Film Begets Film And Real Begets Fake: Woody Allen's Zelig

Woody Allen's Zelig represents many classic potentialities and limitations of the mockumentary. Predating the "mockumentary" designation by a full year, Zelig helped pioneer the mockumentary's use of clever parody to entertain, expose the fallibility of "historical" archival footage, prick the conscience and soothe. Simultaneously, Zelig suffered and suffers from the limitations of the mockumentary, as parasite and slave to the documentary, inherent filmed format and key components imitated to the point of triteness. Despite Zelig's relatively early techniques and presentation, it remains squarely within the mockumentary mode.

Body: Film Begets Film and Real Begets Fake: Woody Allen's Zelig

The term "mockumentary" is a synthetic word stemming from a comment in 1984's This is Spinal Tap. In that film, documentarian Marty DiBergi referred to his work as a "rockumentary, if you will" (Doherty 24). In a small leap from that term,...
[ View Full Essay]