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Part of The Parodic Nature of the Appropriation of Factual Codes and Conventions in Mockumentaries / Polska Sztuka Ludowa - Konteksty 2014 Special Issue

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BEATA KOSINSKAKRIPPNER

The Parodic Nature of
the Appropriation of
Factual Codes and
Conventions in
Mockumentaries
Both parody and satire depend on
the sophistication of the viewer,
and on some familiarity with the parodic target.
Carl Plantinga

I

n 2001Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, classifying
film scripts according to their relation with the
factual discourse generated by a given text, cre­
ated their own list of mock-documentaries.1 If we look
at some interesting examples of the genre produced
outside the English-speaking world such as Dark Side
of the Moon, Year of the Devil, Czech Dream and First
on the Moon through the prism of the classification
proposed by the Australian-New Zealand researchers
then they can be placed probably more between De­
gree II (critique) and Degree III (deconstuction) of
mockumentaries rather than belonging to Degree I
(parody) although in a certain sense they all possess
the features of a parody.

D ark Side of the Moon
William Karel’s 2002 French film Opération Lune2
(aka Dark Side of the Moon/Kubrick, Nixon und der
Mann im Mond3) is one of the most intriguing and
important mock-documentaries capable of deceiving
even an experienced viewer; ostensibly it records dis­
covering previously unknown, sensational facts about
the historical US landing on the moon in July 1969.
The off-camera commentary defines space flights
as a highly spectacular and prestigious and thus impor­
tant aspect of the Cold War waged by the U SA and
the USSR. When in 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the
first man in history to fly into outer space President
John F. Kennedy proclaimed that sending a man to
the moon should become one of the main goals of the
American nation. This task was assigned to the Ger­
man scientist Wernher von Braun, a former NSD A P
member recruited by the Americans at the end of
World War II. Having gained experience working on
the production of V1 and V2 rockets von Braun be­
came involved with N A SA . In January 1967 the crew
414

of Apollo 1 died in a fire during a launch pad test.
Three months later, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov,
commander of the first multi-man spaceflight, per­
ished while returning to Earth. Yuri Gagarin died in a
training plane crash, and in July that year a Soviet
rocket exploded when its fuel tanks were being filled.
The Americans gained a momentary advantage con­
cealing the fact that space conquest rivalry was actu­
ally a cover-up for a more significant if less spectacular
issue - the national defence system. The construction
of spaceships was a part of a highly expensive missile
programme. Supportive public opinion, however, was
necessary to convince Congress about the need for
high expenditure relating to the defence system. A
flight to the moon, a peaceful enterprise, won univer­
sal support. Still, it was necessary to show what the
immense sums of money had been spent on. Von
Braun was the first to realize that an expedition to the
moon must be a captivating show, which only Holly­
wood was able to produce. “Dream factory” profes­
sionals were asked to help. Briefly before the Apollo
11 launch entire Hollywood stopped working on other
films and 700 technicians travelled to Cape Canaver­
al. Producer Jack Torrance of Paramount Pictures su­
pervised the whole undertaking. Attention was paid
to every single detail but something unpredictable that
people should not be allowed to witness could always
occur. Technical difficulties could have prevented the
transmission of images presenting man’s first steps on
the moon. The White House was prepared also for
this eventuality, and it was decided that an “emergen­
cy” studio-set version of the landing would be pro­
duced. According to the off-screen commentary Presi­
dent Nixon found it more important to have the astro­
nauts seen walking on the moon than to have them
actually doing it. This is why he chose to produce the
world’s most expensive film of all times: the staged
landing of Apollo 11. If the astronauts had landed
safely but could not transmit live coverage back to
Earth due to unforeseen technical issues the whole ex­
tremely expensive undertaking would have been a
sheer waste of time from the PR viewpoint. In the case
of a failure of the Apollo programme photos were
needed to show to the wavering audience. The Presi­
dent ordered Donald Rumsfeld to make Stanley Ku­
brick a proposal to direct the undertaking. Karel’s film
suggests that Neil Armstrong’s famous moon walk ei­
ther did not happen at all or, if it did take place, the
TV audience of 2 billion watched a staging directed by
Stanley Kubrick in the same Borehamwood sound­
stage (Great Britain) where he shot 2001: A Space Od­
yssey. The filmmaker agreed to become involved be­
cause he owed a debt of gratitude to the authorities for
being permitted to shoot some of the scenes of Doctor
Strangelove (1964) in actual Pentagon locations. The
film presents evidence backing the staged landing the-

Beata Kosińska-Krippner • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

sis, e.g. photos of a staked fluttering flag even though
there is no wind on the moon, astronauts casting shad­
ows in diverse directions and thus suggesting the ap­
plication of several sources of lighting, no blast crater
visible under the rocket’s nozzle, a clearly seen and as
if illuminated inscription on the spacecraft saying:
“United States” even though the rest of the spaceship
is hidden in deep shade, information about extreme
temperature changes on the moon, which would cause
considerable chemical transformations of the film’s
emulsion and mechanical damage of the camera itself,
information that X-radiation would have blurred the
film tape and that ultraviolet rays would have distort­
ed colours perfect in the transmission, that with lunar
gravity being different from its Earth counterpart the
astronauts’ weight would have been insufficient to
leave the deep footprints on moon dust that we see in
the photographs, that there should have been dust
around the landers, that the temperature and radia­
tion changes on the moon are deadly for men while
the spacesuits worn by the astronauts could not have
protected them, that in all the photographs made on
the moon there was no flash, which according to ex­
perts should have been visible since the astronauts
taking the photographs would have been reflected in
the helmets of other crew members, etc. In addition to
evidence of this kind presented by former KGB agent
Dimitri Muffley (Soviet Intelligence suspected mystifi­
cation and discovered its shortcomings) the thesis’
credibility is boosted by testimony of people familiar
with the truth about the staging, such as Kubrick’s
widow, who seems to confirm the revelations un­
earthed by the film, her brother (Kubrick’s executive
producer), Nixon’s secretary Eva Kendall, Hollywood
producer Jack Torrance, Marla Vargas (sister of the
cosmonaut Buzz Aldrin), Rabbi W.A. Koenigsberg,
David Bowman of the Houston Space Centre, and
Ambrose Chapel, an ex-CIA agent and currently a
pastor, who refused to participate in the undertaking
but was forced to keep it secret. With each successive
piece of evidence and eye-witness comment the film
becomes increasingly credible, especially considering
that Christiane Kubrick is joined by American politi­
cal experts and public figures: astronauts Jeffrey Hoff­
man and David Scott, and N A SA supervisor Farouk
El-Baz. After some time, however, the more attentive
viewer starts to pick up signals questioning or subvert­
ing the factual status of Dark Side of the Moon. The
very moment when this happens - as is usually the
case with mockumentaries - depends on the individu­
al viewer. Suspicions certainly appear about 30 min­
utes into the film - if not earlier - when we hear that
Nixon became afraid that the witnesses would talk
and wanted to halt the whole operation but it was al­
ready too late and the machinery had been set in mo­
tion. According to the commentary, an assassination
415

Opération lune

Barkside of the Moon
m ih il

list appeared on the President’s desk. It is also hard to
believe in a hunt for members of the film crew produc­
ing the moon hoax and their killings, or to treat seri­
ously the suggestion that a heart attack was not neces­
sarily the cause of Kubrick’s death. This is highly far­
fetched and this is exactly how it is supposed to be
because Dark Side of the Moon is a mystification, a
mock-documentary to be precise, which - as I have
already mentioned - if included on the Roscoe and
Hight list would be probably classified as belonging to
Degree III. William Karel, the director, is a Tunisianborn French filmmaker known as a serious version of
Michael Moore, author of political and historical doc­
umentaries dealing with sensitive subjects. Karel sup­
posedly likes to recall François Truffaut’s words that a
documentary is a thousand times more of a lie than
fiction, where things are clear from the very begin­
ning. Advertised by official CBS material as a subtle
mixture of fact, fiction and hypotheses, Dark Side of
the Moon applies documentary testimonies, archival
film material and extensive interviews, mixing them
together perfectly at the editing stage. Consequently,
for quite some time the final result convinces us that
we are witnessing the unveiling of truth - concealed
for many years - about the first moon landing directed
by Kubrick in a soundstage. We become less certain
about the film’s status (or at least we should do so)
when we learn the truth about the numerous murders
contracted by the US authorities to eliminate witness­

