Studying documentaries

In studying documentary, it is useful to examine the role and function of documentary within the larger context of its relationship to “reality.” Documentary does more than simply present or mirror lived world events. It constructs its own versions of “reality.” Audiences must then judge the validity, verisimilitude, or success in presenting that version as a social commentary about experience, as well as its motives in doing so.

It also useful to study documentary as a form of ethnographic understanding of cultural worlds. Ethnographers have recently turned to use of video and photography as tools for conducting studies of cultural worlds, as well as using older documentaries such as Nanook of the North — an early documentary of the Eskimo culture — as documents for studying cultures.

And, documentaries can also be studied in relationship to the current media/postmodern culture. In a culture in which media versions of “reality” are themselves now considered a “reality,” reality television programs purport to present a dramatized, often sensationalized “reality.” However, that “reality” may be more a version of a “television drama reality” in which participants' practices are geared to playing to the television camera in ways that are consistent with what these participants believe is part of playing a role on a reality-television program.

By studying documentary in relationship to these issues of “reality,” students begin to examine the larger function of the media in a mediated culture. And, by producing their own documentaries, they recognize that their own versions of “reality” are themselves only constructions of lived experience.

And, documentaries themselves play an important role in history. The PBS series, Eyes on the Prize, Part I (1986) and Part II (1989) documented the civil rights movement from 1954 to the mid-1980s:

Awakenings (1954–1956)
Highlights two events that were pivotal in sparking the courage and power of black and white movement activists in the South: the Mississippi lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the Montgomery, Alabama, boycott that forces desegregation of public buses.

Fighting Back (1957–1962)
Explores the law as a tool for change. Examined are court cases such as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the story of integration at Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, and James Meredith's 1962 challenge to the white-only enrollment policy at the University of Mississippi.

Ain't Scared of Your Jails (1960–1961)
Looks at the impact college students had on the momentum of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Lunch counter sit-ins spread quickly throughout the South, and a new force of life is given to the movement when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is formed.

No Easy Walk (1962–1963)
Documents the years when the movement embraces the strategy of mass demonstration and Martin Luther King, Jr. emerges on the scene as an articulate and charismatic proponent of nonviolence.

Mississippi: Is This America? (1962–1964)
Examines the resistance to the civil rights movement found in Mississippi and the simultaneous determination of organizers to bring Mississippi blacks into the political process through the vote.

Bridge to Freedom (1965)
Looks at the ongoing struggle for equality ten years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus Montgomery, Alabama. Millions had joined the movement, and thousands are drawn together in a climatic fifty-mile march from Selma to Montgomery protesting racial injustice and demanding the right to vote.

The Time Has Come (1964–1966)
Highlights the growing sense of urgency and anger generated by black communities in the North, and the emergence of Malcolm X as an articulate and dynamic leader. The call for “Black Power” is first heard.

Two Societies (1965–1968)
Explores Martin Luther King Jr.'s effort to bring southern movement tactics to the urban North. A year later, urban violence breaks out as blacks and law officers clashed on city streets and America appeared to be a nation out of control.

Power! (1967–1968)
Shows blacks taking control of their communities using ballot boxes, streets and schools as dominant platforms. Carl Stokes is elected the first black mayor of a major city and the Black Panther Party is formed in Oakland.

The Promised Land (1967–1968)
Examines the movement's increasing concern with economic issues. In the midst of organizing a Poor People's Campaign march in Washington, DC, Dr. King is called away to help striking workers in Tennessee. On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated.

Ain't Gonna Shuffle No More (1964–1972)
Looks at the refusal of blacks to continue to conform to traditional stereotypes. A new generation begins to define itself, led by a greater sense of pride and awareness of its roots, culture and values.

A Nation of Law? (1968–1971)
Uncovers the levels of police harassment and brutality targeted at young black activists. At the same time inmates at New York's Attica prison organize a takeover in an effort to publicize intolerable conditions. For many, Attica becomes symbolic of prison conditions nationally.

