Faking It: mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality is a book authored by Jane Roscoe, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Film, Media, and Cultural Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, and Craig Hight, a Lecturer in the Department of Screen and Media Studies at Waikato University in New Zealand. The book serves as an effective exploration of the sub-genre of mock-documentary, geared to university student readers or people who have a general interest in documentary filmmaking. It presents a working definition of mock-documentary by contrasting it to traditional documentary conventions. The book leads the reader on a deductive journey, from the widest and most general ideas of what constitutes documentary to in-depth analyses of key films including This is Spinal Tap (Reiner, 1984), Forgotten Silver (Jackson, 1994), and Man Bites Dog (Poelvoorde, Belvaux, and Bonzel, 1993).
A guiding organizational framework within Faking It is Roscoe and Hight’s mock-documentary schema. The first degree of mock-documentary explored is parody, where documentary aesthetics are appropriated for stylistic reasons and a nostalgic framework may be used to examine an element of pop culture in a comedic mode. The second degree is critique, where the practices of the factual media become the text and the topic of these mock-documentaries may be political in nature. Finally, the third degree is deconstruction, where the documentary project is the subject that is pulled apart with a high degree of reflexivity. This schema is a guiding tool within the second half of the book.
I came into this book somewhat uninformed regarding what mock-documentary entailed, and I was confronted with my own bias against this type of filmmaking. Contrary to what I thought previously, Roscoe and Hight demonstrate that mock-documentary is not meant to mock the audience but rather to subvert conventions and codes associated with referentially-based documentary filmmaking. I was hooked by their defense of mock-documentary and how this subgenre is inherently interactive with the audience. Time and time again, the role of the viewer is emphasized.
Besides building evidence to support their idea, the authors’ word choice was notable. Their rich description of the films offers a clear mental picture of each film, even standing apart from the use of images in the book. The authors do not rely on film theory jargon but rather invite casual readers to join in the exploration of what mock-documentary means in our contemporary context. Terms defined early in the piece remained a stable point of reference through Roscoe and Hight’s argument and the tone of the book was open and welcoming.
Given these strengths, Faking It by Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight is a worthwhile read. Its effective use of a rich filmography of over fifty films lends greatly to the scope of this study. The authors succeed in their objective “to describe and identify the range of mock-documentary texts and in the process to illuminate the differing relationships such texts build between texts, audiences and the discourse of factuality” (182).
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