Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/31146
Title: Before Big Brother, There was Blair Witch: The Selling of "Reality"
Contributor(s): Hopgood, Fincina  (author)orcid 
Publication Date: 2006
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/31146
Abstract: The Blair Witch Project is a model example of the emerging style of "postcinema" movie-making. More of a "total package" than a film, The Blair Witch Project represents a fusion of independent filmmaking with blockbuster marketing strategies, which creates a dispersal of narrative across several media (film, television, the Internet, comics, books, music), while exposing a mainstream multiplex audience to documentary and avant-garde aesthetics. This essay investigates The Blair Witch Project both as a film (the 87 minute feature screened in theatres) and as a popular culture event (the "mythology" and the marketing), which may be regarded as symptomatic of the changes in cinema leading up to the twenty-first century. In particular, the film's blending of genres (documentary, horror and avant-garde) together with its wilful blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction cast it as an exemplary postmodern cultural product. Throughout this essay, reference is made to the context of the film's reception in the United States and Australia, as gleaned from reviews, interviews and articles in mainstream newspapers and magazines. This sociohistorical analysis is buttressed by reference to theories about documentary and avant-garde aesthetics, as well as more general discussion about postmodern cultural production and the challenges for film in the digital era. This assembly of various discourses demonstrates the necessity for a pluralist approach towards a film like The Blair Witch Project, with its dispersed, multimedia narrative and its persistent cross-over of boundaries between genres, between independent production and mass-market distribution, between reality and its representation.
Publication Type: Book Chapter
Source of Publication: Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, p. 237-252
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc
Place of Publication: Jefferson, United States of America
ISBN: 9780786421848
Fields of Research (FoR) 2020: 360501 Cinema studies
360505 Screen media
470214 Screen and media culture
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2020: 130204 The media
220502 Internet, digital and social media
HERDC Category Description: B1 Chapter in a Scholarly Book
Publisher/associated links: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/60311848
Editor: Editor(s): Gary D Rhodes and John Parris Springer
Appears in Collections:Book Chapter
School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

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