10 great mockumentary films

The two sequels – plus a plethora of accompanying albums, books and merchandise – to Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap (1984) seem to prove that the fandom for a fictional band can swell as large as that for a real one. In Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Reiner reprises his role as Marty DiBergi, the very much partial and non-neutral documentary filmmaker inspired by Martin Scorsese in his concert film The Last Waltz (1978). 

Although it takes the credit for catapulting the mockumentary genre into the pop culture domain, the Spinal Tap franchise owes its format to a long legacy of devious mock and pseudo-docs. A genre that plays fast and loose with the split between fiction and reality (fourth-wall-breaking is a given), the film mockumentary emerged in the 1960s to counteract the nascent cinéma vérité movement. Instead, the mockumentary’s founding philosophy was that anything appearing in front of the camera is, to varying extents, an illusion – an idea filmmakers have taken full advantage of. Mockumentaries sit on a scale from patent tomfoolery to full-on cinematic hoaxes designed to dupe viewers, but the framing device of the fake documentary always adds a layer of disorientation.

At its best, this cinematic ruse can help filmmakers wrestle with real questions about the nature of filmmaking. The experimental filmmakers who pioneered the form, dating back to Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread (1933) and Peter Watkins’ fake docs, were interested in giving the mockumentary a political sting, comedy providing a light-hearted package for the most serious of topics. 

As Spinal Tap II arrives on UK screens from 12 September, we’ve chosen 10 subversive mockumentaries that expertly trick and entertain.

Director: Shirley Clarke

Breaking ground as one of the earliest found-footage films, Shirley Clarke’s rollicking, freewheeling directorial debut opens with a title card claiming that the ensuing film is the work of documentarian Jim Dunn, since mysteriously vanished. Consequently, the material falls under the jurisdiction of cinematographer J.J. Burden. We only catch a glimpse of J.J.’s reflection much later, a man who has far more empathy with this mockumentary’s subjects – a band of jazz-playing stir-crazy heroin addicts holed up in a New York apartment, restlessly awaiting their next hit – than the unfeeling, exploitative director Jim. Clarke’s film lashes out against both cinéma vérité (by then in full swing) and censorship, questioning whether anything in front of the camera lens can be truly “natural”.

Its straightforward but effective premise belongs to Jack Gelber, who adapted the script from his 1959 play of the same name. Clarke initially trained as a dancer, evidenced in her light-footed, whirling camerawork, which is set against a rhythm of monologues and melodies.

Director: Jim McBride

Over the course of Jim McBride’s discomfiting work of metacinema, the misguided, eponymous protagonist David (L. M. Kit Carson) films beleaguered pedestrians without their permission, spies on his neighbour and stalks his ex – all in the pursuit of cinema. At the film’s start he quotes Godard’s gospel that film is “truth 24 times a second”, conveniently omitting that filmmaker’s conclusion that “every cut is a lie.” But what David hopes will capture the essence of modern-day life in America winds up becoming more an exposé of his own questionable behaviour, with the author of the work oblivious to its real meaning.

McBride and Carson sank a Museum of Modern Art grant, intended to go towards a book on cinéma vérité, into this audiovisual critique of the movement’s principles. On the shoestring budget, the duo enlisted cinematographer Michael Wadleigh (who later directed the 1970 concert film Woodstock) to bring a guerrilla filmmaking approach to New York’s Upper West Side. The docu-fiction experiment is ultimately an exploration of the relationship between the cinematic medium and control.

Director: Peter Watkins

English director Peter Watkins’ warped, disturbing vision of 1970s America and the reality of police brutality and corrupt law enforcement hews closer to tragedy than comedy. Any humour lies in the sheer ludicrousness of the rigged, but believable, system its counterculturalists find themselves in.

Shot on a single camera in the Mojave desert, the film sees European journalists documenting the aftermath of a state of emergency declared by Nixon’s government. Under the Internal Security Act, members of the anti-war, civil rights, feminist and communist movements are detained and sentenced in an emotionally explosive, hair-tearing emergency tribunal – before being dispatched into the desert and essentially used as target practice for police officer trainees. By the time Punishment Park was released, Watkins had already tested the boundary between reality and fiction with pseudo-docs The War Game (1966) and The Gladiators (1969) (coming up with the latter’s televised-fight-to-the-death premise decades before The Hunger Games). His work raises the question of whether fiction – or exaggerated truth – is a better tool for change than simple fact.

Director: Peter Greenaway

Taking place in an apparent alternate universe host to the ‘VUE’ (a violent unknown event) with 19 million victims, Peter Greenaway’s avant-garde, encyclopaedic first full-length feature exaggerates the officious formality and orderliness of the documentary form against the baffling weirdness of its outlandish premise. 

Across its three-hour runtime, a staggering 92 alphabetically arranged chapters are dedicated to different, often interlinked, survivors of the catastrophe whose surnames all start with ‘Fall’. They now suffer from strange symptoms: morphing to grow wings; obtaining knowledge of birds and aviation; and gaining immortality. The Quay brothers cameo in one section as the enigmatic tight-rope-walking twins Ipson and Pulat Fallari.