Beata Kosmska-Knptmer • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

es of the mystification; this truth is spewed by such
figures as Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld,
former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Director of
Central Intelligence Richard Helms, astronaut Buzz
Aldrin, assistant to Kissinger Lawrence Eagleburger,
General Alexander Haig, former Deputy Director of
the CIA Vernon Walters, Christine Kubrick and Jan
Harlan. But do these persons really convey the revela­
tions? A more thorough analysis of the film indicates
that they do not. Concrete - frequently shocking - in­
formation is delivered by a voice-over or fictitious
characters played by actors. Take this example: off­
screen commentary about Kubrick’s close relations
with N A SA is immediately followed by added - as if to
confirm - remarks by Christine Kubrick and Jan Har­
lan, even though they only discuss a special Zeiss lens
originally designed for a N A SA satellite programme,
which - we learn from another source - was lent to
Kubrick (presumably in recognition of his Space Odys­
sey) for shooting Barry Lyndon (1975). Eve Kendall,
Nixon’s secretary, recounts that someone from N ix­
on’s circle asked: What if we film the first steps on the
Moon in a studio? but Kendall is a fictitious character
portrayed by Barbara Rogers. Kendall’s statement is
followed by a cut and Rumsfeld saying: I talked to the
President and Kissinger supported me... We never find
out what exactly Rumsfeld told the President, but we
get the impression that he initiated the whole mystifi­
cation. Another sentence spoken by him is just as en­
igmatic: I thought this was the right thing to do because we
have to do something to show that we are still the United
States of America... General Vernon Walters says that
he warned the President: It is very dangerous to lie in the
United States, but we cannot tell what lie he had in
mind. From astronaut Buzz Aldrin we learn only that:
There were some unusual things that happened, such as:
President Nixon had prepared some remarks for a speech
to give if we could not leave the moon and come back. The
off-camera commentary mentions Aldrin’s depression
after he returned from the mission. His wife, Lois, says
that he became an alcoholic, at loss what to do with
himself, and his sister, Marla Vargas (a fictitious char­
acter portrayed by Jacquelyn Toman), embellishes the
story by recalling how Aldrin used to get drunk every
day. Meanwhile, the viewer’s imagination provoked by
the meticulously edited footage links these comments
with the mystification into a cause-and-effect chain.
This also happens when astronaut David Scott pro­
claims: This was a great film, presumably talking about
Space Odyssey while the viewer gets the impression
that he meant the moon mystification. When the voi­
ceover informs us that Nixon was overcome by panic
leading to his condemnable decision, we see Rumsfeld
claiming: It is not something I wanna do (...) and (...) so
I left, but naturally he does not tell us what precisely
he was not involved in. Haig, meanwhile, claims he

told Nixon: This is going to turn into the biggest scandal
that this country has ever seen. Those of us who worked
with Nixon know not to take seriously everything he said
when he was under stress. This time not only do we not
learn what words it was impossible to treat seriously,
but also who uttered them. The situation repeats itself
when Kissinger proclaims in front of the camera: He
said some awful things, but they were never done. A pas­
tor, a former CIA agent, who did not want to partici­
pate and was forced to vanish, assume a new identity
- that of Ambrose Chapel - and promise he would
keep the hoax secret, introduces us to an atmosphere
of crime, plots and a conspiracy of silence but turns
out to be a fictitious character performed by John Rog­
ers. Paramount Pictures producer Jack Torrance (an­
other fictitious character portrayed by David Winger)
describes the production details of the world’s most ex­
pensive film. We find out from David Bowman of the
Houston Space Centre (enacted by Tad Brown) that
Armstrong’s famous sentence about the giant leap for
mankind was actually written by someone else and
that astronauts used to joke about it; the deadly threat
posed by special forces to film crew members is men­
tioned by Rabbi W.A. Koenigsberg (a fictitious char­
acter played by Binem Oreg). As in every mock-docu­
mentary the closing credits offer a last chance to rec­
ognise the fictitious status of the film, with the disori­
ented viewers learning that the characters they as­
sumed were authentic are actually portrayed by actors
and that it was they, and only they, who made the
most sensational, “expository” statements.
Distinct features of mockumentaries include the
signals that the director sends from time to time to
the audience (before explaining everything in the
end credits), suggesting the fabricated character of
the film. Dark Side of the Moon has its share of them,
such as the names of fictitious personae dramatis. Eve
Kendall is a character in North by Northwest (1959),
Marla Vargas - in The Barefoot Countess (1954), Jack
Torrance - in The Shining (1980), David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ambrose Chapel is
the name of the spy headquarters in The Man Who
Knew Too Much (1956), Dimitri Muffley combines
the names of two presidents from Dr. Strangelove
(1964), and W.A. Koenigsberg is a play on the name
of Woody Allen (W.A), Koenigsberg being Allen’s
true surname. If these names failed to make audiences
suspicious the grotesque story about the hunt for the
film crew and their assassinations should certainly do
the trick. Mention is due to the rabbi’s excellent story
recalling how for ten years he hid one of the produc­
tion designers and taught him Yiddish: One night he
was set on by some hooligans in the Bronx. When they
found out he was a Jew, they forced him to do a few al­
terations to their suits. Then they beat him up and left
him for dead. He spent six months in a coma in Mount

416

Beata Kosińska-Krippner • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

Sinai hospital. And one morning he died. Equally note­
worthy is the off-camera information about the film
crew escaping to Vietnam and the US government
airdropping thousands (!) of armed soldiers and secret
agents to catch and eliminate them, along with the
hilarious recollections of alleged Vietnamese peasants
(subtitled into English) about the agents arriving in
their village: For secret agents they weren’t very discreet.
They had no respect for anything. We found empty beer
cans and McDonald’s wrappers everywhere (...) Ama­
teurs, real amateurs. One of them killed himself cleaning
his revolver. We kept the body for the kids to play with
(...). They were only interested in one thing: girls. It was
a real obsession with them (...). They spent their whole
time smoking grass. And it wasn’t just mineral water they
were drinking. They completely destroyed the village’s at­
mosphere. A real disaster. Twenty years later, you can
still see their traces (we see an old man drinking vodka
straight from a bottle) And all for nothing! They never
found anyone. A woman says: (...) They tried to pass
themselves off as Vietnamese peasants. Their disguises and
accents were perfect. But we identified them in 30 seconds
(...) their commanding officer was black! The end cred­
its reveal that the Vietnamese peasants were probably
residents of China and Laos, because the film features
fragments of documentaries about the population of
those two countries. The hints become stronger as the
film draws to a close. The voice-over states that Nixon
sent numerous armed forces to hunt down the film­
makers and ... dress up their murders to look like ac­
cidents. When Chapel says that several crewmembers
died in accidents we see a man lying in a street, with
a dozen or so Santas leaning over him, and when we
hear that one of the assistant directors drowned in his
pool we see two men throwing a dog into a lake. We
also learn that a dismembered body of one of the film­
makers was found in Patagonia, with the police claim­
ing it was suicide.
Another evident and thus remarkably funny signal
is the fact that the already discussed proof of the moon
landing hoax theory (the fluttering flag, the shadows,
the absence of dust, the unexpectedly well preserved
footprints, etc.), quoted in all publications and docu­
mentaries on the topic, features also evidence added
by Karel - an image showing a photo of Kubrick shoot­
ing 2001: A Space Odyssey accidentally left on the fake
moon surface. Finally - as I have already mentioned we also find out that Dimitri Muffley, the former KGB
agent discussing the evidence, is a fictitious charac­
ter portrayed by Bernard Kirschoff. Interestingly, al­
though the film seems to support the thesis that the
Apollo 11 landing on the moon was a trick (and many
viewers interpreted it in this way), universally known
and widely discussed proof is automatically ridiculed
and deprecated by the fact that it was presented by a
fictitious character. This is why the film can be catego­
417

rized as a first - and second-degree mock documentary
according to the Roscoe and Hight classification. In
a concealed manner it supports the myth of man on
the moon, introducing only slight anxiety about its
connections with reality and simultaneously deriding
the codes and conventions of the documentary, chal­
lenging its authority, and inspiring concern about such
other factual forms as daily news programmes.
Dark Side of the Moon is a masterfully assembled
manipulation combining interviews and statements by
authentic people taken out of context with stagings
featuring actors portraying fictitious characters. The
closing credits are followed by final interpretation di­
rectives. The so-called bloopers, i.e. mistakes made by
cast members and jokes caused by the absurd nature of
the dialogue include the twice repeated statement by
an alleged KGB agent: We soon realised the whole thing
was a hoax... along with a declaration by Walters, who
is dubbed throughout the entire film: Listen to me now
and believe me because I’m going to tell you the truth. . . ;
earlier, the sentence ended with the words (naturally,
spoken by the actor dubbing Walters): This could mean
people’s lives, while the post-credits version has: I want
you to believe me because this is the truth (...) I never had
any relationship with that woman. A t the end we also
see a relaxed Rumsfeld saying: You told me this was a
high-class programme and a laughing Helms also stating
that he thought this was a serious programme. Does
this mean that they agreed to have their statements
used in the film and reacted with laughter? Intuition
and experience gained in the course of the film tell
us that these sentences too were taken out of context
and do not concern Dark Side of the Moon. This may
be confirmed by words unambiguously signalling at the
end of the film that this is a parody of documentaries:
Any resemblance to actual living persons is purely coin­
cidental. No goy was mistreated during the filming. The
director verified this in an interview for the Arte TV
channel4 (although perhaps also in this case we should
adopt a cautious attitude). When asked how he came
up with the idea of shooting a documentary that does
not reflect reality Karel answered: I have just completed
a film about Hollywood that does not correspond to (Hol­
lywood’s) reality. Together with an Arte France editor in
charge of documentaries we were thinking about making
a documenteur, to use Agnes Varda’s term (a play on
words —documentaire —documentary, and the similarly
sounding menteur —lying, as in: fictitious). In this way
we intended to contribute something amusing to the oth­
erwise serious Arte programme line-up. This had to be an
entertaining, funny film. First and foremost, we assumed
that one should not believe everything the media are trying
to sell, because it is always possible to persuade witnesses
to give false testimony, forge archival materials, and com­
pletely distort the message of a documentary by using fake
subtitles or dubbing. We wanted to present historical sub­