The Keys to the Kingdom (1974–1980)
Chronicles the relationship between the law and popular struggles, and the efforts in inject substance into promises of equality. The movement's focus is on the keys to the kingdom: jobs and education.

Back to the Movement (1979 to mid-1980s)
Concludes the series with an examination of the social and political changes that occurred in two cities — one Southern, one Northern — more than a decade after the civil rights movement.

What was important about this award-winning series was that it itself influenced attitudes towards race in the1980s by demonstrating the historical sacrifices Martin Luther King and many civil rights workers, while at the same time, portraying the fact that the struggle for civil rights was far from over in the 1980s.

Similarly, Spike Lee's 1997 documentary, Four Little Girls, portrayed the bombing of a Birmingham church that resulted in the deaths of four young Black girls, and the aftermath attempts to bring those responsible for the bombing to justice.

a curriculum unit based on the series by Peter Herndon of the Yale/New Haven Teacher's Institute

reviews of documentaries

For further reading on documentary:

Aitken, I. (Ed.). (1998). The documentary film movement. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press.

Bruzzi, S. (2000). New documentary: A critical introduction. New York: Routledge.

Girgus, S. B. (2003). America on film: Modernism, documentary, and a changing America. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Nichols, B. (2001). Introduction to documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Stubbs, L. (2002). Documentary filmmakers speak. New York: Allworth Press.

Waldman, D., & Walker, J. (Eds.) (1999). Feminism and documentary. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.

Winston, B. (2000). Lies, damn lies and documentaries. London: British Film Institute

Traditional versus Cinema Verite Documentary

Differences in versions of reality are also a function of film technique. Traditional documentary employs techniques in which the filmmaker adopts a clearly defined perspective or agenda as reflected in deliberate selection an editing of material to communicate that perspective or agenda. Michael Moore, in his documentaries, Roger and Me, and the Academy-Award winning, Bowling for Columbine [ click here for trailer ], selects the material that will best convey his perspective on General Motors's disregard for the automobile workers of Flint, Michigan, as well as the National Rifle Association. Events may also be staged simply for the sake of the documentary, as, for example, when Moore attempts to interview Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors, or Charlton Heston, the President of the NRA.

Traditional documentary also makes extensive use of interviews or quoted material, selecting and editing those interview clips that will most clearly convey the intended message. It also employs voice-over commentary to convey its primary points consistent with its desired message. And, it frequently employs interviews with participants regarding their experiences or perspectives on the issues portrayed. The Ken Burns PBS documentaries:

Mark Twain (2001)
Jazz (2001)
Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony (1999)
Frank Lloyd Wright (1998)
Thomas Jefferson (1997)
Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997)
Baseball (1994)
Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1991)
The Civil War (1990)

Make use of historical photos, quotes from documents, and interview clips in a carefully edited montage of information to re-create past historical worlds.

In discussing the making of his award-winning The Civil War, Burns notes how he attempted to recapture the history:

In making this documentary, co-produced with my brother Ric, we wanted to tell the story of the bloodiest war in American history through the voices of the men and women who actually lived through it. And, to the greatest extent possible, we wanted to show the war and the people who experienced it through a medium that was still in its infancy in the 1860s — photography.

A photograph of citizens scanning the casualty lists to learn which of their sons, fathers, and husbands would be coming home -- and which would not -- speaks volumes about the grief and horror that washed over our country, becoming part of domestic routine without ever quite being domesticated.

And yet, what better way to “see” a soldier’s life than through the simple, unvarnished sentences of Private Elisha Hunt Rhodes’s diary; what better way to “feel” the combination of anxiety and determination before a battle than through the moving words of Sullivan Ballou’s letter home to his wife, Sarah?

These “verbal and visual documents” of the past convey meaning and emotions and stories on their own, if they’re allowed to speak for themselves. They can make the past, present. They can breathe life into history. They can illuminate the dramatic sweep and the minute details of important American moments — make them more memorable, more understandable than a recitation of dry facts, dates, and names.

