Although the popular modern image of merfolk is almost exclusively limited to depictions of human-sized, attractive females with human upper torsos and fish-like tails (as exemplified by Ariel, the heroine of Disney’s popular 1989 animated film adaptation of “The Little Mermaid,” an 1836 children’s story by We last saw these very same photographs back in 2003, when they were circulated on the Internet as a “Mermaid found in the Philippines” who had been “caught by fishermen in Visayas Region.” Not only were they hoaxes - then and now - but hoaxes of a type that is hundreds if not thousands of years old.Ĭreatures identified as “ merfolk” (half-human, half-fish creatures who live in the sea, both male “mermen” and female “mermaids”) have been a staple of folklore and mythology for many centuries. All of these considerations and how they all resonate with The Stranger help shape the argument about how Zelig is a contemporary reading of Georg Simmel’s essay.Origins: Proving once again the maxim that there’s nothing new under the sun (or “everything old is new again”) comes the set of photographs displayed above, purportedly depicting a bizarre ocean-dwelling “mermaid” creature unearthed by powerful tidal forces, the latest entry in a series of older photographs being passed off as images associated with the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. To help understand Zelig in terms of its portrayal of race and assimilation, the work reflects upon sources which discuss Jewish-American identity in cinema and race and identity in America in general. Sources which go in depth about the mockumentary genre, the documentary genre which it parodies and the relationship between fact and fiction in television and film alongside examples from these genres will all shape the understanding and argument within that area. ![]() ![]() The dissertation does this by adopting a framework which looks into the filmography of Woody Allen, using secondary sources which discuss and analyse his work, alongside watching the extensive library of films directed by Allen. ![]() The purpose of this work is to identify how the use of mockumentary, a genre itself strange in terms of its uneasy relationship with both fact and fiction, allows Allen to use the story of Leonard Zelig as a mirror to his own relationship with cinema, with him going from stand-up comedian to attempting more serious material, as well as attempting to emulate fellow filmmakers, further down the line, and how all these readings into the film share a relationship with Georg Simmel’s The Stranger. In this dissertation, it looks at how Woody Allen uses the mockumentary form as a reflection upon his own identity and career, and how it is comparable to Georg Simmel’s The Stranger. The Stranger, the 1908 sociological essay by Georg Simmel in which he talks about the idea of ‘The Stranger’, an individual who is ‘fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries, but his position in this group is determined by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning’ (1950: 402). Zelig (ALLEN 1983) is a mock-documentary detailing the life of Leonard Zelig, a Jewish-American man with the ability to transform physically and psychologically into the people he is around, lacking his own personal identity as a result of this, this conditions leads to national fame, given the nickname the human chameleon. Focusing on several unclassifiable blends of document and story shot on digital video (DV) and other hand-held cameras – Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002), Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002), and Hany Abu-Assad’s Ford Transit (2002) – it accounts for how technologically oriented aesthetic variations become signifiers of an artificial generic distinction, and raise questions and concerns about the manufacturing of truth in documentaries. This article discusses the ways by which digital cinematography contributes to the challenging interplay between reality and fiction in the new hybrid documentary form. It has been doing so by cultivating a style of constructed camcorder realism, utilizing the technology’s immediacy and intimacy predicated upon the digital look in its various connotations of authenticity and credibility. Digital technology, often perceived as complicating evidential claims about docu- mentary representations, has been playing a significant role lately in formulating new aesthetic grounds for the long-lasting hybridity formed between fact and fiction in the genre.
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