Beata Kosińska-Krippner • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

ject matter but one that would be universally topical. Since
the theme could not be awkward, murder and war were
strictly out of the question. This is when we thought about
photos of man’s first steps on the Moon. This particular is­
sue matched our requirements: the photos’ authenticity has
been discussed for the last thirty years. Jean-Luc Godard’s
statement declaring on a TF1 news programme: These
live broadcasts are fake, provided an impulse. Sceptics
can cite all types of proof: Aldrin became an alcoholic,
Nixon was not there when the rocket was launched, and
the astronauts travelled thousands of kilometres to spend
only three hours on the moon. All very strange, so...
In the same interview Karel also put an end to all
speculations about well-known people being aware of
their involvement in his prank. Asked how he man­
aged to convince the film’s protagonists to participate,
he answered: Not a single one was in on the joke. The
idea was to say that the interviews had a completely differ­
ent purpose. This is why we did not let any of the witnesses
into the secret. Only seven actors were involved and actu­
ally given lines to learn. They played some of the witnesses.
(For example, the character of Nixon’s adviser was taken
from the film All the President’s Men). Due to twist­
ing the testimony of authentic figures we needed only one
“false" witness, Nixon’s secretary, to make the whole story
logical and credible. We told the “real" witnesses that we
were making a film about Kubrick, his film, the moon or
NASA, and asked them totally vague questions. Christine
Kubrick appeared in the film convinced that it was to
tell the story of her husband and in good faith related
Kubrick’s contacts with N A SA , which allowed him to
borrow a military lens to shoot Barry Lyndon. Farouk
El-Baz was convinced that he was going to take part
in a film about behind-the-scenes of the U.S.-Soviet
space race. Nixon’s advisors were filmed in different
places and for the purpose of other films, and their
statements were taken out of the original context.
Karel - as many authors of mockumentaries before
him - was charged with attacking the media and ques­
tioning our attitude towards photographs. Without
moon landing photos it would be impossible to fully render
the event. In addition, the cinema exerts an influence upon
news programmes. Many authentic historical events were
captured on camera already after they actually took place:
raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi during
the Battle of Iwo Jima, capturing the Reichstag, Ameri­
cans landing in Somalia (shot two or three times). And
during the Gulf and Afghanistan wars we did not see... a
single authentic photo. I considered showing the role played
by a photo, or its lack, in constructing an event to be an
intriguing undertaking. But my film should not give the
impression of being malicious... Nowhere did we actually
say that Armstrong had not walked on the moon. The film
only set forth a hypothesis claiming that the USA prepared
itself for an eventuality that man’s first steps on the Moon
could not be photographed. When does the viewer begin to

doubt? When do we let him know that he is dealing with a
joke? This is not really clear. Hence we included a parodical collection of stylistic giveaways at the film’s end in case
anyone still believed it.
The director also formulated a summary: Manoeu­
vring carefully between lies and truth, the film combines
facts with total fabrication. We used all possible ingredi­
ents: “captured” archival film material, fake documents,
and authentic interviews taken out of their original context
or transformed by narration or dubbing, and staged in­
terviews featuring actors, whose answers adhered to the
screenplay...
In keeping with the spirit of the mock-documen­
tary theory a certain group of viewers took the film
seriously even though it indicates its fictitious char­
acter on numerous occasions in an evident and amus­
ing way and, as follows from the interview, despite the
director’s concern not to leave any doubts about its
status. This reaction is demonstrated by comments on
several Internet forums, both Polish and foreign, with
some disoriented viewers asking for help in finding fur­
ther information about the film, and others confessing
how they were fooled by the joke when they saw the
film for the first time and describing how pleasant it
was to watch it more carefully for the second time.
The Polish website of the Planete TV channel5 be­
came the arena of a rather amusing discussion that
simultaneously says quite a lot about the reception of
mockumentaries. One viewer expressed his outrage
caused by an article by Tadeusz Sobolewski, which
he found shocking; in the last sentence the journalist
aptly defined the mock-documentary message of the
film (without, however, using the genre’s name): In
the earlier Operation Luna, supposedly made for fun, he
achieved a paradoxical effect. He had not only aroused
distrust towards American propaganda but also towards
films revealing behind-the-scenes goings-on of major poli­
tics, which put the chaos of reality into order by using one
obsessive key.6 And here is how the viewer reacted: If
the discussed documentary really is an intentional hoax
then William Karel deliberately offended viewers all over
the world, jeopardized the TV channels that decided to
show the film, and intentionally endangered the independ­
ent foreign policy of the French state. I expect the Board of
TV Planete in France to condemn this unprecedented me­
dia hoax and to apologise to Polish TV viewers for moral
losses. I appeal to members of this forum —see this scandal­
ous film for yourself... The forum’s administrator, who
correctly interpreted the film’s intentions but failed
to completely decipher all its elements, especially the
signals sent by the director, replied as follows: The di­
rector did not intend to conduct an investigation about the
moon landing but to prove that TV is a remarkably power­
ful medium. Contemporary technology makes it possible to
manipulate other people’s words and images in almost any
way you want. Karel deliberately does not reveal which

418

Beata Kosińska-Krippner • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

fragments of the film were falsified by means of editing and
which were not. In this way the viewer can experience for
himself how difficult it is to distinguish the effects of a good
editor's work from an original recording. There would not
be so much confusion surrounding Operacja Księżyc7 if its
author had decided to include a few words of explanation
at its end. On the other hand, perhaps the director did not
plan to reveal the truth so that those who have already seen
this “mock-documentary” would not give away to first­
timers which fragments of the film are real. Please note
that TVP1 scheduled Karel’s film for 1 April, April Fool's
Day. The Planete premiere of the film was also held on 1
April. The viewer replied: Thank you (...) for the expla­
nation, which I find satisfactory although I have to note
that the Nazi regime already long ago proved the power
of media’s impingement, and an attempt at confirming this
fact by using such a concocted film is pathetic. I would also
like to add another aspect of the issue, which I find im­
portant, that is, the concern about the Polish viewer. The
Polish viewer is more demanding and critical and reacts
to the media in a more serious and engagée manner...
As far as I know, films and dialogues fabricated in this
way are used in Poland by radio and TV stations to pro­
duce amusing entertainment and not documentary films
(■ ■ ■ ). I propose to call William Karel and other producers
of his ilk media terrorists. The administrator’s response
is just as amusing: We agree with your opinion. View­
ers in various countries should not be treated in the same
way. This is precisely why Planete networks were divided
in 2004. Ever since then the channel broadcast in Poland
is prepared by a Polish staff. We showed Dark Side of
the Moon when the schedule was still set up for several
European countries (including Poland) in France. After
the forum’s participants discussed at length assorted
political matters, the same outraged viewer returned
to the film: It was my intention to protest against showing
cinematic jokes as documentaries. The fact that during the
narrator’s account of US soldiers assassinating four secret
agents, who worked with Kubrick on the moon landing
production, information that: “assistant director Jim Gow
was drowned in his swimming pool” is followed by a scene
of a dog being thrown into a large lake shows the way in
which the director makes fun of the viewer. The problem
is that watching this brief scene you get the impression that
a man is being tossed into water. Not one of my friends
who also watched the film saw a dog. Myself included.
Only when examining this scene frame after frame ((!)/
my emphasis -B.K.-K/8) you can clearly perceive the out­
line of a dog.
Why am I writing all this? I am concerned with the
fact that films of this kind not only offend the viewer and
are detrimental to the whole category of documentaries,
but also ridicule the foreign policy of France as obsessively
anti-American. In this situation, even the best documen­
tary criticising Big Brother overseas can arouse distrust.
Another viewer reacted as follows: After more or less

ten minutes it became obvious that we are dealing with a
joke, irony and satire. The objective? First, the pretentious­
ness of politicians, the foolishness of the media, the pursuit
of sensational conspiracy theories, and the lack of ordinary
common sense and a critical assessment of what the mass
media are selling us. The film was great fun... The out­
raged viewer did not give up and quoted his teenage
nephew: “The film cannot be classified into any category.
If you insist, it can be treated as political satire or farce
featuring qualities of therapeutic treatment aimed at people
afflicted with a severe case of the Big Brother syndrome.
Good mood after viewing the film testifies to its consider­
able therapeutic assets". And what about the dog? Here’s
the rub. He [the nephew] could not understand why a
dog was given the part of a man. According to him, a dog
playing the role of a man is already grotesque and spoils
the film’s harmony. One more comment on the same
forum: When watching a science fiction film, on 1 April
to boot, you should keep your distance. Moreover, as far
as I remember the film did not claim that the moon landing
never happened; it mentioned that the recording equipment
did a bad job and that it was necessary to shoot the film in
a studio during the “London session", which I do not find
so improbable. This is the way in which the Polish Tele­
vision website advertised the film: Previously unknown,
sensational facts about the historical U.S. landing on the
moon in July 1969. Eminent American political experts:
Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Lawrence Eagleburg­
er, General Alexander Haig and Richard Helms reveal the
truth concealed for many years ... and quoted (without
explanations and a critical commentary) the earlier
cited fragment of the film’s screenplay about the Cold
War circumstances of developing the moon hoax.9
A description of the film prepared by an organiser of
one of the festivals showing it promoted it as: Shocking
French documentary revealing the most concealed secrets
of the American space programme. It turns out that the
scenes of Apollo 11 landing on the moon, which we all
know from, i.a. film newsreels, were staged in a studio and
directed by none other that Stanley Kubrick himself (!).
Statements by Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld and as­
tronaut Buzz Aldrin add credibility to Karel’s revelation.10
These quotes are rather evocative because within the
context of an earlier analysis of the film they tell us
about problems with the reception and interpretation
of a mockumentary and are among the first records
of a Polish audience (ordinary viewers and people
somehow connected with the film industry) confront­
ing this cinematic form. Foreign forums, even though
audiences in, e.g. the US and the UK are considerably
more familiar with the discussed genre, also featured
comments full of approval for the more humane face
of Henry Kissinger, the relaxed stance of Buzz Aldrin,
Alexander Haig and Kubrick’s widow, and admiration
that a man as busy as Rumsfeld found time to participate
in such a film, along with the question: what inspired