We visited more than 80 museums and libraries, where we filmed some 16,000 photographs, paintings, and newspapers of the period. With the help of an extraordinary group of scholars and consultants, we also examined countless written accounts — diaries, letters, reminiscences — to glean a stockpile of quotations to accompany our stockpile of images.

The primary characteristic of traditional documentary is that it is highly edited. A documentary filmmaker may have many hours of footage, which is they edited down to a two-hour film. The filmmaker is then selecting the material that is most consistent with the intended positions or attitudes of the film. This selectivity can result in excluding or masking over alternative perspectives or complex treatment of an issue or topic. Students therefore need to focus on the question as to what material is included and what material is excluded in a documentary. They also need to discern the particular biases evident in the documentary as shaping the selection of material.

Studying documentaries therefore involves applying a rhetorical analysis to examine the filmmaker’s intended message and stance towards the subject. In some cases, a filmmaker adopts a more neutral, objective stance, but in most cases, documentary filmmakers have a defined attitude towards their subject that they want to convey to their audiences. Students may also study the filmmaker’s attempts to gain their audience’s sympathy or identification with their portrayal of a certain topic, issue, institution, person, or group.

To examine the question of whether a documentary simply captures or actually shapes or constructs “reality,” you could bring a camcorder into the classroom and begin filming the classroom engaged in some activity. You could then ask students to discuss whether the presence of the camera influenced their behavior in any way. If it did, you could then discuss how they were influenced and what assumptions they had about how they should behave in front of a camera. This could also lead to discussions about a culture mediated by media productions in which people acquire assumptions about appropriate social practices “on camera.” For example, professional athletes, when interviewed about post-game reflections, typically talk and behave in a highly predictable manner, practices shaped by the familiar television post-game interview practice. All of this leads to the larger issue of whether documentaries mirror or construct realities and for what purposes.

Propaganda Documentary: Blatant Selectivity

Propaganda represents an extreme example of biased selectivity in which a filmmaker uses documentary to promote a distorted or one-sided perspective to achieve certain goals. During wartime, documentaries are constructed in a way that transform “the enemy” into the object of hatred and anger and the sponsoring country into a heroic, virtuous agent of good. For example, the documentary, Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl was made to glorify the Nazi regime and Hitler as the admired leader who will unify the German people as a master race.

For example, Hitler is shown as a god-like figure descending out of the clouds in an airplane that lands and then Hitler attends a hugh stadium rally in which he is portrayed giving a speech, using camera angles to show him as above the admiring crowd.

Similarly, Riefenstahl’s Olympia documentary of the 1936 Olympic games attempted to portray the German athletes as superior representatives of Aryan manhood, despite the fact that Jesse Owen, the American black athlete, was very successful.

Propaganda in the Classroom [ Bill Chapman Classroom Tools: lots of articles/examples ]

Institute for Propaganda Analysis

Centre for the Study of Propaganda, University of Kent [ lots of links to examples ]

Propaganda related to the Iraq War

Cinema Verite Documentary

In contrast to traditional documentary, cinema verite documentary attempts to capture experience is an unobtrusive, unedited manner as possible. These documentaries consist of long takes with little editing or commentary. There are also far fewer interviews in favor of having participations converse with each other. Events are portrayed as they unfold, without having the presence of a camera influence those events or any staging or playing for the camera to shape those events. The less-obtrusive, light-weight 16-mm camera, zoom lens, fast film stocks, and superior recording equipment in the 1960s led to the rise of cinema verite documentary during that time (Giannetti, 2002).

Cinema verite documentary reflects the ethnographic/anthropological belief in the need to capture social and cultural practices as they occur without imposing one's own interpretive frame. The primary assumption is that the filmmaker should simply portray events or people as they behave in everyday contexts without attempting to manipulate or impose their own perspectives onto such portrayals.

The most famous and productive cinema verite documentary filmmaker is Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman's documentaries focus on peoples' experiences in various institutions or sites — schools, hospitals, towns, government /welfare agency sites, prisons, stores, parks, etc. He shows long segments of people interacting with each other or with the site with minimal editing and no interviews or voice-overs. His films are often quite lengthy, in some cases, lasting four or five hours.

