Wiki Articles - The Documentary Network

Music Documentaries – Guide to the Genres

Brian Dorsey — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:21:53 +0000

There are as many different types of music documentaries as there are styles of music, but one of the first instances of music actually being combined with “film” in the United States took place in 1894. New York sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George H. Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song "The Little Lost Child.” Thomas photographed people acting out the song; the photographic images were then printed on glass slides and painted in color by hand. Musicians played and sang the song live in the theater while the slides were projected on a screen by means of a magic lantern. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the “illustrated song,” the first step toward music video. Thanks to illustrated song performances, "The Little Lost Child" became a nationwide hit, spawning a huge industry. At one time, as many as 10,000 small theaters across the United States featured illustrated songs. For music publishers, it was a gold mine. Marks, a former button salesman, and Stern, a one-time necktie hawker, became Tin Pan Alley titans. Some of the earliest American music flicks, so-called “promotional shorts,” featured the jazz stars of that time. Among the jazz world’s most flamboyant luminaries was Cab Calloway. The Hi-De-Ho Man’s signature tune “Minnie the Moocher” served as the soundtrack to Max Fleischer’s 1932 Betty Boop cartoon episode of the same name. Calloway also recorded “St. James Infirmary Blues” and “The Old Man of the Mountain,” which were likewise featured in Betty Boop animated shorts. Through rotoscoping, an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement frame-by-frame, Calloway not only lent his singing voice to these cartoons, but his dance steps as well. He appeared in a series of Paramount “shorties” in the 1930s, where he can be seen performing a gliding backstep dance move – a precursor to Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk.” The orchestras of Calloway and Duke Ellington appeared on film more than any other group of the era. It is difficult to say with certainty what could be considered as the world’s first music documentary, but here are brief overviews of some of my personal favorites: The Kids Are Alright (1979) - [Read Review] Director: Jeff Stein Length: 101 minutes The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) - [Read Review] Director: Penelope Spheeris Length: 100 minutes Step Across the Border (1990) - [Read Review] Directors: Nicolas Humber and Werner Penzel Length: 90 minutes A Great Day in Harlem (1994) [Read Review] Director: Jean Bach Length: 60 minutes Mata Tigre – Change through Music: El Sistema FESNOJIV (2008) - [Read Review] [Watch Film] Director: Stefan Bohun Length: 69 minutes Language: Spanish /with English subtitles Es muss was geben (2010) Directors: Oliver Stangl and Christian Tod Length: 104 minutes Language: German /w English subtitles Conclusion: Music docs can be as diverse as the music genres themselves. Often they are not only about music styles but also about the historical, social and political context; from jazz to punk music docs reflect changes in society. But of course one can just have a great time watching a film about one’s favorite band. To quote Bob Dylan: “Play it fucking loud!” by Brian Dorsey

War Documentaries and War Propaganda – Guide to the Genres

Oliver Stangl — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 22:31:38 +0000

Aside from atrocities and brutality, war means business. Not only to the arms industry but also to film producers and military propaganda units (a recent film that dealt with war propaganda in a mainstream way would be Joe Johnston’s Captain America). A man that for sure knew how to make some bucks out of a war was Sascha Kolowrat-Krakowsky (1886-1927), an Austrian film producer. During World War I his company Sascha-Filmindustrie AG – the largest company of its kind in Austria at the time –managed to gain the monopoly from the Austrian Ministry of Propaganda to exclusively produce “war documentaries”. If you get paid from a state that is at war with almost the rest of the world, you certainly don’t make objective films – thus the brave soldiers of the old monarchy were shown in glorious poses. At first, the war went well for the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire. The audience that saw the films as part of newsreels at cinemas was satisfied. But as soon as the Allies started to get the upper hand, audiences didn’t believe the propaganda anymore and started to laugh at films that showed the frightened enemy forces running away from the Austrians. So propaganda started to become a little more realistic. It was learning by doing in those days because there was very little experience with cinematic propaganda. The filmmakers had to work out a cinematic language that made the audience believe that what they saw was real. It’s a gruesome thing to say but the war taught the European filmmakers back then a thing or two about convincing an audience. The so-called “embedded journalist” wasn’t an invention of our time either – the Austrian Propaganda Ministry took selected journalists to “the front” to show them a little bit of the war. Unnecessary to mention, those journalists didn’t get a glimpse of the real war. The Allies’ propaganda was considered more professional. In fact, Hitler was so impressed with it, he believed it was one of the main reasons why Germany lost the war. When World War II started, a lot had changed. Film could “talk” and editing techniques were much more advanced. The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels, produced a lot of propaganda to discredit everything that wasn’t “Aryan”. Leni Riefenstahl’s (1902-2003) Triumph of the Will (Hitler is credited as co-producer) might be the most famous and quite possibly the most notorious propaganda film of all time. Thematically dubious, Triumph of the Will is formally considered a documentary masterpiece. Read our review and watch the film. Challenged by Riefenstahl’s groundbreaking use of moving cameras and aerial shots, the US government commissioned seven documentary war information training films directed by legendary director Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life) called Why We Fight.

