F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing–Where the Truth Lies: When Reality Ain’t
F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing
Editors: Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
244 pages
This is Volume 17 in the Visible Evidence Series edited by Michael Renov, Faye Ginsburg and Jane Gaines.
Imagine yourself living in Germany in the late 1930s. If you’re hiding Jews in your house, how would you respond if the Gestapo knocked on your door and asked, “Do you have any Jews in your basement?” “Yes” will doom those you’re hiding and perhaps yourself, and “No” will start you on a slippery slope of telling the truth only when it is in your best interest to do so. Would you “lie” to “do” the truth?
This question, right out of Ethics 101, is central to the 15 fascinating essays in F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing. The book’s lengthy introduction by its editors, Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, sets a challenging context for the varied set of writings.
Juhasz states boldly that, “Fake documentaries always imply, and usually make explicit, that many documentaries lie to tell the truth, and that all documentaries are ‘fakes’ in that they are not the world they so faithfully record.”
By Ron Sutton
Published in Documentary Magazine, 2010
Review of F is for Phony by Ron Sutton
Topics: Fake Documentary |