Senin, 16 November 2015

What A Mockumentary Really Is

By Mattie Knight


Mockumentaries have been extremely popular ever since the eighties when more and more appeared due to the continuing appeal. For those who do not know what these are, basically these are the documentaries that are of fictional events with a fictional storyline. The term mockumentary is actually a combination of mock and documentary which means a parody of an actual documentary.

Now there are two types of mockumentaries that one can see on TV. The first one is known as the comedic type while the other one is known as the drama type. Obviously the comedic one lies under the genre of comedy while the drama type falls under the genre of drama, horror, action, or thriller types.

Now the first one, which is the comedic one, is the more common as as it is actually the more popular one because it shows real events in a very funny light that is somewhat ironic. Now the presentation would appear to be quite serious in nature but there would be a lot of funny punchlines and dialogues that would really make people laugh out loud. Now to add to the effect, there are not any laugh tracks which would make the documentary even more real that it is supposed to be.

Now the second type which is the drama type would usually have some kind of message that it would want to show to the viewers. Although it may seem real, everything in the film from the story line to the characters are purely fictional. There are a lot of drama elements that are being used in this particular type of documentary in order to capture the attention of the viewers.

Of course like in a real documentary, there would be some sort of time line or outline of events that these mockumentaries would show. The same thing would happen if this documentary is about a person and the past events that have happened in his life. There would be some sort of sequence that would tell the date of the event and the video depiction of what happened.

These types of documentaries only really popularized in the eighties when director Rob Reiner who directed This Is Spinal Tap coined the term in an interview. From there, these kinds of shows took off in terms of popularity with a lot of people enjoying these types of shows. Some of which even made their way to the cinemas in some countries and in some regions.

In the comedy genre of mockumentaries, one of the most popular ones would be Borat, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Other than that, there would also be Bruno which is an extremely funny documentary about a gay man who is out of the closet. Of course there are still many more than one can find as well.

For the drama types, probably one of the most popular would be the Blair Witch Project. This is a horror documentary that paved way for many more to come like the Last Exorcism and Paranormal Activity. For thriller and action types, there would be the films like Into the Storm and Cloverfield.




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