419

Beata Kosmska-Knptmer • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

Rumsfeld to appear, and even assumptions that White
House personalities became involved in the joke to
distract attention from a hoax of a much higher cali­
bre. The latter suggestion was actually mentioned on
the website of the Grimme Preise award, which the
film received in 2003.
Dark Side of the Moon was clearly inspired by Capri­
corn One, Peter Hyams’ 1978 Mars landing hoax film.
With the flight date approaching N A SA specialists re­
alise that the spaceship’s life-support system does not
guarantee success and prefer staging the landing to
cancelling the mission. Just before the ship’s launch its
crew becomes removed from Capricorn One and tak­
en to a desert military base, where they are informed
that they will have to stage the Mars footage. The as­
tronauts initially refuse, but the authorities threaten
their families if they do not cooperate. While the
empty ship continues its flight to Mars the astronauts
spend several months filming the “Mars landing”. The
conspiracy involves only a few N A SA members, until
technicians notice that the television transmission sig­
nal was sent from a near-by destination and spread the
news to journalists. The technicians mysteriously dis­
appear and the journalists find themselves in trouble.
When the crew’s return is expected, the real (empty)
spacecraft is destroyed by fire during re-entry, officially
plunging the whole world into deep mourning for the
three heroes. The astronauts are killed since they are
no longer needed and know too much. Conspiracy
Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? - John Moffet’s
2001 American documentary may have been the sec­
ond source of inspiration for Karel. Dark Side of the
Moon essentially appears to be a spin-off of the Moffet production. Both films are constructed in a highly
similar way - they use interviews and archival foot­
age and propose the same arguments and evidence of
the staged Moon landing of Apollo 11; in Karel’s film
they are presented by a fictitious former KGB agent,
but Moffet’s picture features authentic characters photography and sound experts, scientists and Bill
Kaysing, the “king of conspiracy theories” specialis­
ing in tracking down evidence supporting the moon
hoax theory. Both films expand the motif of staging
man’s first steps on the moon, but Karel focuses on
Kubrick, the alleged director of this enterprise, and on
the landing’s studio-set staging, while Moffett is only
interested in evidence of the hoax itself, which the
film claims took place in a secret military base in the
Nevada desert. Although Moffett allowed himself to
make a joke by bringing in Mitch Pileggi, the X-Files
star, as his narrator, he decisively defined his film’s
status by opening it with the following caption: The
following program deals with a controversial subject. The
theories expressed are not the only possible interpretation.
Viewers are invited to make a judgment based on all avail­
able information.
420

Year of the Devil and Czech Dream
While in certain countries (e.g. the U SA , the
United Kingdom, New Zealand) the mockumentary
is already a well-known and appreciated sub-genre,
in many other ones it is taking its first steps albeit
with films that can be classified as superior examples
of this cinematic form. Among them is the excel­
lent Czech Rok dabla (Year of the Devil, 2002) di­
rected by Petr Zelenka. In the tradition of a majority
of mockumentaries its classification proved a tough
task for the reviewers. Some attempted to describe
it as docufiction where, as the plot advances and ab­
surd events start to accumulate, the viewer loses grasp
of what is real and what is fiction... it makes genre clas­
sification difficult, freely referring to various cinematic
styles, from the documentary and the music movie to
the comedy. Its strength certainly lies in the creation of
the presented world;11 this depiction reveals the film’s
mock-documentary character. Year of the Devil ini­
tially produces the impression of a music documen­
tary or, more precisely, a documentary biography of
the Czech singer, composer and poet Jaromir Nohavica, featuring elements typical for motion pic­
tures of this kind, such as footage from rehearsals
and fragments of concerts. It applies absurd state­
ments and weird occurrences to point out that its
status is not entirely factual and we should not treat
seriously everything we learn about Nohavica; the
fact that he took part in the film and mocked his
own ups and downs tells us more about him than the
film’s plot and the information it contains. Besides
Nohavica, the film’s list of authentic characters in­
cludes his friend, guitar player and composer Karel
Plihal, the folk band Czechomor and Jaz Coleman,
the English rock musician. The Dutch documentary
maker Jan Holman (played by Czech filmmaker and
distributor Jan Prent), however, is a fictitious char­
acter. The film tells the story of Holman, a recov­
ering alcoholic, arriving in the Czech Republic to
shoot a documentary about a detox hospital. This
is where he meets Nohavica and his guardian angel
Plihal and abandons his original plan by setting out
on tour with the musicians. Zelenka, mixing a ficti­
tious character with authentic ones, resorted to a so­
lution similar to Karel’s Dark Side of the Moon, the
difference being that while Karel assembled various
filmed quotes featuring well-known people and took
them out of context, in Zelenka’s film authentic
characters actually agreed to join the proceedings.
The film maintained the Nohavica myth, endowing
it with an ambiguous character and simultaneously
slightly mocking biographical documentaries of this
sort. Some critics correctly classified the film by
putting it upon the same level as the quintessential
mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, but at the same
time calling it a fake documentary12.

Beata Kosmska-Knppner • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

Cesky sen (C z e c h D r e a m )

Cesky sen (Czech Dream) from 2004 is an extraor­
dinary film within the mock-documentary context.
Before developing their first Czech reality-show film or
first Czech documentary hypercomedy, Vit Klusak and
Filip Remunda created a mock-situation of sorts, a
far-flung hoax intended to ridicule the post-commu­
nist country’s consumerism, expose the mechanisms
of advertising and susceptibility to the latest kind of
propaganda and manipulation, showcase the power of
the media and, simultaneously, reveal possible (and
applied) documentary practices. Klusak and Remunda, at the time students at the Prague film school,
hired ad specialists (many unaware what they became
involved in) to arrange a two-week promotional cam­
paign of Cesky Sen, a fictional hypermarket. They
created a logo, TV and radio advertisements, 200 000
leaflets promoting products of the Cesky Sen brand,
posters, ads in newspapers and magazines, 400 illumi­
nated billboards, an jingle and a website. On the day
of the “grand opening”, however, the estimated 4 000
potential clients, who came to a meadow in the Letnany district saw only a colourful hypermarket façade
painted on canvas. The idea was inspired by a happen­
ing devised by Peter Lorenc who in 1996 handed out
several thousand posters advertising a non-existing
GIGADIGA hypermarket. The opening was held on
an empty meadow, where Lorenc placed a banner with
the inscription: It’s better to go on a woodland walk. A t
first glance, Czech Dream is an account of the succes­
sive stages of preparing a major provocation, all the
way to the grand “non-opening” of the hypermarket,
421

while simultaneously bringing the audience closer to
the event’s social background and the views and mood
(also political) of the Czechs, proposing a sociological
observation, and presenting “behind-the-scenes” of a
major advertising campaign. But there is more... An
experienced mockumentary audience derives pleasure
from participating in a game consisting of searching
for and interpreting signals made by the directors to
confirm the film’s fictitious status. In Czech Dream
the game is - so to speak - dual. The majority of de­
scriptions, reviews and comments consider it to be a
documentary account of a major hoax and only the
expression: hard-to-classify documentary reveals that
their authors, overwhelmed by the scope of the “mock­
situation” itself, have doubts and are uncertain about
the film’s status. Viewers acquainted with the direc­
tors’ intention will enjoy spotting signals addressed
during the advertising campaign to potential clients,
which at the very least should have stirred up certain
misgivings (the hypermarket’s name, its logo with a
comic strip balloon, anti-advertising slogans: Don’t go
there, Don’t hurry, Don’t spend money, Don’t queue up,
Don’t shove and the remarkably low prices, i.a. a digital
camera for less than 1 $). Members of the audience
perceive them as signals not only because the film’s di­
rectors reveal the technical details of the entire under­
taking, of which potential clients were unaware (the
directors’ new image, the simultaneous casting for a
documentary of families regularly spending their free
time in hypermarkets), but predominantly because the
audience is from the very outset informed that eve­

