Arthur Sultan

The mock documentary or "mockumentary" is all the rage now as a genre.

I've been racking my brains trying to come up with the first examples of this genre
either in film or television - earliest I could establish is The Rutles in "All You Need is Cash"
(and years after that of course the floodgates opened with "This is Spinal Tap")

Any other ideas on the earliest?

DB7

Culloden? It depends if you're just including music parodies.

Arthur Sultan

No, I wondered about the use of the
device in general not just with the music ones.
(although with the "Rockumentary" I can really only think of those two
mentioned... but there must be more)

I've haven't seen "Culloden" - although I heard they used a very small cast in that to create a large-scale battle. I didn't know they employed the documentary technique - that dates from around the mid-1960s if I'm not mistaken.

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penfold

Not so much a mockumentary as a mocklivenewsfeed.....if you remember the Julian Pettifer Vietnam reports fot the news or Panorama in the sixties, that's the flavour of Culloden...journalistic pieces to camera in the middle of a battle, ducking for cover now and again - but from musket fire in Culloden's case....but the technique is similar; one other difference, whether or not it's important to your question, is that it's a dramatic device, not a comic one. I know it's radio, but a dramatic precursor would be Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre production of War of The Worlds...
Many of the Python sketches were short mockumentaries...Whicker Island, for example...

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Steve Crook

I agree. I certainly wouldn't count Culloden as a mockumentary. It is a strange technique, but it is done for dramatic, not comic effect. It's actually very effective.

The Australian documentary The Naked Bunyip (1970) could be a contender for the title of the first mockumentary.

Steve

penfold

Thinking a bit more, Peter Watkins' other famous film could count as a mockumentary, again, dramatic, not comic...The War Game.....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

penfold

And fake newsreels have a venerable history...there's a great sequence in Oh!! Rosalinda (Yes, there is one) but there were standalone spoof newsreels from the silent era...off the top of my head, the Topical Budget newsreel was spoofed as The Typical Budget by Adrian Brunel, and The Topical Bonzette, a cartoon from the Bonzo the Dog series....also written, strangely enough, by Adrian Brunel ...guess who I've been researching???

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Arthur Sultan

Thanks for all the information and food for thought on the roots of this genre.

What sparked my interest on this was - I'd recently pleasantly overdosed on
the work of Christopher Guest and team I wondered why
this genre has recently become so popular.

I take it that it's due to the dawn of reality TV / fly on the wall and for comedy purposes it's good
to blur the line - best examples of this and my own favourites are
The Office, Brass Eye and Human Remains.
With the exception of the work of Chris Morris - these tend not to upset people.

However, it seems that when it's done for dramatic purposes
- and looking at the examples given in previous posts like "The War Game" and "War of the Worlds"
when these were broadcast - all hell broke loose. Also, the semi-documentary style of "Cathy Come Home"
brought home issues which probably would have been overlooked if it was pure documentary.

I suppose it could be argued that these were from less sophisticated times and
you wonder if they would have the same impact today.

Another example of the dramatic is the "Alternative 3" ITV conspiracy documentary from the 70s.
http://www.eofftv.com/review/a/alternative_3_review.htm

"Alternative 3" was originally meant to be broadcast on April 1st - and I think
that wound people up even more that it didn't go out that day.

With that in mind then "April Fool" wind-ups could be included -
the "Panorama" Spaghetti Harvest for one.

And finally another personal favourite from a sketch was Monty Python's
hilarious Krays influenced spoof report - The Piranha Brothers!

A Pemberton

I would have said Woody Allens "TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN" as an early example,
but what is mockumentary ? satire or parody or homage in a comic effect to a subject?"Mockumentary"(horrible word!) is it modern term for them all ?

One of my favourites ,sometimes called a mockumentary, though I would call it satirical is , Tim Robbins "BOB ROBERTS"

DB7

The 'mock' appendage may be read differently from what I can tell; some understand it to be satirical-documentary whilst others psuedo-documentary.

Steve Crook

Mockumentary is just a portmanteau word made up from "Mock" and "Documentary".
Surely it's no worse than other portmanteau words like camcorder, brunch, bionic, faction, fanzine and many others.

The Wikipedia article on Mockumentary gives a very good early example - the "Swiss Spaghetti Harvest" from Panorama in 1957

Steve