The documentary film form has, in a sense, been setting itself up for the big cinematic pratfall ever since Robert Flaherty pursued Nanook across the northern tundra. Unlike purely fictional movies, which ultimately seek simply to entertain us with good stories, documentaries have historically made loftier claims on our attentions. Documentaries want us to believe in the “truth” or “reality” of what we’re watching, and they ask us to act upon these beliefs in concrete ways. Over the past 75 years, these highfalutin cinematic claims and ambitions, along with the development of distinctive documentarily strategies, styles, and conventions, have made the form ripe for parody and appropriation. Perhaps the earliest poke in the documentary ribs was Jim McBride’s amusing, fake verité riff, David Holzman’s Diary (1968). Rob Reiner upped the ante in 1984 with his mock-rockumentary goof, This Is Spinal Tap. And in the last decade, Christopher Guest has made a career out of gently needling the form in Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best of Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003). While I’m not a huge fan of Reiner or Guest--a little too winky-winky-ain’t-I-cleaver for my taste--I adore the varied and more complex spins and spoofs described below. (For a more extensive listing of mockumentaries and fake documentaries in the Media Resources Center, see http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/mockumentaries.html)

Dark Side of the Moon. 2002. 52 min. Video/C MM393

One small step for man, one giant step for…Stanley Kubrick? Hands-down my favorite fake documentary, William Karel’s hilariously sober-faced film pulls out all the expository-style documentary stops, including disembodied voice-of-God narration, brilliantly edited news footage, completely believable talking-head witnesses and experts, and skillfully doctored photographs to reveal the dark, Nixonian plot to give the nation a vicarious walk on the moon, even if it does take place on a sound stage with Stanley behind the camera.

Forbidden Quest. 1993. 71 min.  DVD 4523

The re-editing and repurposing of existing documentary footage is by no means a new practice. As early as 1927, in her film Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, Russian filmmaker Esther Shub skillfully cut together existing actualities and news footage to glorify the rise of the Soviet state. In Forbidden Quest, Dutch filmmaker Peter Delpeut raises the use of “found” footage to the level of poetry and wonder. Using archival moving images from a number of early arctic expeditions, Delpeut tells the fictional tale of the doomed South Pole expedition of the ship Hollandia (recounted with wonderful gravity and melancholy by Irish actor Joseph O’Connor). It’s difficult to say which is more captivating, the riveting tall tale or the astounding real life images used to illustrate it.

In Search of the Edge.  1990. 26 min.  DVD 3673

Finally, a documentarian brave enough to rip the lid off of several centuries of dangerous scientific disinformation! Scott Barrie has constructed an uproariously funny, BBC-esque historical and scientific inquiry into the tyranny of “globularism”—the widely-held, misbegotten notion that the earth is round. Frighteningly, for hopeless right-brainers such as I, the flurry of charts and animated schema, the copious historical evidence, and the expert scientific testimony begin to make strange sense by the end of the film.

Forgotten Silver. 1995. 55 min.  DVD 3800

D.W. Griffith, Edwin S. Porter, Cecil B. DeMille—roll on over and make room for Collin McKenzie in the cinematic pantheon. Collin who? Aha! Exactly the point of this terrific, affectionate mockdoc send-up of early film history and filmmakers by Peter Jackson (in his pre-Frodo days) and Costa Botes. Forgotten Silver traces the almost completely obscured career of apocryphal New Zealand film pioneer McKenzie, a technical and directorial genius said to have invented everything from the close-up and tracking shot to color film and talkies. Actor Sam Neil, film critic Leonard Maltin, and—God help us!—movie mogul Harvey Weinstein all turn up to bear witness to McKenzie’s greatness.