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When Unknown White Male (right) was screened at the Sundance Festival last year, it was rumoured that it was a set-up. A documentary about an amnesiac sounds vaguely interesting. But a documentary about an amnesiac that leaves you wondering whether or not its director and subject have been pulling your leg all along? Count me in!
The modern blueprint for this sort of wind-up is The Blair Witch Project, which suckered some credulous souls into believing it was genuine footage left by film-makers who'd come to a sticky end in the woods. This is similar to a concept aired 20 years earlier in the Italian gorefest Cannibal Holocaust, though there it fooled no one thanks to cheesy dubbing, crappy dialogue ("Hey, professor, I recognise these teeth!") and decapitated heads that are clearly made of foam rubber.
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F is for fake in the seedy world of low- budget horror, says anne billson |
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If we discount mockumentaries such as This Is Spinal Tap, in which viewers are in on the joke from the start, then cinematic hoaxers are altogether rarer than literary phonies such as JT LeRoy or James Frey. The cinema of fakery has yet to find its Thomas Chatterton. Even Orson Welles, in his whimsical documentary, F for Fake, seemed more interested in forged Picassos than in counterfeited film.
In fact, there's no shortage of celluloid fakery purporting to be genuine, though you'd have to lower your standards to find it since it tends to lurk in cinema's festering underbelly. It's here that we find such meisterwerks as Snuff, in which the patently bogus "real" murder isn't nearly as entertaining as the movie's tagline: "A film that could only be made in South America, where life is CHEAP!" 
FIRST POSTED APRIL 6, 2006
Film Three View: Pierrepoint
Last week: acting stupid
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