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Too Bold for the Box Office
The Mockumentary from Big Screen to Small
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2012
Summary
Although considered a relatively new genre, the mockumentary has existed nearly as long as filmmaking itself and has become one of the most common forms of film and television comedy today. In order to better understand the larger cultural truths artfully woven into their deception, these works demonstrate just how tenuous and problematic our collective understandings of our social worlds can be.
In Too Bold for the Box Office: The Mockumentary from Big Screen to Small, Cynthia J. Miller has assembled essays by scholars and filmmakers who examine this unique cinematic form. Individually, each of these essays looks at a given instance of mockumentary parody and subversion, examining the ways in which each calls into question our assumptions, pleasures, beliefs, and even our senses. Writing about national film, television, and new media traditions as diverse as their backgrounds, this volume’s contributors explore and theorize the workings of mockumentaries, as well as the strategies and motivations of the writers and filmmakers who brought them into being.
Reflections by filmmakers Kevin Brownlow (It Happened Here), Christopher Hansen (The Proper Care and Feeding of An American Messiah), and Spencer Schaffner (The Urban Literacy Manifesto) add valued perspective and significantly deepen the discussions found in the volume’s other contributions. This collection of essays on films, television programming, and new media illustrates common threads running across cultures and eras and attempts to answer sweeping existential questions about the nature of social life and the human condition.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2012
ISBN-Print
978-0-8108-8518-9
ISBN-Online
978-0-8108-8519-6
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
258
Product type
Edited Book
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access
Prologue: Nothing New under the Sun—Or on Film No access
Chapter 1. Making Up Mammy: Reenacting Historical Erasure and Recasting Authenticity in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman No access
Chapter 2. Mercury’s on the Launch Pad, but Cadillac’s on the Moon: The Old Negro Space Program No access
Chapter 3. Peter Delpeut’s The Forbidden Quest: History and Truth in Fiction No access
Chapter 4. Polka Settles the Score in The Schmenges: The Last Polka No access
Chapter 5. Experiments in Parody and Satire: Short-Form Mockumentary Series No access
Chapter 6. Commando Raids on the Nature of Reality No access
Chapter 7. Aching to Believe: The Heresy of Forgotten Silver No access
Chapter 8. “That’s Not Zen!” Mocking Ethnographic Film in Doris Dörrie’s Enlightenment Guaranteed No access
Chapter 9. The Mind behind the Mockumentary: The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah No access
Chapter 10. It (Might Have) Happened Here: How Nazi Germany Won the War No access
Chapter 11. Between What Is and What If: Kevin Willmott’s CSA No access
Chapter 12. The “Serious” Mockumentary: The Trivialization of Disaster? The Case of Peter Watkins No access
Chapter 13. The Making of It Happened Here No access
Epilogue: Mockumentaries Meet New Media No access Pages 201 - 212
Selected Filmography No access Pages 213 - 226
Index No access Pages 227 - 250
About the Contributors No access Pages 251 - 256
About the Editor No access Pages 257 - 258
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