Capra (1897-1991) worked under Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. The films’ goal was to persuade the public that it was justified to fight against the Nazis (the US was a mostly non-interventionist nation at the time) and to explain to the soldiers “why the hell they’re in uniform” (Capra). Capra insisted that the films he directed weren’t propaganda like the films created by the Japanese and the Nazis. Why We Fight was a success and won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The films are considered masterpieces and Capra believed that the series was his most important work. The Soviets also produced many propagandistic films during World War II; a famous example would be Moscow Strikes Back (1942), a documentary about the Battle of Moscow. The original Russian Title could be roughly translated with The Crushing Defeat of the German Troops Near Moscow. Before the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union still were Allies, this film even managed to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary. (The American Version, narrated by legendary thespian Edward G. Robinson was altered though; scenes that showed Moscow before the war were cut). The film directed by Leonid Varlamov and Ilya Kopalin also received the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Stalin Prize. An interesting aspect of the film is that it puts the fight against the Nazis in a historical context. Let’s save Cold War propaganda for another article and move on in history: One of the most famous wars of the 20th century was, of course, the Vietnam War. A war that severely damaged America’s self-esteem because it had never before lost a war. An early example of a great documentary about the subject would be Emile de Antonios (1919-1989) In the Year of the Pig (1968). This masterpiece, shot in black-and-white, covers several decades of Vietnamese history and shows the clash between “The American Way of Life” and Vietnamese Culture. The doc uses a lot of original footage and interviews with politicians, soldiers and scientists. The montage is superb and In the Year of the Pig was nominated for an Academy Award. The film showed a side of the war that many Americans hadn’t seen before and was received controversially – there were even bomb threats made against cinemas that showed de Antonios work. In the wake of films like Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986) or Full Metal Jacket (1987) documentaries like HBO’s Dear America: Letters from Vietnam (1987) touched upon the physical and psychological wounds that the war was responsible for. Big Hollywood stars like Robert De Niro, Martin Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Michael J. Fox, Sean Penn or Robin Williams (all of them had starred in movies about the Vietnam War) read letters written by US-soldiers. The film also features footage shot by the soldiers themselves and classical rock hits like the Dylan-written “I shall be released”. Many critics consider this as one of the best docs about the Vietnam War. Legendary critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel featured Dear America in their show Siskel & Ebert & the Movies: The Best films of 1988. Compared to the propagandistic beginnings of War Documentaries one can clearly see the difference: War Documentaries had become much more personal and touching. By the way: documentary style also influenced movies. Robert Altman’s masterpiece MASH (1969), a black comedy about a Korean War field hospital (which won an Academy Award and the Palm d’Or at Cannes) used zoom and overlapping dialogue. Altman took out all the information that might have suggested that the film was playing in Korea, so the film looked much more like a film about Vietnam. The film was shot for Twentieth Century Fox at the same time as Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton, a film about the famous World War II-general. Patton won seven Academy Awards. When studio execs saw dailies of both movies, they compared the uniforms of both movies: in MASH they looked dirty and in Patton they looked clean. So the execs wrote to Altman: “Get cleaner uniforms”. And then they wrote to Schaffner: “Get dirtier uniforms.” No other than John Wayne also used pseudo-documentary style for his co-directed right-wing propaganda movie The Green Berets (1968) – at least in some scenes. Someone should have told The Duke that a film about Vietnam shouldn’t play out like a western. The “embedded journalists” – news reporters attached to military units during armed conflicts – were already mentioned before; the term was made famous during the Iraq Wars. The results of those “embeds” weren’t really satisfying though. After decades that had the viewers believe that War Documentaries and reportages had become more and more subtle and objective, embedded journalism left the bad aftertaste of propaganda. The war in Afghanistan changed that again. Fearless filmmakers like Vaughan Smith, Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger made impressive docs about the Afghanistan War. The camera is always close to the soldiers, even when they are under fire. When one watches Restrepo (2010) by Hetherington and Junger, one can really understand the hell of war. The film follows soldiers and how they cope with the war’s aftermath. Restrepo was deservedly nominated for an Academy Award. (Hetherington was killed in 2011 while covering the Libyan civil war.) Vaughan Smith’s impressive Blood and Dust follows paramedics of the US army’s 214th Aviation Regiment (read review and watch here) One could argue that the mentioned filmmakers were also embedded – nonetheless the results speak for themselves. This films show the ugly side of the war in its full brutality – honest and with a heart for the Average (G.I.) Joe. It was a long way from those early propaganda works to films like Restrepo. Even today’s war docs can’t be considered “objective” (that goes without saying for every doc genre) because behind every film there is a filmmaker with a certain world view but the finest examples of the genre certainly prove one thing: war is no glorious adventure. Conclusion: That this article uses the term “propaganda” more often than the term “documentary” is quite natural, given the subject. In the end, it’s up to the viewer to decide if a film about a war is simply propaganda or a serious documentary. Whether the viewer is for or against the war might have to do with that decision.

Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité – Guide to the Genres

Oliver Stangl — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 21:12:34 +0000

Although the terms Direct Cinema and Cinéma vérité are often described as being quite similar, they are in fact two opposing ways in trying to meet the same goal – a goal that is nothing less than reality itself. Some refer to it as that strange beast by the name of “objectivity” others even dare calling it the “truth”. To a much wider degree than one might guess we are talking philosophy here, but let’s hold our horses for a moment and talk history first. During World War 2 moving pictures were misused as a propagandist tool, so one could say there was a bit of a natural mistrust concerning information transported on celluloid afterwards. Furthermore early documentaries tended to be more of a lecture with an authoritarian almighty-sounding voice-over. Movies lie for a living, no news there. So how do you tell the truth when everybody knows how easy it is to lie with the help of light and sound? Of course these questions were around much earlier than the second half of the 20th century. Back in the 1920s Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov established a concept called “Kino-Pravda”, film-truth and made a newsreel series which didn’t have the intention to just depict moments of real life but through the help of editing find and show a deeper truth behind his material. He also wanted his audience to reflect upon their status as viewers as well as on the production methods of movies. A good example is one of his most famous works, Man With a Movie Camera It has to be said that in those futurist years propaganda wasn’t considered an enemy yet but Vertov’s had another problem: he was ahead of his time, which means that the necessary technical devices for his visions simply weren't around yet. Two preconditions were essential to enable documentary filmmakers’ quest for the truth: technical novelties and social change. Before the late 1950s sound recording machinery was extremely heavy or unreliable. Sound had to be recorded in advance and be somewhat synchronized afterwards or was even created in the studio altogether. Lighter (it was pretty heavy still) camera and sound equipment made it possible to go out there and follow the desire to directly capture reality. The first masters of the new hand-held camera came from the French-speaking part of Canada. The Quebecois Michel Brault is their first pioneer. The so-called Quiet Revolution around the year 1960 brought immense social and political change with creating a welfare state and fighting discrimination against their French roots and many of those films share those visions, the social conscience. But the truly revolutionary aspect of what soon was to be called Direct Cinema is in its style: strictly observational, the camera should be merely a “fly on the wall”. The directors believed that once the subjects of their study were accustomed to the camera being around they wouldn’t bother anymore and be (well act) natural. Les Raquetteurs (1958) co-directed by Brault and Gilles Groulx was a predecessor of this new genre and explored a snowshoe convention in rural Canada. No voice-over or any other kind of outside narration tells the audience what to think: What Direct Cinema is looking for are so-called “priviledged moments”, when those being filmed forget that fact and a somewhat hidden truth is being revealed. To achieve that, extensive filming may be inevitable and editing is the most important tool to gain dramaturgy (sometimes the ratio between resulting film and filmed material could be 1:40 or even as large as 1:100). The United States weren’t far behind. Life magazine journalist Robert Drew wanted to adapt the methods of photojournalism to film and began experimenting with technology. “My goal was to capture real life without intruding. My idea was to have one or two people, unobtrusive, capturing the moment.” Drew said in 2003. Together with Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Terence Macartney-Filgate, and Albert and David Maysles he formed the Drew Associates. In 1960 they made three documentaries for Time-Life Broadcast: Yanqui, No! about the difficult relationship between Latin America and the US, Eddie (On the Pole) and Primary about the 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign between John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. The TV Broadcast