with really cheap royalty payments which you can then turn into big bucks
by selling the footage on to the global cartel that now controls the circulation of home movie disaster footage.
● Some of these contradictions and make some observations about the emergence of new forms of subjectivity
against this dominant background of tabloid TV:
● Counter Propaganda
● Surveillance
● Voyeurism
● Subjects and Subjectivity
 Camcorder Cults

Counter Propaganda
● There is an explicitly political aspect to the spread of camcorder culture. In a global context, the use of video
echoes domestic camcorder pleasures in its insistence on the subjective, the individual or tribal experience in the
face of the homogenising forces of global media.
● The Kayope Indians of the Amazon basin are no longer content for visiting anthropologists to record their life-
styles. They now make their own programmes on tape. Here and elsewhere video is used to speak of difference,
of the particular, rather than the endless replication of ‘first world’ objective realism.
● Then again, we can find examples of camcorder culture as counter-surveillance, a means of collecting evidence of
oppression. The Witness Project issues groups subject to human rights abuse with Hi-8 cameras to document their
plight.
● Camcorders have already been used in the US to document police brutality. Here, crucially, we move into the area
of camcorder as people’s evidence used against the state.
 Camcorder Cults

Surveillance
● While video surveillance images have become a pervasive feature of our lives, we can now observe the use of
surveillance being taken over by the citizenry. In the UK, ‘trial by TV’ is instigated by the use of the hidden
camcorder in Private Investigations or Undercover Britain. A network news show in the US, A Current Affair,
issues camcorders to a group of residents trying to clear prostitutes off the streets and broadcasts the results.
● In this Panopticon the mechanisms of the all-seeing eye are internalised and replicated a thousand times by the
inmates themselves.
● Here we have camcorder users adopting the evidential status of ‘home’ video in order to protect themselves. You
can use your camcorder to collect evidence of police brutality, harassment by neighbours, or to pressure the
‘deviants’ in your community. These uses of the camcorder reflect precisely a sense of powerlessness and
alienation in the user – a sense that the mechanisms of control have broken down.
● There is here a heavy investment in the idea that your own personal visual evidence is meaningful in a world in
which power is measured through representation, a world where you know you’ll be lucky if the cops even
answer your call let alone do anything to solve your problem. The video vigilante is here recolonising the domain
of sight in an attempt to impose his or her local and particular sense of order upon it.
 Camcorder Cults

● These individual acts of surveillance reflect and support some of the uses of camcorder material within the ‘Reality
TV’ regime.
● The sense of powerlessness is a constant dynamic of the ‘Reality TV’ narrative strategy. The emergency services
are foregrounded.
● Seemingly endless documentary and fictional series devoted to police, ambulance workers, fire-fighters, life
boatmen, customs officers and hospital casualty units testify to our deep longing for the agents of state-promoted
safety to keep the wolves of chaos at bay.
● So, whilst individuals deploy the camcorder to protect themselves, ‘Reality TV’ adapts the same techniques to tell
tales of powerlessness and disaster, creating new heroes and providing us with the comfort of narrative closure
against our deep-seated fear of accidental and sudden mortality.
 Camcorder Cults

Voyeurism

● The compulsions of ‘Reality TV’ cannot be divorced from the voyeurism in camcorder culture. Audience enjoy a
sense of power at being privileged to see that which was meant to remain unseen: the point at which the private,
connoted in the actual visual grainy texture of the camcorder image, goes public through TV. Here, camcorder use
extends TV’s potential to act as cultural confessional. Current women-run chat shows – Esther, Oprah, Ricki Lake –
extend this potential within the ‘People TV’ manifestation of the ‘Reality’ regime; the Video Diaries format is an
obvious example of this voyeuristic tendency within its documentary form.
● Video Diaries have dealt with adolescent traumas, living with anorexia, coping with cancer, watching your child die.
Here is a voyeuristic loop, private pain becoming public pleasure in the viewer’s private living room. It would be
unfair to characterise all uses of this format as unremittingly mawkish, though: all kinds of subject matters have
been dealt with, on a global and a local scale.
● This use of the camcorder cannot be isolated from the trend in recent documentary film-making to use reflexive
techniques in which the film-makers themselves are made part of the story, of films like Ross McElwee’s
Sherman's March or Time Indefinite, of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me, of Nick Broomfield’s films,
Driving Me Crazy, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife, and The Selling of Aileen Wuornos.
 Camcorder Cults