In an interview with Nick Poppy (“Frederick Wiseman”) in Salon (3/28/02) about Domestic Violence, Wiseman notes that he filmed the documentary over 8 weeks and spent a year editing it before it was shown on PBS. Wiseman noted that:

The shooting was eight weeks, and in eight weeks I accumulated about 110 hours. The movie took about a year to edit. And the second one will also take about a year to edit. You make or break a movie like this in the editing. You can have good material and screw it up, and you can have mediocre material and improve it by the way you put it together.

I have no idea what the themes or the point of view are going to be until I get well into the editing. I don’t have a story in mind in advance and I don’t set out in these movies to prove a thesis. I discover what the themes are as I put the film together, as I edit the sequences and study the material.

I think I have an obligation, to the people who have consented to be in the film, to make a film that is fair to their experience. The editing of my films is a long and selective process. I do feel that when I cut a sequence, I have an obligation to the people who are in it, to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time, in the original event. I don't try and cut it to meet the standards of a producer or a network or a television show.

When I’m making a movie, I have no idea how to think about an audience. I think the kinds of surveys they do in Hollywood are basically high comedy. I hope you don’t think that what I’m about to say is arrogant. I have no idea how anybody else is going to respond to the movie, what their experience or their interests are, what books they’ve read or movies they’ve seen, what their general interests are, etc. So the only audience I have in mind when I make the movie is myself. And I try to make it to my own standards, and I hope that somebody else who sees it will connect to it. The only things I know a little bit about — and I don’t say I know a lot about them either — are my own standards.

Some other Wiseman documentaries include:

Public Housing: portrays life in the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago, coping with crime, drugs, family conflicts, pregnancy, and government officials in a world of poverty.
 
Belfast, Maine: portrays life in a small coastal town in terms of people's daily work and dance, music, and theater productions.
 
Zoo: portrays the world of maintaining and caring for animals in the Miami, Florida Zoo.
 
High School II: portrays teachers and students in an alternative Manhatten high school, Central Park East Secondary School. It portrays various classroom interactions and discussions of issues, faculty/student council meetings, disciplinary problems, conflict resolution by students, and other events in the high school.
 
The Store: portrays the operation of and customers purchasing expensive goods in the main Neiman-Marcus store and corporate headquarters in Dallas.
 
Central Park: portrays people's uses of New York's Central Park as well as difficulties in maintaining the park.

For further reading:

Benson, T. W. & Anderson, C. (2002). Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Benson, T. W., & Anderson, C. (1991). Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

The Maysle Brothers. Albert and David Maysle were also important figures in the rise of cinema verite. Their 1969 documentary, Salesman, considered seminal in the development of cinema verite portrayed the experiences of four door-to-door salesmen of expensive bibles in working class neighborhoods. The film was a landmark in that it captured the realities of frustrated workers and of customers who could not afford to buy their bibles.

In the previous year, 1968, they made an up-beat rock documentary, Monterey Pop. This contrasted with their 1970 rock documentary, Gimme Shelter, about a 1969 Rolling Stones concert tour, including a concert in Altamont, California, in which members of the Hells Angels contracted as security guards murder an audience member. They also made a number of films about the artist, Chisto, who constructed monumental works of environmental art. David Maysle died of a stroke in 1987. Albert then made one of the key sports documentaries, When We Were Kings (1996) about the Ali–Foreman fight in Africa.

Barbara Koppel. Another important documentary filmmaker to arise in the 1970s was Barbara Koppel, whose 1973 documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A. (released on video in 1976) portrayed a bitter coal-miners strike against an intransigent mining company in a small West Virginia community. This film, which won an Academy Award, portrays the poverty of the workers and their lack of power relative to the powerful mining company. She then made another film, American Dream, about a strike at the Hormel meat packing plant in Austin, Minnesota. The film portrays the workers’ attempt to strike for higher wages after their wages and benefits were cut despite the fact that the company was profitable. It shows how the strike created conflicts between friends and family members in the town of Austin. It also captures the rise of a new negative attitude towards unions that began during the Reagan administration.