through Time-Life brought a lot of attention and a wide audience but also a lot of debate on this new kind of production, which led Time-Life to drop Drew Associates who carried on, on their own. One of their masterpieces is Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), a film that would fuel a nationwide debate and is an example of political impact and power that today’s TV or cinema could only wish for. Crisis is the close-up of a political watershed. George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, tried to oppose integration by blocking two Afro-American students from attending University. Drew Associates were allowed to film the following debates between president Kennedy and Wallace inside the Oval office – something that is impossible to imagine in today’s politics. In 1987 Albert Maysles talked to The New York Times about the essence of Direct Cinema: “The Hollywood film is an escape of one sort or another. But our films make it damn near impossible to escape. We’re interested in what you can’t escape from and presenting it. Some people get a little edgy when they see something that is so personal. They don’t know where to turn to look for the kind of buffer that most movies give them. In fiction you can say ‘it’s only a movie’ and forget it. You can’t do that with reality.” Meanwhile the French were also influenced by all the new technical stuff but when it comes to their notion of reality they are contradicting the New World. A lot. Gaining objectivity by pretending the camera wasn’t there seemed dishonest or simply impossible to them, because something that’s there is – well – there and there’s no denying the altering effect of it. This would only be the illusion of reality. For this movement, which would soon be called Cinéma vérité after the subtitle of Jean Rouch’s and Edgar Morin’s defining work Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a summer) the camera became a catalyst tool. The Direct Cinema folks wanted to observe impartially (or thought they would), the Vérité guys liked to provoke to get insights, the filmed subjects didn’t plan to share or maybe even didn’t know were there. In Moi, un Noir Jean Rouch even went so far as to let the subject take the camera and direction. Reflection was another key strategy in Cinéma vérité. In Chronique d’un été for example Parisians were interviewed and later confronted with their statements and this confrontation was filmed once again. Direct Cinema’s protagonists often had a background in journalism whereas the beginning in Vérité lay in sociology and anthropology. In the latter, set-ups were often staged, filmmakers and their subjects would interact, revealing the techniques behind producing a film and questioning their own role in the process. Edgar Morin summed it up perfectly: “There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real: The first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there were two ways to conceive Cinéma vérité. The first was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of truth.” Considering all that, we have to be aware we are not talking “Dogma 1995” here. There was no set of rules or manifestos describing what or what not Direct Cinema or Cinéma vérité had to look or be like. Different filmmakers as well as different philosophers and very well every single human being has a differing take on reality and one has to check out the films of the above as well as those of people like John Cassavetes, Frederick Wiseman, Ulrich Seidl, Michael Moore, Chris Marker and many others to see if there is any “truth” and if so, how this notion of reality manifests itself. The techniques used in those cinematic movements are common ground today and their influence to be seen in feature films, music videos or TV news so to give filmed material a truthful look. Most significantly those are the shaky hand-camera and a kind of low tech-look of faulty material be it over- or underexposed. They’ve got an authentic feel to them just because they are the opposite of Hollywood perfection. Famous examples would be The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Finally there’s been some discussion whether Michael Moore could be considered heir to the Cinéma vérité tradition with his very subjective take on documentary filmmaking. He’s a provocateur alright, with his famous ambush interviews, stinging irony and satirical tone. Well, whatever the truth may be, get your own picture of it. Capitalism-a-love-story

