A few days ago, I binged on “American Vandal”. It’s a mockumentary where a high school student is trying to find the truth behind a huge high school prank on the staff gone too far. One student is expelled as he is the only person that “fits”. It is hilarious, the prank itself is funny, but it does a great job of showing you the way a documentary would be worked on. The documentarist as he at some point addresses himself as, shows the work ethic it takes to create something like a documentary. All his interviews, the research and questioning of everyone, all the theories. I mean documentarist aren’t just filmmakers, they become scientists, detectives, whatever they need to be “to find the truth”. That stuck out to me, this work of fiction, a show about some high school mockup getting blamed for something he would probably end up doing anyway, it’s a damn great piece of work. I mean it may honestly be some of the best insight into a documentary that I have seen in a while, it parodies true crimes but it’s a whole lot more honest than most of those series. Most of all it’s a hell of a lot more honest than “Nanook of the north”. Don’t get me wrong Nanook was kind of cool, but let’s be honest it was staged and fake and wasn’t exactly upfront about it. It didn’t have a message, it didn’t shed any light on an issue, or even try to reach any truth. This Netflix original which is upfront about its mocking nature. It does hold message although at the very end in a short speech, and it certainly goes about showing some real-life process that a documentary or crime research might go through and I mean that’s cool. Seeing as I’m passing 300 words by now, American Vandal set out to make a fake crime documentary on probably the most bro humor topic you could think of, yet it gave the viewer a view into what the work is like and you walked away with a message and maybe even some truth. It’s a bit weird to think that this is what we call mockumentaries while Nanook is still a “real” documentary, props to Netflix for making what some may see as a joke of a genre into something that honestly holds its weight.
I watched the first three episodes of this show after you mentioned it in class last week, and I agree, it’s just great! You’ll start to see where the director got some of his ideas as we watch more films in class. He really draws on some typical doc film norms that originated with some folks we’ll watch.
You mention that the film’s process is really highlighted, and there’s one scene I quite like in this respect. In the 3rd episode, the camera person is shooting b-roll – footage that might be used in editing to stitch other scenes together. The main guy says: what are you doing?? So the show makes an interesting point about how subjects may behave during the shooting process.