mockumentary???

[John Dunn]

Now that the subject has come up, it may be worth mentioning that although they were produced for very different purposes*, there are certain similarities between the 'Swiss spaghetti harvest' and the 'Funeral procession for food', staged and filmed by the Oba-na team at the end of 1990.   In fact, between then and the end of 1993 there were a number of similar short film items, many of which were shown on Russian television in the Avtorskoe televidenie slot.  Among those which come to mind are 'SSSR, kotoryj my poterjali' and the less well known 'party political broadcast' for V.V. Pribylovskij's Subtropicheskaja Rossija, shown during the 1993 election campaign.

John Dunn.

*For those who don't know it, the 'Swiss spaghetti harvest' was an April Fool item shown on BBC's normally serious programme Panorama.

-----Original Message-----
From: Nancy Condee <condee2 at VERIZON.NET>
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 10:56:54 -0500
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] mockumentary???

Danny, see also http://www.imdb.com/keyword/mockumentary/.  The term is
often attributed to Rob Reiner in interviews about his 1984 mockumentary
This is Spinal Tap; earlier de facto mockumentaries, such as the 1957 "Swiss
Spaghetti Harvest," were already well known.  See the UC Berkeley site at
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/mockumentaries.html.  An excellent, recent
Russian example is Aleksei Fedorchenko's 2005 mockumentary First on the Moon
[Pervye na lune], which won the 2005 Horizons Documentary Award at the
Venice International Film Festival and the 2005 Russian Federation Guild of
Film Scholars and Critics Award at the Kinotavr Open Russian Film Festival.

Prof. N. Condee
Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures
CL 1417
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
412-624-5906

John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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