In his prologue to this volume, Jerome Kuehl introduces the Office Cat, his clever trope to suggest the role of film researcher in exposing faked, misused, or dishonestly employed footage masquerading as factual film (e.g., the BBC's Swiss Spaghetti Harvest, 1957). This historical overview provides a platform for Miller's motley crew of scholars and filmmakers to launch their brilliant, insightful, and utterly enjoyable essays on the mockumentary, that subgenre of media that parodies and subverts the often-solemn form of the documentary. The collection explores how the mockumentary functions as social commentary, offering cultural critiques with humor and transgression. Among the contributors are cinema pioneer Kevin Brownlow, who discovered that his It Happened Here had been used as actual archival footage; historian John Tibbetts, who maps out the counterfactual rewriting of history with Brownlow's dramatization of the Nazis invading London; and Linda Kornasky, who treats The Schmenges: The Last Polka, a mockumentary with its own panache. Of particular delight is filmmaker Chris Hansen's discussion of the inspiration and making of his satiric narrative American Messiah. This excellent compilation interrogates the "truthiness" of mock histories and cultural commentaries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Choice Reviews

Taking BBC Panorama’s classic Spaghetti Harvest of 1957 as a starting point, Cynthia Miller has collected a number of essays that examine the ‘mockumentary’, broadly-speaking the art of spoof documentaries. Perhaps the ones that most of us are familiar with are the ones associated with Christopher Guest, like This Is Spinal Tap & Best in Show or even The Office, but a joy of this book is that it introduces us to other titles not so familiar.

Archive Zones

The volume is a valuable compilation of writing on a genre that will only become more important as new technologies enable non-Hollywood filmmakers to make their own distinctive cinematic statements.

Journal of American Culture