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Mock-documentary is a ‘fact-fictional’ form which has a close relationship to both drama and documentary. It not only uses documentary codes and conventions but constructs a particular relationship with the discourse of factuality. This chapter outlines some of the key issues for our analysis and discussion of this relationship which mock-documentary texts build with documentary and factuality
Counterfactual Romanticism 2 •• Door-to-door and across-thecounter factuals: history as fashion, furniture, fraud, forgery, folklore and fiction in the Romantic onset of modernity Gary Kelly Beyond play on this volume’s title and organising theme, this chapter argues that history, however understood, is always something else too, especially in the Romantic onset of modernity and the formation of modern history as a history for modernity – or rather the formation of a certain historical consciousness for modernity as a field of contest between differing
( MacPhail, 2015 ). However, data presented as a neutral entity devoid of the political context and human subjectivity remains a malleable commodity open to manipulation in a post-factual world. Emotion Témoignage allowed the personification of an issue or a crisis to increase awareness of rights violations through the figure of the témoin , who was able to humanise distant suffering
Atrocities that befell Ethiopia during the Dergue regime (1974–91) targeted both the living and the dead. The dead were in fact at the centre of the Dergue’s violence. Not only did the regime violate the corpses of its victims, but it used them as a means to perpetrate violence against the living, the complexity of which requires a critical investigation. This article aims at establishing, from the study of Ethiopian law and practice, the factual and legal issues pertinent to the Dergue’s violence involving the dead. It also examines the efforts made to establish the truth about this particular form of violence as well as the manner in which those responsible for it were prosecuted and eventually punished.
Fantasy and the supernatural are everyday expressions of the imaginative experiences of Malaysian and Singaporean women writers who use the Gothic to explore and expose the contradictions within their societies, constraints upon peoples lives, and most specifically, womens roles. In tales of wealthy families and their bondmaids, growing up, investment, education, marriages, the supernatural and fantasy run everywhere alongside realistic factual accounts to critique contradictions, and highlight little ironies, some of which have been generated by or supported by the,colonial presence, and some of which emanate from their own cultural traditions. Many cultural and individual contradictions are generated by recognition of the need to simultaneously maintain what is valuable in tradition, benefit from what was brought by colonialism, and move on to create new ways of being. Through the gaps and fissures of colonial homes and those of grand Chinese or Malay families leak tales of repression and silencing legitimated by cultural, economic and gendered differences. The repressed return, as they do in all good Gothic tales, to bring cultural and personal discrepancies to the notice of the living.
gacaca process. This will be the entry point to subsume disparate dynamics and features of the gacaca practice. 2 The truth is an elusive and multidimensional concept. In the report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission four notions of truth are identified ( TRC-SA, 1998 : 110–17). The forensic truth entails answers to the basic questions of who, where, when, how and against whom and possibly the context, causes and patterns of violations. Other dimensions of the truth – narrative, social and restorative – go beyond this factual delineation
friends? TR: I didn’t want to cause unnecessary hurt or pain to people, even those who I may have felt had acted badly. I held back as much as was reasonable on any personal criticisms and only referred to factual events, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions. One passage though drew comments from the editor that I was settling old scores. I had a discussion with them about it, as what I was describing was exactly what had happened – and I had documentary proof that it had happened. The passage stayed in. In general, if I was to make personal remarks
changing network connections and disconnections. The overlap here with neoliberalism’s necessarily ignorant subject is returned to below. Importantly, the pure factuality of a post-humanist existence casts doubts on the distinction between a lived reality and a wider world, a distinction that is central to knowledge and the narrative of history. Without this separation there is no space, as it were, for a political commons of contrasting life-chances, contestation and critique that is essential if we are to successfully share the world with Others
newcomers or saving those in need from suffering in Libya or death on the high seas. But what we have seen in this case bends any concept of ‘public discussion and debate’ beyond breaking point. In making accusations of collusion between people smugglers and rescuers, political actors advanced a set of false claims, the factual basis of which was limited to a small handful of ambiguous incidents which were then read in a tendentious and biased way, without
There are any number of fiction and non-fiction texts which challenge, articulate or reinterpret many of the central tensions within the documentary form. Of the non-fiction texts, the most significant have perhaps been reflexive documentaries. This book is primarily intended to introduce ideas about mock-documentary to students and academics working within media and documentary studies. It examines those fictional texts which to varying degrees 'look' (and sound) like documentaries. This group of texts have been labelled using a variety of terms; 'faux documentary', 'pseudo-documentary', 'mocumentary', 'cinéma vérité with a wink', 'cinéma un-vérité', 'black comedy presented as in-your-face documentary', 'spoof documentary' and 'quasi-documentary'. The book includes some discussion of the tensions within the genre, in particular where different codes and conventions appeal to competing, often contradictory, cultural understandings of how 'reality' can be represented. It looks to outline the nature of the more recent expansion of textual concerns and representational strategies employed by documentary filmmakers. Mock-documentary represents only one instance of a continuum of fictional texts which are characterised by a blurring of the line between fact and fiction. The book compares these contrasting screen forms, concentrating especially on the nature of the distinctive relationships which they each construct towards the documentary genre. It introduces a schema of three 'degrees' of mock-documentary, in part reflecting the diversity in the nature and extent of these texts' appropriation of documentary aesthetics. A speculative genealogy for the mock-documentary as a distinctive screen form is outlined.