Mockumentary Cinema

The mockumentary is one of the oldest forms in the history of cinema that undermines clear distinctions between documentation and fiction. In this course we will focus on a variety of mockumentary films that adhere to different documentary traditions (political documentation, newsreel, musical documentary, the diary film, the anthropological representation, etc.) and will examine how they challenge any attempt to contain the documentary cinema in specific aesthetic frameworks and to pre-suppose that style guarantees knowledge and truth. By focusing on the parodic and critical rhetoric of this cinema, the students will acknowledge the value and limits of different traditions like direct cinema, cinema verite, or anthropological cinema, and will question: do we define documentary cinema by its structure or by the way it is understood according to the viewer? In this course we will also deal with a few contemporary cinematic structures that share similar properties with the mockumentary, like the docu-drama or the hybrid documentary, and will explore how those create as well a critical discourse on the authority of documentary cinema. This course will offer that mockumentation is not merely a fictional mock-up, but also a valid documentary strategy that creates arguments of truth-value about reality, in a way that presupposes the irrefutable place of subjectivity and fiction in recreating history in cinema. Lectures will be accompanied by screenings.