Mockumentary – Guide to the Genres

Oliver Stangl — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:17:53 +0000

Fake documentaries aka Mockumentaries & Pseudo-Documentaries. The documentary genre is as old as the history of the movies – the first images put to film weren’t exactly “art stuff” but simply covered (documented) everyday events; the audience was impressed nonetheless. When seeing the Lumière Brothers’ film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de la Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat), shot in 1895, the audience jumped up from their seats, fearing that the train might leave the screen and crash into the auditorium. Film is illusion, but an illusion that can be taken for real. In its early days, film was pure spectacle, nonetheless some filmmakers tried to make money by disguising pornographic material as “medical education films” (There were some serious filmmakers too, like the Romanian neurologist Gheorghe Marinescu who shot films like The walking troubles of organic hemiplegy from 1898). Several decades later, the documentary genre was regarded as serious – purely objective, just showing the truth. And, except for the “beautiful” images of nature documentaries not really regarded as “artistic”. In recent years, however, certain documentaries are more and more regarded as art – and art can be quite subjective, can’t it? Michael Moore’s films (Bowling for Columbine, 2002; Fahrenheit 9/11, 2004) would be good examples; his films won several prizes, yet they were being received controversially and are not exactly regarded as “objective”. Certainly Moore’s films transcend the genre; actually they are a mix of documentary, essay, infotainment and polemics. There have been films before that which are hard to categorize; an early example would be Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera from 1929 that mixes feature film with documentary. Another example would be the work of Michael Glawogger: In Workingman’s Death (2005) for example, the filmmaker depicts work under extreme circumstances all around the world. The film doesn’t go into economical detail but tells its story through impressive tableaus. In a way, fake docs can be seen as a comment on the serious and objective aura that went along with the documentary genre for many decades. As mentioned above, film is illusion, but one that can feel very real. Think of the audience that was in terror because of the arrival of a train. So how about that theory: the documentary form can be used to create bigger illusions than feature films. And that’s where the mockumentary genre (as you might have guessed, the term mockumentary is a blend of “mock” and “documentary”) steps into place, taking advantage of that paradox. The filmmakers use the documentary form to create illusions that have kind of a real feeling to them. What you see has to be real – because it was put to film. Or because it was on the radio. One of the early, but very effective fake examples was Orson Welles’ radio version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds from 1938. Welles staged the play about Martians attacking Earth like a reportage. The result was panic as many people took the play for real. Mostly though, mockumentaries have a comical and satirical touch about them. An early cinematic example would be Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969) which covers the life of a thief to comic effect. In a conversation with critic Richard Schickel, Allen statet that “Take the Money and Run was an early pseudo-documentary. The idea of doing a documentary ... was with me from the first day I started movies. I thought that was an ideal vehicle for doing comedy, because the documentary format was very serious, so you were immediately operating in an area where any little thing you did upset the seriousness and was thereby funny.“ Though with regards to content clearly recognizable as a comedy, Allen used hand cameras to capture the feel of direct cinema. The form of documentary also allows him to retell the life of his unlucky protagonist (played by Allen himself). Somehow the music genre seems to be especially fruitful for mockumentaries: Richard Lester’s film A Hard Day’s Night (1964), with The Beatles in the leads, was a satirical film about the adventures of the famous band, while The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978), directed by Gary Weis and Monty Python’s Eric Idle was a parody on The Beatles. The Rutles features a reporter, played by Idle who has problems to stay in the frame, as the camera has a life of its own. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0eJEX5c1sM For many the best music mockumentary though, is Rob Reiner’s cult favorite This is Spinal Tap from 1984. The film follows a fictional British Band that started with Beat Music and later turned into Heavy Metal. Reiner gets the documentary feel right here, as much of the dialogue was improvised and not in the script. That “realistic” approach works very well; there are lots of little details like one of the musicians being trapped in a stage device because of a technical malfunction. Also the band’s drummers keep dying. Trailer: This is Spinal Tap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTduY_k2aY4 Woody Allen returned to the mockumentary genre in with his masterpiece Zelig (1983). A movie as subtle as mockumentaries can get and maybe Allen’s best work from the 1980s. Zelig follows the life of Leonard Zelig, a man with the ability to transform into everyone he meets. He changes to an Afro-American in a Jazz Club as well as a snob when attending a fancy party. Allen’s film is a great take on the human desire to be liked and accepted and uses lots of fake newsreels to marvellous effect. There are many fake photos in the film, showing Zelig with famous people like Herbert Hoover or Al Capone. Allen also shot scenes of a film within a film, to show Hollywood’s fictional take on Zelig; the film also features interviews with celebrities like Susan Sontag or Saul Bellow who talk about Zelig as if he had been a real historical figure. (Allen returned to the technique of using interviews with “experts” in Sweet and Lowdown from 1999, a comedy about a jazz guitarist played by Sean Penn.) Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agkCEOHQVgg There is practially no limit to the mockumentary genre; it ranges from political themes (Bob Roberts from 1992, directed by and starring Tim Robbins, who portrays a right wing politician and folk musician) to cultural satire (Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan from 2006, directed by Larry Charles is about a Kazakh journalist who travels the US) and even animation (Surf’s Up from 2007, directed by Ash Brannon and Chris Buck, for example, follows the adventures of a surfing penguin). It can also work the other way around: Director Robert Altman (MASH, 1970; Nashville, 1975; Short Cuts, 1993) used documentary style, zoom effects, overlapping dialogue and a naturalistic acting cast to lend his films more credibility. There is also a lot of reflexivity and criticism on the documentary genre to be found in mockumentaries: The Belgian film C'est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog, 1992) is about a reality televison team that follows a serial killer and eventually teams up with him. The film is a satirical take on how „real“ (or manufactured) reality TV actually is and how far TV stations would go to make money. The Austrian documentary Das Fest des Huhnes (The Feast of the Chicken) from the same year is a satire on ethnological documentaries as it follows an African TV team that studies the behaviour of Austrian natives. Mockumentaries (which in many cases don’t acquire a lot of budget for props) can also be highly profitable: The Blair Witch Project (1999), a horror film about three film students who become victims of a witch and leave video footage behind, was realized for a relatively small budget but made a world wide gross of roughly 250 million dollars. Most of the films budget was spent on a brillant marketing campaign that had people believe the case of the missing film students was real. Critics also liked the film, Roger Ebert even called it “an extraordinarily effective horror film.” Last year, Banksy – Exit through the Gift Shop was a huge success with critics and received an Oscar nomination. The film starts as a documentary about famous street artist Banksy but suddenly turns into a Banksy-directed film about the filmmaker Thierry Guetta – who doesn’t exist. (For this film, many critics didn’t use the term mockumentary but „prankumentary“.) Mockumentaries, if done right, play demanding and complex tricks on the viewer; they can also be plain fun or quite scary – and they can also remind the viewer that “serious” documentaries are not 100% objective either. So, if you watch a documentary next time, make sure it is not a fake. Conclusion: A mockumentary, with its “realistic” approach, can be many things – a satire on a certain topic, a critical reflexion on the documentary genre or even an effetive horror film. Basically, a mockumentary can cover the same subjects as a regular documentary: life.