Beata Kosmska-Knptmer • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

rything was undertaken with the film in mind, and
views the whole enterprise through this prism, which
subconsciously influences the reception of the hoax
and the attitude towards its victims (how could they
have fallen for it!?). The film entertains its viewers, who
feel compassion for, but also superiority to the future
victims of the joke, and harbour the impression that
they play in the same team as the directors. I believe
that the film also includes certain mock-documentary
qualities encouraging reflection on the capabilities
of the documentarians and the viewers’ susceptibil­
ity to possible documentary manipulations, caused if
not by belief in the factual accuracy of a documentary
then by instinctive trust in it. Signals informing about
the film’s actual state are not overly exposed and the
hoaxes and prevarications are not explicit. We are
dealing rather with the directors’ manipulations or
perhaps merely interventions consisting of selective
footage in the manner of Michael Moore’s documen­
tary method, which in this particular case boils down
to manipulation. In any case, such moments may
seem suspicious to the more careful viewers, e.g. the
fact that a film ridiculing consumerism and exposing
advertising mechanisms also becomes involved in ad
barter relations. Two minutes of the end credits are
dedicated to showcasing logos of companies backing
the production. The whole sequence about a shopping
trip of the Kudrnov family, winners of the casting for
the alleged documentary: Hypermarket with a Human
Face, is unquestionably an advertisement of the Tesco
chain. During the directors’ transformation into man­
agers, set in a Hugo Boss salon where they hire suits,
a salesman turns to the camera and says that the time
has come to fulfil the mutually beneficial agreement
and show the Hugo Boss logo for ten seconds; he then
rearranges a lapel, the camera zooms on the logo and
the filmmakers count the remaining time. In a scene
of shooting the advertisement involving a man chang­
ing his clothes, an employee of the ad agency organis­
ing the campaign points to the Mark/BBDO logo on
his cap and the camera zooms in. When posing for ad
photos in an atelier, Remunda and Klusak are clearly
mocking the whole situation by making exaggerated
moves, faking a relaxed and cool mood, and smiling in
a studied, artificial way. This sequence is for a moment
interrupted by a series of photos of well-known people
with equally premeditated expressions and smiles, i.a.
Vaclav Havel with wife Dagmar, Karel Gott, Helena
Vondrackova, and Vaclav Klaus. In this way, the
film directors are compared to people who play act
in front of the camera, strike a pose and pretend to
be someone else, and not to expository documentary
makers or journalists, usually on the other side of the
camera. The excessively long scene of the conflict
between the directors and the ad agency people also
looks suspiciously artificial, as if it were to present a

single sentence uttered by an ad agent, thus creating
the impression of the directors winking knowingly at
the audience (sending a signal). One of the filmmak­
ers wants the posters to include a sentence claiming
that on opening day no one shall leave empty-handed.
An agent objects, adding that he refuses to lie. After
a heated discussion the agent finally declares: Perhaps
for you filmmakers cheating people is business as usual, but
in the ad industry we don’t lie. You may find this surprising
but we don’t. One of the directors then asks him to re­
peat this statement. The agent looks straight into the
camera and says: I repeat. Even if you documentary mak­
ers lie in your films, we don’t do it in advertisements. The
filmmakers once again question the status of their film
and the work of documentarians in general in a scene
with a furious fisherman who found out that there is
no hypermarket. When asked what the whole story
has taught him, he replies: Never trust filmmakers. Sim­
ilar moments indicating the authors’ intervention are
numerous. The entire motion picture is interrupted as is the practice of many TV stations - by advertise­
ments, but the ones shown here promote the opening
of Cesky Sen. From the casting footage of families,
supervised by consumer behaviour specialist Dr Jitka
Vysekalova, we are shown only interviews whose par­
ticipants expressed their enthusiastic attitude towards
supermarkets and spending free time in them (I love
supermarkets. I find them a source of great joy. You can
really relax in a hypermarket). In one of the scenes a
woman says: This is not a dream, this is reality, this is
Harmony. When the director asks: What did you say?
and wants her to repeat the sentence, she once again
recites her (?) reflection.
In a scene shot after the Kudrnov family left the
supermarket, the director asks one of the women to
sing something in front of the camera. She immedi­
ately agrees and performs together with her daughter
an old folk song, in broken English but in tune:
Hey, ho, nobody’s home
meat or drink nor money have I none
Everybody will be happy
Hey, ho, nobody’s home.13
We then hear a replay, this time with a profession­
ally arranged orchestral backup and accompanied by
a magnificent sunset. During an earlier conversation
with the filmmakers the same woman declared: Our
lives are short, let’s live them the best way we can. Cu­
riously, the hypermarket’s anthem14 features both a
reference to the lyrics of her song (a kdyz nemas ani
halir/if you have no money) and to her statement (zivot
trva jen chvili/life is but a moment). In one of the casting
scenes, a mother of a teenager admits that she took her
daughter on a six-kilometre excursion last weekend,
but the girl did not enjoy herself at all; to cheer her up,
in the evening they went shopping at Tesco (!) and
this made her very happy. One of the directors then

422

Beata Kosmska-Knptmer • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

asks the daughter to describe how she felt at the store
after that exhausting walk. The girl replies: It was...
I don’t know... as if it had been raining all day long and
then I suddenly saw that the Sun came out. It was cool,
fun and pleasant. Strangely, the teenager’s sentence
turns out to have far-reaching consequences for the
whole film. The fictitious hypermarket’s anthem men­
tions, i.a. shopping that can brighten up a cloudy day
(Jak mohou ruze kvesti, kdyz je posmourny d e n .) . After
the Kudrnov family leaves Tesco and all push their
full carts towards the parking lot, one of the women
suddenly cries: Look, the Sun is setting. Klusak and Remunda decided to arrange their grand “opening” on
31 May 2003, the day of a solar eclipse. In one of the
scenes the directors are driving a car at dawn (we see
the Sun rising) and the radio’s presenter is heard say­
ing: Today we shall witness a solar eclipse. The rising Sun
will be unable to shine. On the contrary, it will be more of
a shrinking crescent (an amusing association with the
scene of casting the families, when a woman asked
what name she would choose for the new hypermar­
ket answers: “Horn of plenty”). The announcer then
goes on to say: You should not look at this fascinating
phenomenon for too long. Get up in the morning and put
on your special eyeglasses. And we see both directors in
their Hugo Boss suits looking at the sky through dark­
ened pieces of glass, while in the background resounds
the hypermarket’s anthem about rose-tinted specta­
cles (Tak prijd se radovat jak dite/ spousta veci omami
te/cely svet muzes mit. Chce to jenom trochu chtit/chce
to jenom nelenosit/zaparkovat, vzit si kosik, nepromeskat
velky den/prisel k nam vas cesky sen). Later, a woman
who came three hours before the opening explains
that she never participates in this kind of events but
her husband woke her up to see the eclipse, so she
came incidentally. Weather on the grand "opening”
day was beautiful and sunny (as emphasised by those
who gathered on the Letnany meadow), but rain
poured when the hoax came to light and it turned out
that there is no hypermarket. Not one is in sight when
across the wet windshields of a car driving away the
camera shows the increasingly distant façade of the
Cesky Sen hypermarket. We get the impression that
the day is coming to a close, although in reality the
scene could have been (and probably was) shot on a
completely different day. Moreover, at the end of the
film newspaper headlines express outrage at the hoax,
men replace street posters advertising the hypermar­
ket with advertisements of cigarettes and credit cards,
and the last scene is... a sunset; this time it seems to
refer not to the feelings of the would-be clients, but
to the second game that the directors were playing
with the audience. All the elements fit together as in
a jigsaw puzzle. Mention is due, however, to one more
signal sent by the directors, albeit not in this particular
film. They had prepared two trailers (“bloodless” and
423

“bloody”), of which the latter certainly appears to be
staged not only because the scenes it contains are not
featured in the finished film. It shows how after wouldbe clients found out about the hoax the crowd set off
in pursuit after the escaping directors, who managed
to jump into a car. Two brawny men, however, step
in front of a crowd composed of predominantly senior
citizens, one of them taking a baseball bat out of his
car’s trunk and bashing it against the front windscreen
of the filmmakers’ vehicle. Then the “bald one” drags
them out of the car, start shoving, beating and kick­
ing them, and tears the Hugo Boss suits into shreds
while a miniskirt-wearing woman enthusiastically
batters them with her handbag, presumably spew­
ing obscenities, while the oldsters shout and shake
their fists. The filmmakers finally manage to break
free and, covered in blood, run in slow motion in the
camera’s direction. The overall intention is to cre­
ate the impression of an authentic end to the whole
story, although the directors assure that no blows
were dealt. Interestingly, the DVD release of Czech
Dream featured 32 minutes of bonus footage miss­
ing from the final cut, while the film’s official web­
site includes photos of bloodied directors in ripped
clothes next to photos actually inserted in the film.
Finally, press material prepared by the distributor
for journalists included photos exclusively from the
“bloody” trailer.

