Bontoc Eulogy, week 3

Bontoc Eulogy
    The Fake Documentary.  Immediately it sounds like an oxymoron.  Documentary.  Allegedly, it's defined as "documenting" reality.  In fact the documentary.org website is billed as "[s]upporting documentary filmmakers and promoting non-fiction film and video."  Non-fiction.  Not false.  I.e., True.  Or, at least truthful.  Fake.  Well, it's fake.  It's a replication of, not the original, an approximation.  It doesn't seem like Fake, and Documentary can be one term.  However, what is true, and what is real?  The fake documentary is a surrealist way of asking this question, presenting notions about identity and authenticity and challenging the view to examine the paradigm of documentary.  What do we expect from documentary?  The format of documentary is thrown into question.  What promise to the real is the documentary trying to provide? Just because it looks like a documentary, and "acts" like a documentary doesn't mean it's all real.  Does it?  No.  Notions of memory are brought to the fore.  How well do you remember a given event, or time?  Isn't it true that you and I may differ in our memories of a real event?  And, were we do differ, who becomes the authority?  Surrealism.  Throwing what we know into disarray, dislocation, upsetting the balance.  What we are familiar with now is parody, and satire.  Think The Colbert Report, The Daily Show.  The idea of a Fake Documentary then is almost a play on the words.  Or, in this case word.  Fake.  Is it a fake of a fake? Therefore, possibly a truth?  Or is is a document about fake(s)?  A documentary about a boat could be, The Boat Documentary.  Therefore, The Fake Documentary could be about fakes.  I think this is precisely what is surreal, and makes the Fake Documentary (a sub-discipline of Documentary) intelligent and valid as a form of storytelling. 
    In Bontoc Eulogy, grief and memory are our guides on a search for the truth about a man's grandfather, and ultimately a search for identity.  Through an assemblage of found footage and of memory, the narrator, Marlon Fuentes, asks the broader question of how we form our identity from memory.  Using the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Mo. (yuck!), as the place where his grandfather disappeared (he never returned), Fuentes imagines – through the real filmic footage taken at the fair –  evolving Philippine identity as a whole in the postcolonial world.  Postcolonial was a new concept at the turn of the 19th century.  Through the Fake Documentary, Fuentes forces the questions of What is meaningful, and what's usable in history?  How do we situate ourselves in the narrative of our history?
    But what about the term fake, in Fake Documentary?  Why does the word fake in this name work?  Today it was announced that J.D. Salinger died.  May he R.I.P.  He was notoriously private, and it's hard to imagine a biography about his life.  We don't know details about his life in the same way that we don't really know the details of Fuentes's grandfather.  We get a sense of his (Salinger's) life from his novels, and we assume from historical stories that the mental breakdown of Holden Caulfield, in the vernacular he wrote, and the place he came from, is really, him.   This is not much different from wondering – actually, assuming –  which parts of the life of Fuentes's grandfather are true and which are false, or embellished in Bontoc Eulogy.  Could we call a biography a Fake Biography?  Would anyone believe it?  Would anyone buy it?  Somehow, I don't think so.  The application of the work fake is different, and doesn't apply here.  Why not?   The term Fake Documentary is, in fact then, a work of fiction and can only be referred to as such.  Yes, there are parts which are true.  Yes, there is real footage of real people at real events doing real things.  Yes, Fuentes had a grandfather, but is this film actually about a real person?   Or, is it's purpose to inform about something else?  The Fake Documentary is more of a meta-text, presented as the main text, yet about some other (presumably) real text.  Fake Documentary is using the language and form of documentary (which we assume is real since, by definition it is documentary) in the same way that a novelist uses the voice of a character and the vernacular of a time period to tell a story, and ultimately inform.  Fake Documentary is not documentary.