Her 2000 film Woodstock portrays the attempt by the producer of the original 1969 Woodstock concert to put on a repeat concert in 1999. The film demonstrates the cultural shift from the late 60s to the late 90s towards a much more commercialized music industry and American culture.

An American Family. Another ground-breaking cinema verite documentary is the 12 hour PBS series, An American Family, broadcast in 1973 made by Alan and Susan Raymond. This documentary portrayed the daily lives of an upper-middle-class California family with five children as it coped with martial conflict — leading to divorce, the oldest boy's gay lifestyle, and attempts to deal with shifting values toward the family that challenged the idealized Father Knows Best drama versions on prime-time television. Before beginning the actual filming of the family, the Raymonds had the cameras running without any film in them so that the family would become accustomed to the presence of the cameras to that point that they began to ignore them, lessening the likelihood that the presence of the cameras would alter their behavior. However, the question remains as to whether the presence of the camera had any influence on how the family portrayed themselves, as well as whether it is possible to capture the reality of everyday family life.

The Raymonds made another follow-up documentary about the Loud family, An American Family Revisited, that was aired in 1983 on PBS. Then, in 2003, they aired another documentary on PBS, Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family, that portrayed, at his request, the final months of Lance Loud's life, who died in 2001 at age 50 of Hepetitis C and HIV infection.

Because Lance was one of the first people to have been shown on television as an openly gay person, he became a celebrity figure and writer. However, in the documentary, after years of coping with substance abuse and dying of AIDs, he perceived his celebrity status, the result of television exposure, as shallow.

Another important documentary that dealt wit the issue of gay rights is the 1984, The Times of Harvey Milk, which portrays the political experiences of Harvey Milk, a representative of San Francisco's gay community on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. In 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were both assassinated by another supervisor. The film documents the ways in which Milk's election and death galvanized the gay community.

All of this raises questions as to whether it is ever possible to portray “reality” in an unmediated, unfiltered manner, “as it really is” even through cinema verite documentary. Frederick Wiseman describes his films as “fictions,” noting that they are still his interpretations of reality, as opposed to a totally unmediated version of reality. This is most evident in documentaries about the film medium itself. The 1991 documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, about Francis Ford Coppola’s making of the film, Apocalypse Now, demonstrates how the attempt to recapture the Vietnam War itself was a difficult, almost impossible attempt to capture the cultural and psychological realities of that war. And, the 2002 documentary, The Kid Stays In the Picture, portrays the story of a Hollywood producer, Robert Evans, who produced films such as The Godfather and Chinatown, but then, in the 1980s, with the decline of the studio, he experiences his own loss of fame to become an obscure person.

And, the documentary, Lost in La Mancha, portrays the challenges of director Terry Gilliam's attempt to make a film version of Don Quixote, that demonstrates the challenges of attempting to portray past historical period.

The Docudrama

Docudramas consist of films or television programs that are fictional reenactments of actual events or people's lives, in some cases, based on a book or historical novel about those events or lives. The rhetorical effectiveness of docudrama requires an audience to momentarily believe that the events being portrayed actually occurred, requiring the filmmaker to attempt to achieve some historical verisimilitude by recapturing the appearance , language, and behaviors consistent with a particular historical period of culture. For example, Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, recaptures the rise of Frank Abagnale in the 1960s, a con artist and expert money forger who alluded the FBI.

Spielberg also made Amistad, a portrayal of a slave revolt on a slave ship in 1939 and their trial in America.

Another director who has made a number of docudramas is Oliver Stone, best known for his controversial film, JFK (1991) based on the attempts by James Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, to challenge the official government version of the Kennedy assassination. While some of Stone's analyses have been discredited, he uses the film to build an argument to promote his version of the assassination. Similarly, in Nixon (1995), Stone portrays the rise and fall of Richard Nixon in terms of the ways in which Nixon violated the law.