Director: Woody Allen

Opening with interviews with contemporary intellectuals Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Irving Howe, Woody Allen’s filmic tall-tale pertains to a human chameleon, Zelig (Allen), who takes on the traits of those he keeps company with. Supposedly a figure who has faded from public memory, Zelig possesses a superhuman skill that allows him to seamlessly pirouette through different pockets of society, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s soirées to Clara Bow’s Hollywood set. Through the use of then-innovative blue-screens, Allen is implanted into different scenarios, settings and personas.

A handy allegory for Jewish cultural assimilation and its discord with American individualism, the film presents its shapeshifting hero as a product of antisemitism. After his second feature Take the Money and Run (1969), Allen returns to the mockumentary on a more ambitious scale and with a clearer-cut concept – and its wacky gamble pays off.

Director: Rusty Cundieff

After the example set by This Is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary genre began to embrace its propensity for silliness. Rusty Cundieff’s feature debut was one of the first to follow in Rob Reiner’s droll footsteps. The fictional documentary maker of this film, Nina Blackburn (Kasi Lemmons), seeks to produce a sober study of the hip-hop industry as part of her academic research, with the hat-donning group NWH serving as her case study. Except its disreputable trinity (Cundieff, Larry B Scott and Mark Christopher Lawrence) make for a rather chaotic, unaccommodating and odd example. 

Rife with lowbrow humour levelled at everything from laughably lurid rap lyrics to the ubiquity of ‘Ice’ as a rap moniker in the 90s, Cundieff confronts the stereotypes surrounding hip-hop – including violence and misogyny – with amped up humour. The comedy is also littered with contemporary parodies, from “Jike Spingleton” (John Singleton meets Spike Lee) to MC Slammer. Beyond the cheap gags, this affectionate satire makes weighty points, particularly about the industry’s white shot-callers, police brutality and unfair censorship.

Directors: Costa Botes and Peter Jackson

In one of cinema’s most successful hoaxes, Peter Jackson and Costa Botes convinced swathes of New Zealanders of the existence of the intrepid but unknown godfather of film Colin McKenzie, whose reels Jackson supposedly finds collecting dust in a family friend’s shed. Testimonies from McKenzie’s ex-wife and Sam Neill, plus rapt eulogies from the likes of film historian Leonard Maltin, lent credibility to the far-fetched account, while fake archival footage offered the final deceptive touch.

It tells the story of a South Island-born filmmaker alive in the late 19th century, with an impressive array of cutting-edge inventions to his name: the first feature-length film; synchronising sound to motion-pictures; colour film and the close-up. But at every turn his innovative efforts are somehow thwarted. Possibly the film’s biggest giveaway is its segue into Indiana Jones-adjacent territory, the crew traipsing through the New Zealand foothills in search of McKenzie’s recreation of Jerusalem. Part indulgent fantasy, part dry comment on the woes of the film industry, this mockumentary is foremost a lesson in how to hoodwink an audience.

Director: Tim Robbins

Taking its beats from the documentary Dont Look Back (1967), Tim Robbins’ directorial debut presents the eponymous Republican senatorial candidate Robert ‘Bob’ Roberts Jr (Robbins himself) as a sly inversion of Bob Dylan: commandeering the folk songs of the 60s to preach conservative ideals as if revolutionary. British documentary maker Terry Manchester follows the campaign trail of the dogwhistling candidate, his camera subtly revealing Bob’s casual racism, misogyny and homophobia.

Robbins’ “rebel conservative” had his origins in a Saturday Night Live sketch by the writer-director. The figure is an amalgamation of multiple then recent presidents but, with its backdrop of the Gulf War, a clear skewering of the Bush administration. For the film version, Robbins enlisted a shady Alan Rickman as Bob’s right-hand man Lukas Hart III and Gore Vidal as his even-handed campaign opponent. The comedy lampoons hollow politics, with eerie echoes to be found in present-day America.

Director: Christopher Guest

Part of Christopher Guest’s winning streak of mockumentaries (after he starred in This Is Spinal Tap and directed 1996’s Waiting for Guffman), Best in Show sees him reunite with co-writer Eugene Levy and an ensemble cast including Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban and Parker Posey – this time with Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch and John Michael Higgins also on board. 

Marrying the freshness of improv comedy with the mockumentary format, the action follows five rival pups en route to compete in a prestigious dog show. What the comedy really showcases, however, is the eccentricity of the canines’ owners, resulting in a delightfully campy extravaganza.

Director: Zak Penn

Making full use of the mockumentary’s ability to muddy the border between reality and fiction, there are meta layers upon layers to this Scotland-set dramedy. A collaboration between Werner Herzog and director Zak Penn which, in turn, imagines a joint project between them that goes awry – the disastrous shenanigans documented by a separate filmmaking team – the film starts off rooted in reality but wades into increasingly nightmarish waters.

Assuming their onscreen alter-egos as director (Herzog) and producer (Penn), the pair and their crew make an excursion to Loch Ness where Herzog will shoot a documentary on fictitious monsters dreamt up by the cultural consciousness. Penn is cast as the despicable villain of the piece, derailing the production with inept decisions and arrogant interfering – symbolising the worst of Hollywood’s values. In this surreal, morbidly funny odyssey, Herzog lore is debunked while the Nessie myth lives on.