With Blockbuster’s implosion, I’ve recently been plundering the wreckage of some of these dead stores, seeking bargains amongst the “everything must go” detritus.  As I shopped the other day, I overheard a couple negotiating with the owner—they had come hoping to snag a copy of A MIGHTY WIND, and were disappointed to find it sold.  The owner was trying to turn them on to THIS IS SPINAL TAP and WAITING FOR GUFFMAN—and was trying to explain why they were similar selections.  They came from the same makers, yes, but moreover they were of the same style.  And then he said the word: “mockumentary.”  I involuntarily shuddered, and choked back the urge to start arguing.  For a few years now I’ve been trying to promote an alternate term, “fictuality,” which I first coined in an article in VIDEO WATCHDOG.  It hasn’t gotten much traction, but I’m a stubborn SOB, and I’d like to spend some time this week singing the praises of the hybrid offspring of narrative fiction and documentary.

My VIDEO WATCHDOG piece had concerned a trio of monster flicks that all happened to arrive at virtually the same moment: the Spanish zombie thriller [REC], DIARY OF THE DEAD, and CLOVERFIELD.  (And for those of you who’ve read that article, yes, there will be some familiar passages below.  I’m entitled to plagiarize from myself).

CLOVERFIELD, being the first of the three films to be released in the United States and therefore the first to find any American critical attention, was immediately compared in turn to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, the alleged originator of the idea of fake horror documentaries.  Ironically, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT had itself experienced the same phenomenon of an unrelated competing film aping its style. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT may have enjoyed all the press attention, while in its shadow stood a strikingly similar (and much better) film called THE LAST BROADCAST. Moreover, if you widen the definition of “fake documentary” beyond the limited scale of first-person-shooter camcorder pieces, even earlier inspirations can be seen, such as 1992′s MAN BITES DOG.

But if you’re going to start widening one definition, what about widening another one as well, and examine fake documentaries in other genres other than horror?  Clearly the phony documentary style has been a fertile ground for comedies, ranging from THE OFFICE and THE COMEBACK to the films of Christopher Guest back to the likes of Woody Allen’s TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN.

It is in the realm of comedy that the idiotic term “mockumentary” has been invoked to describe such things.  Christopher Guest should buy stock in the damn word and get paid every time somebody says it in reference to his films. The problem with the word “mockumentary” is that, with few exceptions, the comedies given that label are not actually mocking documentaries as a genre—not the way that AIRPLANE! mocks disaster movies. They’re just comedies that employ a phony documentary style in the course of making jokes about something else.

We can trace the schism back to the very beginning, the Big Bang of cinema, December 28, 1895. When Auguste and Louis Jean Lumière projected the very first ever public movie show, most of their selections were records of actual events. In today’s terminology, they could be called documentaries, but most film historians refer to them as actualities. But sandwiched in the middle of these actualities was a film widely cited by film texts as the first ever fiction film—L’ARROSEUR ARROSÉ.

To call this trifle a “fiction film” reveals the paucity of language. It runs less than a minute, and consists of the following action: a gardener is watering his plants. A mischievous kid comes along and stomps his foot on the hose. The poor stooge haplessly points the nozzle at his face to get a better view of why it has stopped—at which point the kid lifts his foot and blasts the guy full in the face. The End.

As fiction goes, there ain’t much here. L’ARROSEUR ARROSÉ qualifies as fiction by one criterion alone. It was staged for the camera. But if this is where we want to divide the species, with the future of fiction filmmaking descending from L’ARROSEUR’s slapstick pratfall and the future world of documentaries evolving from the rest of the Lumière’s actualities, we have a problem. It is a subtle one, but one that will taint the entire genre of documentaries for all time.

Consider the very first Lumière actuality—the film with which they opened their show at each and every performance for years to come, their signature film, LEAVING THE FACTORY. In theory, this is a record of an actual event, but the factory in question is the Lumière’ own, and the people leaving are their employees. The folks who file out the door past the camera wouldn’t get to go until they were told, by the very person who set up the camera in the first place. The event would have happened anyway, but it is still, to some extent, staged. The same is true of many Lumière shorts—all are moments that have been shaped in part by the presence of the camera, and enacted by people who knew they were on film.

The fundamental issue dogging generations of documentarians has been how to capture an unfiltered reality.

Meanwhile, some filmmakers took a different lesson from these seminal beginnings. Realistic dramatic film descends from the idea that instead of struggling to bottle a moment of interesting reality in a way that is as true as possible, why not focus on the interesting part and ditch the obsession with reality. Like a bunch of 1900’s era Steven Colberts, they were satisfied with truthiness over truth. On the far end of that scale were fantasists like Georges Méliès who figured, while you’re faking things, why not make them really interesting?

