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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.
hyphen) for two reasons: because it suggests its origins in copying a pre-existing form, in an effort to construct (or more accurately, re-construct) a screen form with which the audience is assumed to be familiar because the other meaning of the word ‘mock’ (to subvert or ridicule by imitation) suggests something of this screen form’s parodic agenda towards the documentary genre. This
inhabit the space between the still potent public perception of a fact/fiction dichotomy. Mock-documentary is one of the more interesting and significant of these screen forms, in large part because it plays in the space ‘in-between’ and works to subvert the fundamental discourses that underpin the documentary genre. Documentary’s privileged status derives from a sense that documentary is distinct from fictional screen forms. Its
discourses. It is not a comprehensive survey of the documentary theory literature but an overview of the key arguments with a view to showing how documentary positions itself as the screen form most able to portray the social world in an accurate and truthful way. ‘Documentary suggests fullness and completion, knowledge and fact, explanations of the social world and its motivating mechanisms’ (Nichols, 1993 : 174). Documentary holds
, emphasis in original). To these insights I add my own: that Lepage integrated spatial montage techniques into his theatre productions before r e-remediating them into his films. These allow him to present multiple characters, activities, and/or scenic elements on stage simultaneously and suggest a relationship between them, exploiting theatre’s unique qualities of liveness and threedimensionality to make montage do representational, symbolic, and affective work not achievable in screened forms of representation. In this chapter I look back to Lepage’s early career to
to, and which in large part distinguishes, mock-documentaries as a screen form. Table 2 Degrees of mock-documentary Intentions of the filmmaker Construction of the text
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
populist commercial forms, and these discourses have played some role in shaping the documentary form across the two media. To a certain extent, film and television represent two different institutional contexts for documentary production and reception. In the early days of cinema documentary was posed as an alternative screen form, to fictional film in general and more specifically to the studio films produced by the Hollywood
) and non-diegetic music dubbed over during post-production to influence mood. Other characteristics that mark the drama-documentary as a specific screen form include the telescoping of events and the creation of composite and fictional characters. Like other dramatic forms they focus on moments of inherent dramatic tensions and/or dramatic irony. They are more likely to present relationships between individuals and institutions
instead of ink, are of no avail. She finds herself daydreaming instead, her black-and-white fantasies projected onto the screen formed by her penthouse window (the obsession with her inner life blocking her view of the wider world beyond the flat). In the first daydream, she goes to meet Tom at the airport, hides from him, and is then identified and embraced by him (a reworking of a scene in Un homme amoureux). In the second