Surrealist Documentary, Mockumentary, Self Reflexive... 

This thread looks at some examples of Mockumentary, surrealist documentary and looks at their role within Documentary tradition.

Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop

This is the inside story of Street Art - a brutal and revealing account of what happens when fame, money and vandalism collide. Exit Through the Gift Shop follows an eccentric shop-keeper turned amateur film-maker as he attempts to capture many of the world's most infamous vandals on camera, only to have a British stencil artist named Banksy turn the camcorder back on its owner with wildly unexpected results.

There has been extensive debate about whether the film is a real documentary or just a hoax. What do you think? Does it even matter whether it’s real or not?

See more questions in influence film club discussion guide, link below

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm:

Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Interesting to watch how film plays out across media, social media too. Here’s some links to related stories and reviews. Including his tweets in build up to US Elections

Early Surrealist Documentary

Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933), (English language: Land Without Bread or Unpromised Land) is a 27-minute-long documentary film (ethnofiction) directed by Luis Buñuel and co-produced by Buñuel and Ramon Acin. The narration was written by Buñuel, Rafael Sanchez Ventura, and Pierre Unik, with cinematography by Eli Lotar.

‘Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan) is Buñuel’s first movie without Dalí. Though lacking many of the overt surrealist flourishes of his earlier movies – no ocular mutilation here – this 1933 film is much more unsettling. Ostensibly a documentary about the Las Hurdes region located in a remote corner of Spain, the film is in fact a lacerating parody of travel documentaries. Novelist Graham Greene, in a review of the movie for Night and Day magazine, called it “an honest and hideous picture.” ‘ - Open Culture

Surrealist Documentary

See Surrealist Documentary: Reviewing the Real article by Bruce Hodsdon in Senses of Cinema via link below

Mocumentary

“The Atomic Cafe is a 1982 American documentary film[1][2][3][4] produced and directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty and Pierce Rafferty.[5]”,
The film covers the beginnings of the era of nuclear warfare, created from a broad range of archival material from the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s including newsreel clips, television news footage, U.S. government-produced films (including military training films), advertisements, television and radio programs. News footage reflected the prevailing understanding of the media and public.

Though the topic of atomic holocaust is a grave matter, The Atomic Cafe approaches it with black humor. Much of the humor derives from the modern audience's reaction to the old training films, such as the Duck and Cover film shown in schools. A quote to illustrate what can be perceived as black humor, culled from the movie: "Viewed from a safe distance, the atomic bomb is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man," a U.S. Army training film declares.

Historical context - The Atomic Cafe was released at the height of nostalgia and cynicism in America. By 1982, Americans lost much of their faith in their government following the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the seemingly never-ending arms race with the Soviet Union.[6] The Atomic Cafe reflects and reinforces this idea as it exposes how the atomic bomb's dangers were downplayed and how the government used films to shape public opinion.” The Atomic Café - Wiki

BORAT

Brass Eye

What we do in the shadows (2014) Dir. Taika Waititi

To complement the halloween costumes most of you were wearing (apologies for forgetting myself), we watched Taika Waititi’s ‘What we do in the shadows’ film.