Click here for an analysis of Quiz Show, a 1994 docudrama about the scandals of the 1960s quiz shows by Steve Lipkin:

Other docudramas:

Rush (2002)
A Civil Action (2002)
The Missiles of October (2001)
Ali (2001)
The Amy Fisher Story (2001)
Hoosiers (2001)
The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2000)
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Harlan County War (2000)
Steal This Movie! (2000)
Thirteen Days (2000)
Truman (2000)
The Battle Over Citizen Kane (2000)
Boys Don’t Cry (1999)
Dangerous Evidence (1999)
The Hurricane (1999)
Summer of Sam (1999)
Tuesdays With Morrie (1999)
Elizabeth (1998)
Stand and Deliver (1998)
Lean on Me (1998)
Four Days in September (1997)
Into Thin Air: Death on Everest (1997)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
Miss Evers’ Boys (1997)
Rosewood (1997)
Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)
Ghosts of Mississippi (1996)
I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)
In Cold Blood (1996)
Apollo 13 (1995)
Malcolm X (1993)
The Doors (1991)
Amadeus (1984)
Gandhi (1982)
Lenny (1974)

There are a number of limitations to docudramas, again related to the key theme of the portrayal of reality. Janet Staiger notes three problems with this form.

One reservation is related to “dramatic license.” In order to create a drama that adheres to the conventions of mainstream story-telling (particularly a sensible chain of events, a clear motivation for character behavior, and a moral resolution), writers may claim they need to exercise what they call dramatic license — the creation of materials not established as historical fact or even the violation of known facts. Such distortions include created dialogues among characters, expressions of internal thoughts, meetings of people that never happened, events reduced to two or three days that actually occurred over weeks, and so forth. Critics point out that it is the conventions of mainstream drama that compel such violations of history while writers of docudramas counter that they never truly distort the historical record. Critics reply that the dramatic mode chosen already distorts history which cannot always be conveniently pushed into a linear chain of events or explained by individual human agency.

Another reservation connected to the first is the concern that spectators may be unable to distinguish between known facts and speculation. This argument does not propose that viewers are not sufficiently critical but that the docudrama may not adequately mark out distinctions between established facts and hypotheses, and, even if the docudrama does mark the differences, studies of human memory suggest that viewers may be unable to perceive the distinctions while viewing the program or remember the distinctions later.

A third reservation focuses on the tendency towards simplification. Critics point out that docudramas tend toward hagiography or demonization in order to compress the historical material into a brief drama. Additionally, complex social problems may be personalized so that complicated problems are “domesticated.” Adding phone numbers to call to find help for a social problem may be good but may also suggest sufficient solutions to the social problem are already in place.

Click here for a course based on the construction of a docudrama of the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities developed by David Knights and Hugh Willmott for use with the textbook Management Lives (Sage, 1999).

For further reading:

Rosenthal, A. (1999). Why docudrama? Fact-fiction on film and TV. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Mock Documentary

Another type of documentary, mock documentary, or mocudrama, parodies certain documentary conventions by calling attention to and exaggerating the use of these genre conventions. In their book, Faking It: Mock Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (2001, Manchester University Press), Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight describe the characteristics of the mock documentary:

• They use the same codes and conventions as documentary, such as an authoritative narrator, ‘real’ footage of events, archival photographs, interviews with apparent ‘experts’ and ‘eyewitnesses,’ and so on.

• Mock-documentaries ‘work’ because of the assumptions and expectations that we have of documentary. When we see a text that looks and sounds real, we tend to naturally believe it.

• Because they demonstrate how easily all of these codes and conventions can be faked, mock-documentary can often cause us as viewers to consider why we place so much faith in documentary itself.

• Mock-documentary, then, is a fictional form which can encourage us to reflect on the nature of the documentary genre, and on the ‘privileged’ position that we give such factual texts.

