Trickery and Tomfoolerey! Part One!
Sgt. Angle Reporting for Duty!
Late last week, a video exploded in all galaxies of the internet, and will have quietly imploded by the time you read this. The video is from the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus in 1928.
The gentleman posting the video has a theory that the woman is a time traveler. With enough convincing, and a little imagination, she is. All we need to see is the video of a woman in the ‘20s holding something unseen to her ear and talking. Our imagination will take care of the rest. It’s what makes reading a book so thrilling, and what makes the power of cinema so frightening.
I write now (right now), of course, about the influential power of movies — from propaganda to creative manipulation of facts and fiction, from documentaries to mockumentaries to political rally films, the cinema is the one place where people across the globe will believe the sights before them as if they’re all completely true — “I saw it! It was right there!”
What’s the quote? “You ever seen a million dollars?” “No.” “Well just because you haven’t seen it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” So if I see a million bucks, it must be real — the gray area forms when you ask me who owns the million bucks. I tell you it’s me, you tell me it’s you, when the only thing we both really know is that it’s there.
I digress — in a bad way — so let me get to this week’s topic (which just may be large enough to provide room for further installments in the near future) — the Trickery and Tomfoolery of Movies.
(*Note that below you may find some spoilers. Read at your own RISK*!)
First and foremost, let me try to avoid the dangers and pitfalls of political talk by drowning you in propaganda and political movies as a way of proving a point about the influential power of cinema. Let us first dive into the Mockumentary.
I’ll use one main example. The title is Forgotten Silver.
No, it’s not a movie about miners left underground for 69 days. This 1995 flick was directed by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, and led the way for current movies such as I’m Still Here to try and manipulate the audience into thinking what it’s just seen is real by perpetuating the hoax through false advertising.
Silver revolves around the New Zealand silent filmmaker Colin McKenzie. “Recently found” footage, supposedly recorded by McKenzie, reveals that he had discovered color film, recorded the first tracking shot using a bicycle, and pioneered the recording of dialogue and sound-synching but never received the credit — because no one knew about it.
http://www.dailymotion.com/videox30jp4Jackson himself is a lead in the film, posing as himself as he “discovers” the lost footage and dives deeper into the life and history of New Zealand film history’s re-imagined past thanks to discovered filmmaker Colin McKenzie. Interviews with Sam Neill, Leonard Maltin, and Harvey Weinstein add to the flavor of authenticity.
When the film was broadcast on New Zealand television in 1995, there was an almost immediate uproar, and a call for film historians to place Colin McKenzie on his proper historical pedestal. The hoax was revealed a few days later, leading to angry letters and devastated, proud film fans. The entire film was a hoax, a carefully planned and executed mockumentary in the truest sense, and marketed as if the footage was entirely real and merely an historical documentary.
The term “mockumentary” has been around (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) since 1965. One of the earliest features in the genre was Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run.
However, the modern form of the genre was spawned, many say, with This is Spinal Tap. Rob Reiner’s documentation of the world’s loudest rock band on their most recent tour, is complete fiction. But had there not been end credits, or if Reiner hadn’t been a household name by then, perhaps people might have believed that Spinal Tap was a true band.
Since Spinal Tap, films like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind play with the (mock)documentary genre, basically showing us, the audience, that if you see it, you must believe it.
Recently, Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here, about Joaquin Phoenix’s retirement from acting and his short-lived career as a rapper, posed some of the same questions about reality and perception by marketing itself as a documentary. Phoenix took on the persona of himself as a weirdo, a new rapper with an odd sense of self and quite possibly on drugs. The public bought this, at first, but the backlash occurred before the film’s release, with several news reports alleging it was all a hoax. The producers called for the reporters to rescind their comments, which only broadened the speculation.
Just days after I’m Still Here was released, Affleck and Phoenix both came clean, with Phoenix even reappearing on “The Late Show with David Letterman” clean-shaven and well-spoken. The experiment, you could say, failed from the start. In these days of quick communication and speculation spreading like wild-fire across the internet, it’s almost too difficult to manipulate a film’s audience before the initial release. Only in a smaller place, like New Zealand, almost 20 years ago, could you create this kind of minor hysteria for what we now watch as an obvious mockumentary.
There are many sub-genres of the mockumentary world — including television (The Office), “found footage” films (Blair Witch, Cloverfield), and even cross-genre offerings (District 9), but too many to go into in just one week.
One more film I want to point you to in the over-arching mockumentary genre is an interesting one, if only because it involves another filmmaker playing himself, but in such a way as to make the entire hour and a half adventure believable. Werner Herzog is known to be quite an eccentric filmmaker. As a teenager, he stole a 35mm camera from the Munich Film School. During an interview a few years ago, he was shot by a man with an air rifle, but kept the interview going as though nothing had happened. He once offered, as motivation to fellow documentarian Errol Morris, to eat his shoe if Morris would actually complete the film on pet cemeteries he’d only conceptualized up to that point.
Herzog Cooks his Shoe.
Footage of Herzog cooking and eating his shoe is featured in the documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe by Les Blank. (*Side note, Werner Herzog could very well be the Most Interesting Man in the World.*)
In any case, Herzog and writer Zak Penn teamed up on Incident at Loch Ness. The conceit of the film is this: We are watching footage of a documentary called “Herzog in Wonderland” which is a study of Herzog’s work as he prepares filming “Enigma of Loch Ness,” which is a study of the Loch Ness monster myth. Zak Penn arrives to produce this film within a film within a film, and conjures up actors and a fake “Nessie” — until the film crew (played by real Herzog collaborators) are on the waters…and reality strikes. Or does it? The whole conceit of the film is that we’re watching Penn con a true filmmaker, but the filmmakers of Incident are conning us — or are they? Is the documentary “Herzog in Wonderland” the real con? Check out the trailer below, which gives us the impression that it’s a real documentary.
What will you choose to believe?
So ends part one of the study of cinematic trickery. Next time: Found Footage and Fooltomery.
You are dismissed!
Sgt. Angle
