Just to confuse two recent debates, Todd Haynes' _Poison_ features a
fictional documentary-style story as one of its three narrative strands -
could it and similar (Woody Allen's _Zelig_, and any number of his films
employing the docu-style voice-over/narrator) be understood without cultural
knowledge of the documentary form?
Also re _Spinal Tap_, a musician will 'get' a lot more from the details of
touring etc than a general audience, but each, one might assume, is more
than capable of 'getting' it anyhow - but a friend of a friend once assumed
the band were real (before they became a real band of sorts); also it's
perfectly obvious from the hilariously confused, amused and bemused
expressions that the actors ad lib their way through the film - does this
make them more spontaneous and maybe more 'real' than the sort of
interviewees (who invariably speak and behave like cliches of the genre in
'real' documentary) parodied/referenced by Haynes?
No-one seemed to mention recently the primary docu device of the 'real-life'
interview, or the omnipresent over-arching narrative structures with encoded
psycho-socio-political values.
Eg: a recent British TV (ch4?) docu-style report on the then-imminent
release of Jamie Bolger's convicted killers (who were children when
convicted)clarified a few facts as opposed to the exploitation of the case
by the tabloid press (spurious detailed descriptions of sexual abuse prior
to the killing etc). However, by insisting on a humanist-individualist slant
that asked how two children could commit such a crime (thereby allying
itself with the general approach of the tabloids by substituting 'murderers'
for the tabloids' 'evil monsters') rather than ask what sort of society can
produce children who are capable of killing (and what the media's and for
that matter, film's, role might be in such production)
O. Welles
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