The supposed dichotomy between documentary and fiction film is in fact a single continuum. Some films manage to successfully efface their creator’s intrusion and fall on one far end, but arrayed between that point and the wildest artificiality of full-blown genre fantasy fall any number of in-between productions that mix reality and fiction in various measures.

I coined the term “fictuality” to describe that messy middle section of the continuum where the two ends overlap.  The most prominent examples of this overlap are those fiction films that use a documentary technique, but the overlap runs the other way, too—but we’ll come to that in a moment.

The most ready excuse for why such techniques would be more popular now compared to generations past would be the advent of reality TV. The last decade has seen an extraordinary explosion of actuality programming on television, giving filmmakers and audiences alike a common grounding in shared influences and familiar metaphors. Certainly many modern fictualities connect themselves very overtly to reality TV. SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS presents itself as a marathon package of episodes of a fake reality series, and it’s now the rare TV sitcom that doesn’t adopt a faux-reality-show stance.

But, the reality show era doesn’t explain the boom in literary memoirs, or those scandals in which authors were caught out passing off fiction as if it were a genuine memoir. In fact, the furore around A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is telling. James Frey’s story was not by itself satisfying unless it was real—the discovery that it had been made up undermined its value. Readers of memoirs were interested in something more than just good stories—perhaps even something altogether other than a good story. Humorist David Sedaris found himself critiqued by some angry fans disappointed that his tales of his family were not always explicitly true—to which Sedaris countered that he was a storyteller trying to entertain, not a journalist, and he was only using real people and real events as a jumping off point for writing that was never presented as nonfiction.

We can also mention in this context actual journalists whose work was sold as nonfiction who were revealed to be just as fast and loose with facts as any novelist. To have the likes of Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke, and Jayson Blair passing fiction off as journalism is more damaging than a faked memoir here or there.  From the standpoint of journalists, faking a news story allows for the articles to be tailor-made to suit what editors and consumers want to hear. Real life can be messy, but a faked story can be designed to skirt those complications.

Ironically, from the standpoint of a fiction writer, that very freedom afforded by fiction is the problem. If you can make any detail serve your narrative need, then the audience starts to expect perfection. The more competitors you have, the greater the risk someone else will come closer to perfection than you. So, by adopting the appearance of nonfiction, you justify rough edges and flaws that would otherwise be problematic.

But there is yet one more benefit to be found in disguising fiction as fact, although possibly counterintuitive. The process of making a documentary presupposes an ability to capture with some objectivity a moment of real life, unfiltered by an authorial presence. Not all documentaries achieve this, and some are more fanatical about effacing their intrusions than others, but the attempts by many documentarians to record real life with authenticity had the side effect of establishing certain stylistic touches. The rise of lightweight portable film equipment in the 1950s enabled documentary filmmakers to work fast with a small crew, but the resulting images were grainy and shaky. This cinema verité aesthetic was so pronounced, it was an easy matter for fiction filmmakers to borrow those stylistic cues for films that were in no way documentaries, even if they looked the part.

The distinctive style of a true documentary is a consequence of the attempt to faithfully capture reality. By contrast, fiction filmmakers who appropriate the appearance of those techniques do so in ways that have a completely different effect—enhancing the role of the authorial voice. Fictualties are not attempts by fiction filmmakers to get closer to reality, they are the exact opposite. The recent rise in fictualities across genres does not reflect a diminishment of storytelling, but a new venue for it.

[REC], CLOVERFIELD, and DIARY OF THE DEAD each involve a character who plays the role of the mostly unseen cameraperson, making the movie we are watching. Since in each case, this character is killed during the film, it forces the audience to become aware of the distinction between the person who shot a film and the person who edited it. The film one person sets out to make may not resemble the film the other completes.

This tension has been present in film since the very beginning: the guy on the set rarely has control over the finished product, and so the act of editing a movie can be the act of unmaking the director’s wishes.  Fictualities have the narrative tools to bring this tension into the film’s story itself.

In fact, we find that many horror fictualities revolve around multiple narrative viewpoints that are at times in conflict. Koji Shiraishi’s NOROI: THE CURSE and THE LAST BROADCAST both feature (fictional) creators of TV shows about supernatural subject matter who set out to document what they believe to be an actual paranormal event, but who end up being claimed as victims by the thing they set out to film. In both cases, their footage is then taken posthumously by a separate filmmaker and turned into the movie we see—in other words, a fake documentary about another fake documentary, in which multiple conflicting authorial viewpoints overlap within the same footage.

There were some experiments with first-person point-of-view filmmaking back in the earlier part of the 20^th century, most notably the 1947 film noir LADY IN THE LAKE by Robert Montgomery. Theorists behind such experiments assumed that the audience would identify with the camera, and connect with a story that appeared to unfold as if through their own eyes. In fact, audiences more readily connected with identification figures on screen than any abstraction they could not see, and first-person POV films neither caught on, nor ever really worked.