One of the recent popular directors of mock-documentaries is Christopher Guest. His first mock-documentary was Waiting For Guffman, in which he stars as a Broadway actor who is in charge of producing a play the commemorates the 150th year of the small town of Blaine, Missouri. He finds some local townspeople to play various parts in the play resulting in a spoof of an amateurish small-town theater company's production.

His next mock-documentary was Best in Show, a parody of a dog show at the upscale Mayflower Kennel Club Dog in Philadephia.

His most recent 2003 production was A Mighty Wind that spoofed the musical documentary about series folk singers engaged in the production of a large reunion concert.

Examples of other mock-documentaries:

Under Cover-Brother, a parody of Blaxploitation crime films

Galaxy Quest, a spoof on Star Trek

This Is Spinal Tap, a mock documentary about a rock band

Forgotten Silver, a mock documentary about a filmmaker's production of silent films

Man Bites Dog, (original title: C'est Arrivé Près de Chez Vous): a mock documentary about a serial killer that parodies the cinema verite style

Return of the King, spoofing of Elvis sightings

The Blair Witch Project, plays on documentary interviews with townspeople about their experience with witchcraft

Zileg, Woody Allen's parody of a celebrity figure, Leonard Zelig, during the 1920s, who could behave like other famous people (shown in actual newsreel clips)

The Rutles, a spoof on Beatles films

Bob Roberts, a political satire on a campaign documentary about a conservative senatorial candidate that include s songs by director Tim Robbins

History of the World: Part I, Mel Brooks's parody of history documentary films that explains the actual events of history

For futher reading:

Barnouw, E. (1993). Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stam, R. (1989). Subversive Pleasures. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Music Documentaries

One of the more important sub-genres of documentaries is the music documentary, which portrays a particular group, musician, or concert. These documentaries can often effectively capture the visual and aural impact of a successful performance, as well as explore the behind-the-scenes perspectives of musicians about their work. For example, one of the most successful of these documentaries is The Last Waltz (click here for trailer), filmed by Martin Scorsese in 1978 and reissued in 2001 on DVD. It portrays the last concert of The Band which included performances by Muddy Waters, Neil Young, and Eric Clapton.

Another success music documentary is Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002), which documents the unnoticed back-up band to many of the Motown stars, The Funk Brothers, who perform in a concert with younger singers performing familiar Motown songs.

Webquest: Standing in the Shadows of Motown

One of the most interesting music documentaries is Stop Making Sense (1984) by Jonathan Demme which captures an engaging concert by The Talking Heads.

Another important documentary is Scratch, which portrays the development of hip-hop DJ practices from the early turn-table street concerts to more current DJ contests.

In 2003, PBS aired the series, The Blues, a series of seven documentaries by famous movie directors who focus on a particular aspect of the history of the blues that most interested them:

• Feel Like Going Home: Martin Scorsese (The Last Waltz): the Delta blues with Willie King, Taj Mahal, Otha Turner, Ali Farka Touré, Son House, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.

• The Soul of a Man: Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club): songs by Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson, and J. B. Lenoir as performed by Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Eagle Eye Cherry, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds and others.

• The Road to Memphis: Richard Pearce (The Long Walk Home): B.B. King, Bobby Rush, Rosco Gordon, Ike Turner, Howlin’ Wolf and Fats Domino.

• Warming by the Devil’s Fire: Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep): the intergenerational tensions between gospel and the blues.

• Godfathers and Sons: Marc Levin (Slam): Chuck D (of Public Enemy) and Marshall Chess unite to produce an album that seeks to bring veteran blues players together with contemporary hip-hop musicians.

• Red, White and Blues: Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas): Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Tom Jones talk about how the early 60s British music reintroduced the blues sound to America.

• Piano Blues: Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven): piano blues of Pinetop Perkins, Jay McShann, Dave Brubeck, and Marcia Ball.

Other music documentaries:

Buena Vista Social Club

Jazz

Woodstock

Gimme Shelter, Rolling Stones

Don’t Look Back, Bob Dylan

Bound For Glory, Woody Guthrie

I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, Brian Wilson