F is for phony : fake documentary and truth's undoing /
Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, editors.
- 255 pages : illustrations ; 27 cm.
- Visible evidence ; v. 17 .
- Visible evidence ; v. 17. .
Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography: p. 241-243.
Introduction : phony definitions and troubling taxonomies of the fake documentary / Steel engines and cardboard rockets : the status of fiction and nonfiction in early cinema / La Venganza de Pancho Villa : a lost and found border film / Trashing Shulie : remnants from some abandoned feminist history / No lies about Ruins / The past in Ruins : postmodern politics and the fake history film / Land without bread / Surrealist ethnography : Las Hurdes and the documentary unconscious / Extracts from an imaginary interview : questions and answers about Bontoc eulogy / Makes me feel mighty real : The watermelon woman and the critique of black visuality / The artifice of realism and the lure of the "real" in Orson Welles's F for fake and other T(r)eas(u)er(e)s / Forgotten silver : a New Zealand television hoax and its audience / The truth about No lies (if you can believe it) / Screen memories : fakeness in Asian American media practice / Faking what? : making a mockery of documentary / As a finale : reflections on a phantasm / Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner -- Charlie Keil -- Gregorio C. Rocha -- Elisabeth Subrin -- Jesse Lerner -- Steve Anderson -- Luis Bunuel -- Catherine Russell -- Marlon Fuentes -- Robert F. Reid-Pharr -- Catherine L. Benamou -- Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe -- Mitchell W. Block -- Eve Oishi -- Alisa Lebow -- Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
Fake documentaries mimic documentary genre expectations, unraveling the documentary's authority and dismantling understandings of identity, history, and nation. The interdisciplinary essays in F Is for Phony discuss a broad scope of works and explore issues raised by "fake docs" such as the fiction/documentary divide, the ethics of reality-based manipulation, and whether documentariness derives from form or reception. Defining the borderline between fact and fiction, the contributors reveal what fake documentaries imply and usually make explicit: that many documentaries lie to tell the truth, and that the truth is relative.