Roscoe, Jane, and Craig Hight. Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.

This group of texts have been labeled using a variety of terms; ‘faux documentary’ (Francke, 19996), ‘pseudo-documentary’, ‘mocumentary’, ‘cinéma vérité with a wink’ (Harrington, 1994), ‘cinéma un-vérité’ (Ansen, 1997), ‘black comedy presented as in-your-face documentary’, ‘spoof documentary’ and ‘quasi-documentary’ (Neale and Krutnik, 1990). We favour the term ‘mock-documentary’ (including the hyphen) for two reasons:

1 because it suggests its origins in copying a pre-existing form, in an effort to construct (or more accurately, re-construct) a screen form with which the audience is assumed to be familiar

2 because the other meaning of the word ‘mock’ (to subvert or ridicule by imitation) suggests something of this screen form’s parodic agenda towards the documentary genre. This is an agenda which we argue is inevitably constructed (however inadvertently by some filmmakers) from mock-documentary’s increasingly sophisticated appropriation of documentary codes and conventions. (1)

Our definition of mock-documentary is specifically limited to fictional texts; those which make a partial or concerted effort to appropriate documentary codes and conventions in order to represent a fictional subject. 2