Modern fictualities understand this, and use their first-person POV elements with greater sophistication.  In [REC], the fictional cameraman Manu never functions as fully-formed character, yet does insert his own personality into the proceedings. Manu does not always follow his onscreen host Angela’s instruction about what or when to film, and his wandering attention is itself an added authorial voice along with her own on-camera narration, and the narrative structure provided by the assembly of the footage those two characters supposedly compiled.

This is a fugue-like approach to storytelling that achieves an authorial complexity no other fiction form even attempts. Aside from fictualities, I cannot come up with a single example of a film presented from two simultaneous yet distinguishable authorial points of view.

And this is where we find some intriguing examples of fictualities that are genuine documentaries, of sorts, that have appropriated fictional elements.  Let’s take a look at Orson Welles’ F FOR FAKE and Banksy’s EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP.

In many ways, these are two versions of the same film—as if the documentary EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP somehow manifested a remake of F FOR FAKE.

Both films are about controversial sub-cultures within the art world that not only challenge what art is, but cross the line into crime while they’re at it (art forgeries, street art, respectively).  In both cases, there was a chronicler of that art genre who unexpectedly became an example of the very thing they were chronicling (Clifford Irving goes from writing the biography of a major art forger to being the center of a fraud scandal himself; Thierry Guetta goes from obsessively filming street artists to promoting himself as their most public heir).  Then, another artist steps in and takes over the existing footage to reconfigure the documentary to include its original subject, and the story of its own making (Welles, Banksy).  The mind-warping meta-text Mobius strip that results somehow recursively contains the very experience of you watching it—with multiple points of view interlaced so precisely and delicately that no mere summary can express the density of conflicting ideas in either film.

F FOR FAKE is the more overtly fictional of the two—and by that I make no comment about the veracity of the story told.  I merely refer to the bits where Welles performs magic tricks, or ostentatiously tells a grandiose lie about Pablo Picasso and Oja Kodar.  These bits though blend fact and fiction in troubling ways, manipulating the staging.  Welles wandering through the train station with his magic kit. . . well, that really happened, and it’s as genuine a documentary moment as the Lumiere employees decamping the factory.

Even weirder is the whole Picasso/Oja story.  Unless you’re the anal-retentive type who started a stopwatch the instant Welles promised to tell the truth for an hour, you come into this anecdote accepting it as genuine.  But, every single thing about it strains credulity.  I mean, setting aside the utterly looney story and the fact that it sounds like a joke, it is clearly staged: Picasso is represented by a photograph of Picasso.  A black-and-white photograph, at that!  In context, though, the authority of the film confers upon this scene enough plausibility that we accept it—and when Welles yanks the curtain away and reveals the trick, it’s disorienting—and proves a point about how convincing and documentary-like a fully fictional piece of fantasy can be.

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP doesn’t play with fiction as openly—although I say that knowing that “Banksy” is an artificial identity projected by an unnamed man in a monkey mask who speaks with an artificially treated voice.  The producers of the Oscars were worried that if EXIT won the award for Best Documentary, “five guys in monkey masks would storm the stage and each one saying, I’m Banksy,” thereby making it both a ridiculous moment in a show known for taking itself too seriously, and a challenge to know which one is the real Banksy.

Wait a minute.

Which one is the real Banksy?

What is this movie about, again?  Thierry, AKA Mr. Brainwash, becomes a commercial force in the art world by commoditizing street art.  He generates ideas for art, adopted/pilfered from the artists he’d been documenting, and sub-contracts them to hired anonymous workers.  His is art extruded by a factory—and “Banksy” expresses dismay and disillusionment at this development.  How sad—“art” created by industrial workers, branded with a corporate logo, and treated as the work of a single visionary.

And then there’s “Banksy,” whoever that is.  A shadow in a hoody—a distorted voice—a monkey mask.  For all we know, “Banksy” is a bunch of guys, like Mr. Brainwash’s team.  Or Thierry could be Banksy himself, and the film his secret confession.  I don’t really think these things are true, but they remain unresolved possibilities, tantalizingly suggested by a work of such ambiguity.

That we take to thinking of this guy pictured below as a single person of some defined identity is a consequence of the way cinema works on us, unconsciously, just as Welles could openly fool us into accepting a photograph of Picasso as meaningfully “being” the real thing.  We suspend disbelief, and play along–until that rare film makes the artifice a part of the story, and lets us in on the gag.

The fictuality format mixes the inner narrative with alternate points of view of its manufacture into a recursive presentation, a fugue—something neither pure documentary nor pure fiction can achieve alone.