● These films mark the end of the ‘Direct Cinema’ tradition as the dominant form of documentary practice and the
revival of the cinema vérité idea. The film-makers deliberately construct narrative personae for themselves which
work to mobilise the audience’s sympathy with the film-maker’s point of view. This is often the film-maker as klutz,
the film-maker who makes mistakes, forgets things, retraces his steps, who can’t get the essential interview. If we
are not terminally irritated by this refusal to assume the traditional authoritative point of view, then we will be
recruited to the construction of the film-maker’s subjective vision. Michael Moore’s recent TV Nation series
represents the TV ‘domestication’ of the genre.
● Video Diaries extend all these tendencies. The diarist becomes the subject, the story, of the film, whatever other
issues may be under discussion. The engagements on offer within this format are not the engagements of traditional
factual programming – no balance, objectivity, or sense of arguments unfolding or research submitted in evidence;
here is experience as evidence – testimony – raw and ‘authentic’.
● The sense of audience construction is different from conventional documentary or even ‘Reality TV’ programming.
TV documentaries construct a normative idea of an audience – safe, middle-class and secure – by foregrounding
‘stories’ that are extraordinary, dangerous and from a world other than your own. They invite us to confirm what we
are by looking at that which we are not.
● Watching a Video Diary we are not asked to distance ourselves from the subject, but to identify. We are offered a
sense of intimate engagement with the otherness portrayed. The subjective camera point of view and the first person
 Camcorder Cults

Subjects and Subjectivity

● One of the implications of the above is a new aesthetic of documentary truth. It is badly lit, subjective, handheld,
but it should not be seen as a development of the ‘Direct Cinema’ style, which sought to efface the presence of the
film crew, to present unmediated reality. The new video gains its sense of authenticity from the presence of the
individual, from the fact that it is personal, subjective, mediated. The video camcorder image is the mark of
someone, a subject, having been there, an inscription of presence.
● This constitutes a major shift and one of the most interesting effects of video technologies. However it has little to
do with the so-called ‘democratisation’ of TV. The structures of power relations in the mass-media industries
remain unaltered by the challenge of democratic, accessible video media. On the contrary, every new stylistic
development has been seized upon and recycled to further increase profit margins.
● Continuing globalisation and centralisation of media power has been accompanied by a fragmentation of cultures
and political systems. This fragmentation is reflected by a subjective form such as camcorder video, which appears
to undermine the citadel of objective realism. The traditional Left critique of the TV documentary for the bias which
lurks under the cloak of objectivity now gets its reply – video-based forms that are anything but objective but which
serve the needs of the market.
 Camcorder Cults

● The spread of camcorder culture reflects, rather than drives, wider cultural developments.
● Subjectivity – the personal, the intimate – is the only remaining response to a chaotic, senseless, out-of-control
world in which the kind of objectivity demanded by the Enlighten­ment is no longer possible; a world where radical
politics and critical theory are constantly defining and refining identity politics, the politics of the subject; a world in
which the grand narratives are exhausted and we’re left with the politics of the self to keep us ideologically warm.
● Video is playing its part in a wider process in which objective realism is slowly evolving into a different regime of
truth.
 Social Actors/Subjects/Participants

● A reliance on social actors, or people, who present themselves in their everyday roles and activities, are among
the conventions common to many documentaries.
● Documentary films, in fact, often display a wider array of shots and scenes than fiction films, an array yoked
together less by a narrative organized around a central character than by a rhetoric organized around a
controlling perspective.
● Characters, or social actors, may come and go, offering information, giving testimony, providing evidence. Places
and things may appear and disappear as they are brought forward in support of the film’s point of view or
perspective. A logic of implication bridges these leaps from one person or place to another.