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True Lies: The rise of the bunkumentary

I've been interested in these types of films: mockumentaries that depict alternate universes, sort of like a big "what if." Not the greatest article of all time nor the best name of the subgenre, but as the author demonstrates, there are quite a few out of these films out there. And now I definitely want to get my hands on some of them, especially William Karel's Dark Side of the Moon. Interesting stuff.

That's it then. Hollywood starts production on "The Fatherland: What If Hitler Won?" this friday.

SncDthMnky wrote: That's it then. Hollywood starts production on "The Fatherland: What If Hitler Won?" this friday.

The Man in the High Castle

Godardslave mentioned Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, a novel whose closest cinematic counterpart is Kevin Brownlow's fascinating It Happened Here. Normally known for his documentary works on Hollywood and the like, Brownlow's film shares a similar plot with the Dick novel in that it speculates, with close attention to detail, what England would have been like under German occupation in 1944. Apparently, Brownlow started the film in 1956 (when he was 18!), and it took a full decade to see its fruition. Once it did see release in the mid 60's, the film was banned - it features actual neo-Nazi's making various anti-Semitic remarks - and it took him another 30 years to finally see it finished.

Also, in a similar vein, it would be worth mentioning Peter Watkins, whose entire oeuvre seems to consist of the type of film described; I'd argue that his "alternate reality" films - The War Game, Punishment Park, The Gladiators - are the greatest examples of the genre at hand.

godardslave wrote:

SncDthMnky wrote: That's it then. Hollywood starts production on "The Fatherland: What If Hitler Won?" this friday.

The Man in the High Castle

I'm going to read that and then adapt it to screenplay.

neuro wrote:Godardslave mentioned Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, a novel whose closest cinematic counterpart is Kevin Brownlow's fascinating It Happened Here.

Non-cinematically, I recall a woeful TV movie called Fatherland with Rutger Hauer which posited a Greater Germany that had conquered Europe and disposed of the Jews. And in dim memory there was 1990, a British series I think with Edward Woodward about a Britain run by the Nazis. My recollection is slight but it seemed to take place mainly indoors. There seems to be a tendency especially in the US these days to try to debunk everything, I suppose with the intention of making the populace even more clueless than they already are. The main culprit used to be the creationists, but now it appears to an outsider to run through the whole of political discourse. And through anything that might be open to conspiracy theories e.g. Sept 11.

What's interesting about these films to me is positioning them as documentaries as opposed to narrative, "fictional" films. What does using talking heads and dramatic reinactments and maps, graphs etc add to the film's meaning that wouldn't be present otherwise? I thought of Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver as possibly falling into this subgenre, about the man who invented talkies and colored film years ahead of their supposed origin, but that film never posits that he revolutionized the industry of art of filmmaking. In fact, it revels in the fact that the guy was a lost visionary, leaving little trace or impact, putting it squarely in the mockumentary camp.

I think that many of Peter Greenaway's early films would fit in well here... particularly Vertical Features Remake and The Falls