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9780810885189

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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

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Cynthia J. Miller is the Film Review Editor of Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies and serves as President of the Literature/Film Association, as well as on the editorial advisory board for The Encyclopedia of Women and Popular Culture.

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