First on the Moon
The Russian mockumentary is still in its infancy.
Aleksei Fedorchenko’s 2005 Perviye na Lune (First on
the Moon), awarded in Sochi15 and Venice16 and writ­
ten by Alexandr Goronovsky and Ramil Yamalayev,
is probably one of the first Russian examples of the
genre. The fact that local reviewers came up with
various neologisms to describe the film, which did not
match any categories familiar to them, demonstrates
that it was a total novelty in Russian cinematography.
Local promotion material described it as documentary
drama (a post-modern hoax), and critics wrote about a
pseudo-documentary,17 a documentary farce,18 and a
documentary look-alike.19 Polish material also called
it a science-fiction quasi-documentary, while W est­
ern reviewers applied the term: mock-documentary,
already adopted in many countries. In a documentary
style the film tells the story of an alleged Soviet space
project from the 1930s, culminating with a flight to the
moon in 1938 and contemplating the absurdities and
tragedies, which had to follow a clash between Stalin­
ist mentality and scientific progress. Its protagonists
had a chance to enjoy worldwide fame but instead be­
came victims of Stalin’s dictatorship. The plot begins
in Chile, where the Soviet spaceship landed after re­
turning from the moon, and follows Soviet astronaut
Ivan Kharlamov (Boris Vlasov) travelling from Chile

Beata Kosmska-Knptmer • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

across the Pacific Ocean and China to Mongolia, un­
til he is captured by the NKVD and sent to a psychi­
atric hospital, from which he eventually manages to
escape and, changing his identity in Zelig fashion, to
stay on the run from the secret police. Fedorchenko
mixes various footage ranging from authentic period
film newsreels (sports parade in the Red Square) and
fragments of Vasili Zhuravlyov’s 1936 sci-f film Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantistechaskaya novella (The Space
Voyage), to scenes meticulously shot to resemble pe­
riod newsreels, imitating NKVD operational materials
with suitably distorted picture and sound and subti­
tles made to look old. The interspersed contemporary
scenes shot in colour apply the form of a documentary
investigation as they follow the ups and downs of peo­
ple involved in the programme (i.a. Ivan Kharlamov,
female athlete Nadezhda Svetlaya and circus dwarf
Mikhail Roshchin). Fedorchenko declared: Viewers
should discover the game’s rule on they own and decide
whether they want to participate in it or not.20 As all
mockumentaries, also this one finally reveals its actual
status in the closing credits, according to which actors
portrayed all the characters. Sometimes, the film is
amusing (information about shooting archival footage
with the aid of hidden, several-centimetre cameras, a
dwarf joining the spaceship crew because the size of
the spaceship was undetermined, words spoken by a
guardian of the NKVD archives: Since everything in­
cluded here was filmed it really took place, or nostalgic.
Fedorchenko said: The element of irony is very small,
perhaps about 5 percent. The rest is something of a homage
to the generation of our fathers and grandfathers, including
their honesty and genuine belief in ideas.21 The funny and
self-reflective film has the qualities of a mock-docu­
mentary, but the director protests against this term
and several others used to describe his work: We didn’t
aim for mystification, but for a fantasy drama. Terms like
“post-modernism” and “mock-documentary” are not what
we intended. Perhaps the genre is documentary fantasy.22
The director distances himself from the film’s associa­
tions with Viktor Pelevin’s space novel Omon Ra, be­
cause it was not his purpose to bring down myths but
to recreate the grotesque and tragic character of the
past and to symbolically commemorate people who
fell victim to a policy intent on proving the greatness
of the U SSR at any cost. Fedorchenko regarded the
heroism of volunteers taking part in the secret pro­
gramme and put through gruelling training just to
become superfluous and destroyed by the system as
very important and quite a challenge. The director re­
portedly spent half a year watching old film newsreels
to create an exact replica of the visual documentary
styles of the 1930s. Thanks to the mastery of cinema­
tographer Anatoly Lesnikov and production designer
Nikolay Pavlov the film makes a great job of “imitat­
ing” old newsreels, even though 90% of it is actually
424

footage shot today. Kovalov noted: Fedorchenko does
not imitate the arbitrary "flow of life"; instead, he imitates
the normative aesthetics of officious film-journals —edu­
cational, instructional, and other types of applied films in­
tended for use in “official work”. He reproduces precisely
this method of staging... it is distinctively “an imitation of
an imitation". (...) He creates a genuinely monumental
image of a unified aesthetics. It is important to remember
that in a commissioned film, shots of an official parade
are different from shots of a sports parade; that the politi­
cal leadership was to be filmed in one way and ordinary
citizens in another; and that in different periods of Soviet
power these norms changedP
The film starts with the following caption: Status
of the film material does not meet the accepted standards
of quality, but it has been included in the film due to its
uniqueness. This announcement suggests that we shall
be dealing with archival footage of considerable sig­
nificance, although genuine period material consti­
tutes 10% of the whole film and is composed of widely
known photographs that do not bring anything new to
the film but boost its credibility. Although Fedorchenko protests against his film being described as a
mockumentary it certainly has a mock-documentary
dimension to it and thus can be analysed and inter­
preted as such. The director constructed the film us­
ing elements typical for a documentary: iconography,
black-and-white archival newsreels and period film
material (secret NKVD footage) as well as present-day
“talking heads” commentary (shot in colour). Some
90% are look-alikes, which the director - as in every
mockumentary - indirectly suggests to us from time
to time, and the “talking heads” are actually actors,
although obviously we do not find out until the final
credits. In this case, laughable statements made by
some of the characters should be recognised as hints
about the real status of First on the Moon. Allegedly
discussing the filmed events, their comments actually
concern something completely different, are taken
out of their original context, and when introduced
into that of the film sound outright absurd. First on the
Moon begins with a large close-up, which viewers mis­
led by the title may identify as the surface of the moon.
As the camera pulls back, however, it turns out that
this is the Earth, with someone digging with a hoe.
Black-and-white footage, as if from an old newsreel,
shows Chilean peasants who, naturally in their native
language, describe - the commentary suggests - a huge
meteorite. We immediately called the police - says one of
them - but what can our police do? When my wife was
robbed, they arrived two months later. Since the closing
credits feature information that material from the site
where the “Chilean orb” fell is property of a Chilean
natural science museum, the footage may actually be
genuine; more, the peasants may be really discussing
a meteorite, but the audience usually does not know

Beata Kosmska-Knppner • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

what the film’s various non-Russian speaking witness­
es are saying, because their comments are drowned
out by a Russian translator. Comic image-commentary
juxtapositions also act as a signal, e.g. the black-andwhite “newsreel” Soyuzkinozhurnal nr. 54 noyabr 1936
titled: Continuing Tsiolkovsky’s Work. The off-screen
narrator speaks about Young Pioneers repeating Tsiolkovsky’s experiment with a special centrifuge, and
we see them putting a goose into a pot placed on a
bicycle wheel, covering the pot with a lid and turning
the wheel; finally, once the task is accomplished, they
raise their arms in a Pioneers’ greeting. Another scene
shows thoughtful older men in white overalls, prob­
ably scientists, surrounded by metal skulls, ribs and
spines. One of them in earnest explains the goal of
their research: the creation of a Soviet man with metal
bones, which will protect him in a collision with a car.
Another example - an alleged Secret Service instruc­
tion film: The Technique of Applying the SK-29 Camera
for Secret Observation, with the caption: For profes­
sional use only. The voice-over informs us: Cameras are
used for obtaining materials compromising the subject and
the black-and-white footage shows a girl standing by a
bed and a m an... shaving her legs. In the same absurd
instruction film a soldier takes a small camera out of
a briefcase, with the commentary explaining: You can
hide the SK-29 camera anywhere you want, in a briefcase,
in a woman’s purse, on the street and in a room. A caption
appears: Unfold the shoulder strap. A n off-screen direc­
tive instructs: The camera may be used without a stand in
assorted situations. Caption: Keep your distance. We see
a woman and right behind her - a spy with a briefcase
filming her. In another allegedly secret NKVD mate­
rial in Fedorchenko’s film the off-camera commentary
informs us: Subject under observation —Ivan Kharlamov,
and we see Kharlamov (or rather the actor portray­
ing him) walking up to a street stall, buying matches,
entering a room, lying down on a bed, walking up to
a window and looking out of it while smoking a ciga­
rette. The comical nature of the whole situation is the
effect of a juxtaposition of serious off-screen commen­
tary with the completely insignificant nature of situ­
ations from the life of the observed subject filmed by
the secret, hidden camera and the very fact that such
trivial material was preserved in the archive.
An even more interesting signal comes from a frag­
ment supposedly shot at the Film Archive in Moscow,
where an old curator of the NKVD archive, walking
among shelves full of film cans, says: Since everything
included here was filmed, it had actually taken place.
Next, black-and-white footage pretends to be archival
material from the 1930s and shows Ivan Sergeyevich
Kharlamov; the off-screen narrator informs us that
Kharlamov was wounded when suppressing a rebel­
lion in Turkistan, but we see him in an idyllic scene,
delightedly posing for the camera while sitting on a
425

