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Hollywood Hype
by Ricco Villanueva Siasoco |
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Welles's F for Fake
Orson Welles's F for Fake is a Kafkaesque labyrinth of a real filmmaker (Welles) filming a fake documentarian (Francois Reichenbach) documenting a not-so-credible interviewer (Clifford Irving) interviewing a master art forger (Elmyr de Hory). The consummate manipulator on narrative time and sequence, Welles tackles the question of what is real and what is false in art. The 1975 motion picture, the last one he completed, is an impassioned meditation on the nature of art and fiction.
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The Blair Witch Brouhaha
The tagline was "In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. One year later, their footage was found." Five years later, in the spring of 1999, media hype began to build around the found footage, neatly packaged and titled The Blair Witch Project. Marketed as a documentary, the Little Picture That Could fooled unsuspecting audience members at the Sundance Film Festival, where it caused a sensation, and later, theatergoers across the nation. With its grainy footage, extensive, detailed mythology, and perhaps most effectively, an often-overloaded Blair Witch website, the myth of the Blair Witch Project was a wildly popular hoax.
Buñuel is Balked
The grueling poverty and lack of opportunities for working-class youth in Mexico City provides the sustenance for Luis Buñuel's acclaimed 1949 film Los Olvidados. Long associated with the Surrealists of the early twentieth century (Salvador Dali was a collaborator for many years), Buñuel's film combined social commentary on the slum conditions of Mexico with his trademark bleak imagery and disturbing visual style. Though the characters in the film were not real, Bunuel claimed they were based on people he met during the months he actually lived on the street. Sometimes categorized as a documentary and other times a drama, Los Olvidados is, nevertheless, a convincing portrait of life in the city.
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