Contested Realities: Pseudodocumentary and Other Staged Events
With the success of films such as the improvisational works of Christopher Guest and television comedies such as The Office, the language of nonfiction cinema has become increasingly scrutinized, satirized and reconstituted. This series presents an overview of some of the more compelling works which use reflexive strategies to challenge the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Rather than more recent attempts to employ these conventions as a tool for parody, these works pose more challenging questions about truthful modes of representation in cinema.