camel. A t this stage, there comes to mind a question:
why do these presumed remnants of old newsreels fo­
cus on Kharlamov (clearly the only person the cam­
era follows) already before he became a renowned,
accomplished engineer? And if this is confidential
material shot by the Secret Services, planning to re­
cruit him, then why did Kharlamov (and only he)
react to the camera’s presence (look in its direction,
wave)? In addition, the opinion voiced by the archi­
vist is complemented by a statement made by a man
bedridden in hospital, probably a former agent, who
says: You are asking strange questions, comrade director.
There was nothing of this sort. My memory is good but I
don’t remember anything. Both declarations sound es­
pecially interesting in the context of one of the film’s
last scenes, with soldiers burning numerous film reels
taken out of cans, probably property of the archive
shown earlier. Another hint are the fake smiles of the
persons posing for the camera. One of the metal bone
scientists is artificially and nervously laughing directly
at the camera, although his colleagues seem not to
notice this, absorbed by their urgent activities. Since
what they are saying is ridiculous and their occupation
is absurd, this man’s conduct questions their gravity,
producing the impression that he is unable to help
laughing and slip into the appointed role as earnestly
as his colleagues. Amusing doubts can also be inspired
by the film’s iconography. The colour footage displays
an old book with Chinese writing and prints suppos­
edly presenting the construction of a spaceship. The
off-camera commentary discusses spaceship construc­
tors from, i.a. the eleventh century, a treatise on this
subject dating back to 1320, and nineteenth-century
Russia, where battle missiles and submarines were de­
signed. The documents, prints and old encyclopaedias
on display may all be authentic but they do not neces­
sarily show what the commentary is suggesting. The
same holds true for some of the possibly genuine news­
reel fragments accompanied by not automatically true
commentaries, e.g. a fragment of a newsreel with cou­
ples dancing at some sort of a ball (perhaps on New
Year’s Eve) features commentary claiming that the
ball celebrated Kharlamov’s accomplishments. Typi­
cally for a mock-documentary the film also contains
fabricated newspaper cuttings with headlines match­
ing the film’s topic, e.g.: The last of the astronauts passed
away in his workshop before the production of our film
wrapped up. We see young people putting a spaceship
into a chest. The project was terminated, people disap­
peared. Now it turns out that there was nothing. But there
was a rocket. We see some kind of a black-and-white
chronicle, with street traffic and a paperboy. Narra­
tion: In March 1938 news about the fall of a fireball in
Chile was in all the papers. We are shown people read­
ing newspapers on a tram and old press headlines:
“Herald Express”: Passengers of “Fortuna” airliner saw

Beata Kosińska-Krippner • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

a fire ball; “El Mecurio”: El Sol cayo Sobre Chile. Ovnis
o pruebas militares? (The Sun fell over Chile), “L ’Echo
de Paris”: Meteorite? Comete? Martiens?, "Il Buonsenso”:
La Sfera Cilena —I Dei sono ritoranti in Cile? (Chilean
globe. The gods returned to Chile?), “Daily Express”: The
Chilean Ball —a League of Nations Special commission
investigation. A headline: The secret of the Chilean globe
revealed. Narration: A shepherd found debris of foreign
aircraft in the mountains. Caption: Chile. 200 kilometres
north of the town of Olyagua. The area where the “Chil­
ean globe” fell. Off-screen commentary: The Chilean
globe fell on 24 March 1938. Suprun’s rocket took off a
week before on 16 March. Our production crew went to
Chile. We watch the trip: And we found it. A tiny part
of the dashboard of the very first Soviet spaceship. Local
peasants sold the rest for 125 dollars. The film also con­
tains look-alike elements introducing mystery, con­
spiracy and secrecy, e.g. frames from supposed NKVD
footage with German officers (actors in costumes, we
learn later) observing candidates for the secret mission
diving into water. When the director asks Fattakhov:
How did the Germans come about?, he replies that he
does not know, because this was a secret project. No
further comments, because the planted suggestion is
supposed to stir the viewers’ imagination. Successive
takes illustrating the secret project show water being
poured on the candidates (as in old psychiatric hospi­
tals) and then soldiers leading a... piglet with imple­
mented electrodes. Next, Material no. 9: a piglet in a
spacesuit is placed into a rocket and launched. The
animal then lands with a parachute and two soldiers
pose with it for a photograph.
Apart from the mock-documentary-style film
newsreels in Sergey Livnev’s Serp i molot (Sickle and
Hammer; 1994), the list of Fedorchenko’s significant
predecessors includes Vitali Mansky’s project Chastniye kroniki. Monolog (Private Chronicles. Monologue;
1999) - a compilation of amateur video films the di­
rector received from people from every former Soviet
republic, telling the story of a fictitious protagonist
born on the day before Yuri Gagarin’s space flight (11
April 1961); his death coincides with the end of the
Soviet era.

Polish mock-documentary parodies
The Polish cinema as yet has not featured such
spectacular mock-documentaries as the examples dis­
cussed above. Nonetheless, one of the first films in
which certain (Degree I) mockumentary elements can
be found is Krzysztof Gradowski’s 11-minute TV film:
Déjà vu czyli skąd my to znamy (Déjà Vu or Where
Have We Seen This, 1978), realised at Studio Minia­
tur Filmowych, a parody of popular educational films
and programmes shown at the time as part of so-called
school series. Just like a full-blown mock-documentary
it ridicules the documentary style, statements of so-

called ordinary people caught on camera, TV com­
ments by experts, professionals and specialists, scien­
tific jargon and empty rhetoric, scientific discourse,
etc. The film begins with thank-you’s listing the peo­
ple who helped with its production, but this time grat­
itude is expressed in an absurd way, mocking the cus­
tom adopted by many directors. The voice-over says:
From the Author. I consider it to be a pleasant duty to
thank Prof. Jerzy Borowa, Ph.D., for his sympathetic atti­
tude to the film’s project presented to him at the Magnolia
restaurant. The screenplay was based on the theses of his
fundamental work: Rewarding Positive Adjustments (a
black-and-white photograph with an autograph below
it. The man in the photo moves, takes his glasses off,
smokes a cigarette and then freezes in a new pose). I
also want to publicly express my gratitude to Assistant
Professor Jan Pracz for his acceptance of the three-dimen­
sional method assumed during the film’s production.
Thanks to his kind consent we have obtained a complete
perspective illusion, which will require the viewer to main­
tain absolute discipline of looking at the left side of the
frame with the left eye and, respectively, at its right side
with the right eye (the man in the photograph is smok­
ing a pipe and reading a book). I would like to thank the
management of the Division of Assignments at the Depart­
ment of Resources of the Ministry of Imitated Illusions for
letting me study the practical benefits of optimistic percep­
tion (the man in the photo is drinking alcohol). Finally,
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Director
Kuliszka who by withholding special care and an atmos­
phere of particular sympathy for my modest undertakings
decisively contributed to the film’s creation in its present
shape and dimensions. Intertitle with caption: Case 1
and the sound of some sort of an off-camera psychiat­
ric examination: Man aged 48, railway worker, does not
admit to any hereditary dispositions. As a child often used
to skip school to go to the movies. Masturbates since 14.
While hypnotised confessed to an on-and-off sexual rela­
tionship with a seamstress living nearby. Previously sought
the aid of an herbalist. We hear the patient’s account
(dubbed by Krzysztof Kowalewski): This is what hap­
pened. I’ll describe it in chronological order. I was crossing
the street in no particular hurry because I was already late.
I’m walking, it’s cold, and I’m thinking to myself: “Good
thing I’m wearing a warm padded jacket". Now, a doc­
tor’s office, with a model of the human brain standing
on the desk. A staged visit of the patient follows, shot
in black-and-white. The railway worker on one side,
the stone-faced professor (portrayed by Jan Himilsbach)
on the other, taking notes and tapping his pencil
against the table-top. When the patient starts talking
we watch the discussed events in colour: I came closer
and saw Africa on the Kaiser-panorama poster. “I’m going
to take a look at it", I’m thinking to myself, because I am a
fan of all things exotic. To my surprise the pictures show
me walking through the snow, but with whom and where?

426

Beata Kosińska-Krippner • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

Something wasn’t right. “Oh well, I can still afford to pay
6 zlotys for the ticket", I thought to myself and went inside.
Poor decision, but I wanted to see what was going to hap­
pen next. I sit down, arrange the device, and guess what I
see? My entire life right in front of my eyes. First, the town
house in 16 Koźla Street, where I was born. More, I grew
up there. Then my wedding photo. I got married in Łódź
and, honestly, it was great fun, but only the wedding. I’m
still looking at the photos: now I’m in a steam engine,
laughing, at work, not really looking like myself. Later I’m
shown being rewarded for putting a freight train from Elk
on a side track because otherwise it would have massacred
the 386 passenger train from Toruń. Never mind. But
then I see myself looking into the camera in front of the
Kaiser-kamera place, and this got me really annoyed be­
cause a moment later I was once again walking through
the snow, and so on, the same thing over and over again. It
is not about the six zlotys; I wonder what’s wrong with me.
Back in the professor’s room: There is absolutely no need
to worry. From a scientific point of view the case is banal.
Here is a chart. The professor reaches for a chart with
a brain diagram. The whole screen becomes filled with
an animated colourful diagram featuring circled areas
captioned with mysterious abbreviations. To simplify
matters, let us assume there are three consciousness zones.
It is your sub-consciousness that transmits certain images.
The shapes and colours reflected by the Kaiser-kamera are
then presented by the consciousness as reality. Stratton dis­
cussed this phenomenon already a long time ago. Diagrams
and drawings with animated arrows describe Strat­
ton’s experiment. After each bath he used to recall the
image preceding it for the purpose of marking the cleanli­
ness scale. See, you should always look ahead to a bright
future. Titlecard with caption: Case 2. Voiceover:
Former model, aged 35, currently a teen fashion designer.
Complains that people closest to her fail to understand her.
Speaks of herself as a man. Since her stay in Paris, which
she visited as a correspondent of the “Mloda moda" week­
ly, has been involved in flagellation and horseback riding,
uses Old Spice cosmetics and a Kharkov electric razor.
Has a neglected personality inventory. A t the same time,
the professor and the woman (Lucyna Winnicka) are
arguing. Professor: Please calm down. Try to imagine
that it was I who came to you and not the other way round.
I’m listening. Woman: I’ve always liked fruit drops. I used
to enjoy 20 to 35 decagrams a day. Three months ago a
doctor forbade me to eat sweets due to hyperacidity. Ever
since then I’ve been dreaming the same thing over and over
again. The woman’s fantasy world is now presented in
colour. I dream that I am completely alone. An envoy of
the president of New Heartburn usually appears more or
less an hour before dawn. He asks me to come in (castle,
women in men’s clothes). They hypnotise me and offer
the position of Minister of Confectionery. I agree and ac­
cept gifts (piles of gifts). Then the doctor appears in the
form of a hideous insect. The professor has dozed off.
427

