Before writing a mockumentary series I needed to familiarize myself with the genre. I found articles on Mockumentary as a Transmedial Narrative Style (by Cristina Formenti) and How Bill Nichols modes of representation are applied in animated documentary films .
The article further emphasized how mockumentaries are malleable enough to be applied over a broad range of media forms. In fact, texts that record fictitious events but are totally created as nonfictional works by copying the veridictive markers of their medium of destination fall under this category. In other words, they mimic the aesthetics and narrative elements we typically identify with the factual creation of that particular medium. It also becomes clear how this narrative style can be easily adapted in various forms of communication given that almost every media platform has its own nonfiction realm and, as a result, one or more factual modes of representation on which to draw in order to give an invented story the form of a nonfictional text.
However, in order for a text to be deemed a mockumentary, it must also display (more or less overt) signs that it is fiction, such as a disclaimer, the use of renowned actors, an absurd plot, the use of parody, or more subtly visible signs like glances in the direction of the camera and minor narrative inconsistencies. Such hybrids actually differ from fictionalized documentaries in that, in contrast to what occurs with the latter, their actual ontological position must be indicated in some way. There isn’t a pre-compiled list of tips to employ for this purpose, though.
Most well-known and popular mockumentaries are comedic feature
films such as Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) and Rob Rainer’s This Is Spinal Tap
(1984), the medium within which this narrative style has first been employed
was not cinema, but radio.
In particular, among the mockumentaries initially created, we recall Orson Welles’ famous radio drama War of the Worlds (1938), wherein H.G. Wells’ homonymous novel has been retold in the fashion of a live bulletin, by deploying aural codes and conventions associated with news reporting, like interviews with eyewitnesses, declarations of experts and feeds from on location journalists. It must also be noted that, in line with what was previously described as characteristic of this style, it was as well hinted at the program’s fictional nature through four disclaimers, a near-future setting, and the date of its airing.
It might be an overestimation to declare the small screen best suited to house these hybrids. However, it cannot be denied that over the past 20 years, mockumentaries have entered the mainstream of television programming and have evolved into a new genre that can be used for both commercial and artistic purposes. The four primary typologies of texts that this form of narration is used to construct are one-off episodes inside otherwise plain fictional series, individual news feeds in factual programmes, non-serial products, and full series. The Grey’s Anatomy episode These Arms of Mine (2010) is an example of the first. It preserves the episodes’ normal narrative framework while adopting the point of view of an outside documentary team, entered the diegetic space to attest to how a shooting, which had occurred in the hospital a few months earlier, had changed the lives of the characters as if they were real-life doctors.
The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest, an April Fool’s Day hoax that is regarded as the first audio-visual mockumentary, is an example of the second, while the third category includes films made specifically for television, like Costa Botes and Peter Jackson’s Forgotten Silver (1995) or shows like Lesley Manning’s Ghostwatch (1992). The popular sitcoms The Office (2001–2013) (both US and UK versions) and Modern Family (2009–2020), which pretend to be vérité gazes on the daily life of an extended Los Angeles family and a British workplace, respectively, are examples of the final group.
Mockumentaries have increased at a constant rate in the last decades they are not just limited to film and television but have leaped into the digital medium as well e.g., the web. In addition to serving as a platform for the distribution of individual videos or entire series that use this mode of narration, the internet is also home to what Federico Zecca refers to as “hoax websites,” or webpages, blogs, or websites that portray a fictional character, an invented company, or an imaginary community as if it were actually real. This growth of hybrids has been observed concurrently with the emergence of online documentaries. For instance, on the Internet, we may find the webpage for the purportedly Indiana city of Pawnee, about which James Hay noted Although the website has evolved over time and, as of this writing, its homepage does not match what was described by Hay, it still strongly resembles those of actual towns. Yet, this city is fictitious as are its councilmen, who are embodied by popular television actors (a fact that we can ascertain, for instance, through the photographs that accompany their biographies in the City Council Bios page). Indeed, not only are we here dealing with a hoax website, but the latter was also constructed in order to extend on the web the story world of the televisual mockumentary sitcom Parks and Recreation (2009–2017 ). However, it replicates the structures and the aesthetics of nonfictional websites and at the same time presents hints to its fictitious nature—through parodic written contents, a link to the Parks and
Recreation series’ webpage, and the aforementioned photographs—, we can consider it a mockumentary in itself.
Developing visual metaphors to plot Nichols’ theoretical framework of documentary
Bill Nichols identifies six modes of representation in documentary films. They are the expository, participatory, observational, performative, reflexive and poetic modes. Bill Nichols’ proposed modes of documentary create six subdivisions akin to sub-genres in his book, Introduction to Documentary (2001, p. 99, 1st ed.). His topology was composed of the “poetic mode”, which places emphasis on aesthetics rather than a subject; the “expository mode”, which presents a linear authoritative perspective; the “observational mode”, documenting a subject naturalistically; the “participatory mode”; focusing on the relationship between the filmmaker and subject; the “reflexive mode”, focusing on the relationship between the filmmaker and the audience; and the “performative mode”, attempting to represent subjective knowledge (2001, p. 125 & 138, 1st ed.). Collectively the modes appear, at first glance, to be a method for dividing the spectrum of documentary productions into distinct camps.
After reading the articles, I had a much better understanding of what had been done and how it was done. I need to go back and revise my concept and script to fit within the setting and characters styles.
References
Formenti, C. (2015). Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Expanded Mockuworlds. Mockumentary as a Transmedial Narrative Style 2015. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft. Themenheft zu Heft, [online] 21(1), pp.63–80. doi:https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16508.
Widdowson, A., 2019. Animating Documentary Modes:. Navigating a theoretical model for animated documentary practice, Volume 3.
Nichols, B. (2001). Introduction to Documentary, First Edition. 1st ed. [online] JSTOR. Indiana University Press. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gznjb.
Arsalan Awais 