Professor! the woman cries, he wakes up and says: Oh
well, take a teddy bear from a child and he will dream
about a bear (reaches for a chart). Compensatory delu­
sions, a somewhat infantile reaction, but entirely proper.
We are shown diagrams and charts with animated ar­
rows. The professor’s voiceover explains the determi­
nation of the subject matter of dreams: At the stage of
non-rapid eye movement sleep your appetite for fruit drops
selectively activates the cerebral cortex and cortical centres
of the brain, in this way creating dreams. Their subject
matter, regarded as reprehensible and repressed in a given
culture, easily matches the accepted norms of another cul­
ture. This is why I think you should leave for some time
and, so to speak, just look around. The slightly disap­
pointed woman smiles with a sceptical look. Titlecard
with caption: Case 3. Voiceover: Patient aged 27, deliv­
ery driver. Claims that as a child he took part in games
played with a turkey. Has been drinking exclusively recti­
fied spirit ever since a young boy. As a school student was
tempted by —as he described it —chemical experiments.
Together with a storeman of the enterprise employing him
sentenced to two years in prison for setting fire to a ware­
house. Pills received from the prison doctor did not help.
Animated chart presents a Hans Kuliszka experiment,
drawings and arrows. Examined with the Roschasch test
and put through the Kuliszka experiment, expressed readi­
ness to change his surname, profession and remuneration.
The professor requests: Please take off your glasses.
Chewing on a match, the patient (dubbed by Stefan
Friedman) takes off his shades and says: My wife and
mother-in-law forced me to make this appointment. The
point is that I was on a business trip with my colleague to
Częstochowa and as usual we stayed at the Dworcowy
hotel. We entered the room, the window curtains were
drawn, and just to fool about I told my friend: “Want to
bet that there’s a firefighter on the roof of the home across
the street?". He replied: “Yeah, right”, opened the curtains
and there really was a fireman, asleep, by the way. A col­
our film shows a firefighter sleeping on the roof of the
house across the street. I also would like to mention that
I haven’t seen the fireman before nor knew him, so I
couldn’t be in league with him, because as soon as Kazek
realized that he lost the bet he accused me of plotting the
whole thing with the fireman. And my wife sent me here
because this is not the first time that something like this
happened. Professor: Great. You know what, the thing is
that you experience déjà vu in its pure form with no un­
necessary components. The professor clambers on his
knees onto the desk while the patient is glad that his
affliction is unique. The professor, up to now uptight,
bored and drowsy, finally stirs: I am going to build a
theory based on your case. An animated chart presents
Wrangel’s curve, omitting Prof. Bialkowski’s points. Pro­
fessor’s voiceover: We shall give Prof. Białkowski some­
thing to talk about. We shall deform Wrangel’s curve and
raise the threshold of possibility. The railway worker

Beata Kosińska-Krippner • THE PARODIC NATURE ... IN MOCKUMENTARIES

walks through the snow. The same voice, which previ­
ously read the author’s thank-you letter, now says: In
other words, we can allow ourselves to enjoy a moment of
happiness. Yet another blank spot has disappeared from the
map of the extensive field of knowledge about the world
and life of man. A clear and concrete explanation of the
phenomenon of déjà vu is another step taken on the path
to an increasingly complete comprehension of man’s con­
scious and socially shaped existence. Our accomplishments
once again confirm that obstinacy and, most of all, compe­
tence are decisive for success in each domain of creative
investigation.
From beginning to end, the film’s amusingly absurd
plot is the reason why its construction resembles that
of a typical educational production with experts, dia­
grams, discussions of concrete examples illustrating sci­
entific theories, etc. The ensuing parody challenges the
viewers’ trusts in films of this kind and habitual belief in
their "veracity”. It also questions their status of “serious
cinematic form” which as it turns out, can incorporate
an absurd topic while keeping all ingredients intact.
One of the first films recalled in this context24 is
Marek Piwowski’s Egzekucja długów, ludzi... (Execu­
tion of Debts, M en..., 2001), a parody of investiga­
tive TV shows with a journalist interviewing the wit­
nesses and participants of a given event and from
time to time offering his own commentary. The film
is dedicated to an old-age pensioner-victim of a bank
swindle orchestrated by an alleged businessman. The
pensioner recounts the events on camera, with the
film crew following him to the bank and shooting his
conversation with the imposter. Although everything
about the film appears to be rather realistic, Degree
III mockumentariness is “spoilt” at the very beginning
for the sake of Degree I mockumentariness when the
director sends a single, but important signal to the au­
dience by casting himself as the journalist. Naturally,
those unfamiliar with Marek Piwowski might treat the
film as a journalistic account for much longer. Fans of
sophisticated Degree III mock-documentaries, how­
ever, regret that the part did not go to someone en­
tirely unknown or, on the contrary, to a celebrated
journalist specialising in such broadcasts, especially
since the film progresses in an interesting direction by
describing the illegal operations of mysterious banks
and ways of collecting debts. The “journalist” talks to
a gangster - a debt enforcer, who wants to protect his
privacy but nonetheless matches our media-shaped
belief of how a criminal should look. The film be­
comes increasingly absurd due to its increasingly ficti­
tious appearance (allusions to the staging applied in
factual programmes), and ends with acts of violence
caught on camera. Or perhaps this is only our imagi­
nation (we witness the practice of evoking the pursuit
of sensational news and references to the “accidental”
filming of “live” events).
428

Endnotes
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3
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22
23

24

See: B. Kosińska-Krippner, Mock-documentary a doku­
mentalne fałszerstwa, “Kwartalnik Filmowy” 2006 no.
54-55.
Planete channel broadcast the film in 2005 as: Operacja
księżyc. During the Fantastic KINO.LATO Festival at
the Kino.Lab cinema in Warsaw (1 July - 2 September
2006) the film was shown as: Operacja Luna.
Producer: Point du Jour Production and Arte France.
The interview was published on Arte's website: http://
arte-tv.com/de.
http://www.planete.p/cgi-bin/pla/forum/topic/1-52-51/1.
T Sobolewski, Kosmiczna manipulacja, “Gazeta Wyborcza”
1 April 2005, p. 17.
Planete used this title.
Other viewers, including the author of this text, noticed
the dog already on the first occasion with no need to
watch the film frame by frame.
http://www.tvp.pl/View?Cat=1874&id=199905.
Fantastic KINO.LATO Festival 1 July 2006 - 2
September 2006, KINo.LAB in Warsaw.
Quotation from press material supplied by Vivarto, the
film's distributor.
T Jopkiewicz, N a druga stronę, http://film.onet.
pl/9713,24721,1. The Stopklatka portal also called Year
of the Devil a false documentary.
The song, one of whose versions dates back to 1609, is
known as: Hey, ho, Nobody Home, Rose, Rose, or Peace
Round. The most popular variants of this particular verse
are the following:
Hey, ho, nobody’s Home
meat nor drink nor money have I none
Still I will be very, very merry
or
Hey, ho, nobody’s home
meat nor drink nor money have I none
Yet I will be merry
Music Hynek Schneider, words Tomas Hanak.
Best debut and critics' award at the Kinotavr festival
2005.
Horizons Documentary Prize at the 62nd Venice
International Film Festval in 2005.
Term used by Oleg Kovalov
Russian term used by Viktor Matizen: asmeshka nad
dokumentom (English: mockery of the document).
Russian term used by Andrey Plakov: poddel’naia dokumentalistika (English: counterfeit documentary film), in:
A Plakov, Perviye na lune, “Kommersant" 10 July 2005.
V. Matizen, My ne poliruem vremia, “Novye izvestiya”, 6
June 2005.
Quotation after: T. Birchenough, Inspired Lunacy, “The
Moscow Times”, 30 September 2005.
Ibidem.
O. Kovalov, Aleksei Fedorchenko: First on the Moon
(Perviye na lune) 2005, “KinoKultura. New Russian
Cinema”, 14 January 2006 http://www.kinokultura.
com/2006/11r-firstmoon1.shtml.
W. Godzic, Telewizja i jej gatunki po “Wielkim Bracie”,
Kraków 2004, pp. 193-194.