# data[].attributes.body
Opening- uses fast paced editing of seemingly irrelevant images; gives no real sense of what the documentary was going to be about. The reconstructions are very confusing as well, again the spectators aren't sure what they're watching until it is explain dot them by the voiceover

# data[].attributes.headline
Grieson defined documentary as the 'creative treatment of actuality.' What are some of the key issues raised by the this definition for spectators of documentary?

# data[].attributes.subject
Grieson defined documentary as the 'creative treatment of actuality.' What are some of the key issues raised by the this definition for spectators of documentary?

# data[].attributes.body
Ending scene- Guetta spray paints the wall which then gets knocked down straight after can be seen as constructed as it all happens just at the right time and was just set up t create an effective ending of the film.

Breaking leg scene- everything else throughout the film was on video apart from when he breaks his leg which is only shown by photos creating a sense of it being made up to add a spin on the opening of his show.

# data[].attributes.body
Night Driving scene- Nev, Henry and Ariel drive to a house a night to get some post half way through the film. This can be seen as being constructed as they could've waited till the nest morning to film this part of the documentary instead they do this to create tension or suspense to keep the spectator interested.

# data[].attributes.body
- Reconstructions
- Voiceover
- Introduction and ending - montage of images
- interviews
-highly edited

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What's it like to have all your memories erased? Well, not all your memories, because if that happened, you'd simply be like a newborn infant, and you'd have to relearn everything. The more interesting scenario is to lose only certain memories - the memories that most people think of as "true" memories: episodic memory.

Memories can be divided into three rough categories: episodic, semantic, and procedural (there are actually many more categories). Procedural memories are the memories of how to do things: driving a car, walking, sewing, and so on. Semantic memories are bits of factual knowledge: names, places, meanings. Episodic memories consist of the explicit recollection of specific events: prom night, my trip to Monument Valley, and so on.

A few nights ago, Greta and I watched the movie Unknown White Male, which purports to be a true case history of a 33-year-old man, Doug Bruce, who suddenly and inexplicably lost his entire episodic memory and much of his semantic memory. In fact, the movie demonstrates the inadequacy of such categories - what, for example, is the memory of the concept "ocean"? In one sense, it's purely semantic: an ocean is a large body of salt water. But when Bruce visits the ocean for the first time following his amnesia, he is overwhelmed with a vast array of new sensations, from the sound and power of the surf, to the water filtering the soft sand through his feet. This particular ocean visit could become an episodic memory, but isn't there a semantic aspect to the power of the surf? Bruce can't remember whether or not he can swim, but when he dives into the water, he quickly realizes he can stroke effortlessly through the waves. Is all knowledge of swimming procedural, or are there finer points of such knowledge, such as "keep your elbows up" better characterized as semantic?

In some ways, these distinctions are irrelevant, but in others they are the key to understanding Bruce's condition. What does it mean to "lose your memory"? Why can he still drive a car, retain his aptitude and interest in photography, but lose all knowledge or interest in cricket, a sport of which he had been an avid fan his entire life?

Typically amnesia is the result of physical trauma and is a rare, temporary condition; individuals such as Doug Bruce with no evidence of injury are exceedingly rare. Indeed, amnesia is often used as a plot device for film or books - it's an intriguing concept, but one rarely seen in real life. Even more unusual is for the condition to continue as long as it has in Bruce's case - over two years. It seems that a more plausible explanation of his case is that he's faking it.

Yet if Bruce (with, or without the complicity of the filmmakers) is perpetrating a fraud on us, it's an effective one. Renowned neuroscientist Dan Schacter is convinced, and lends his expertise to the film in a series of interviews explaining key concepts of memory and amnesia. His doctors, his friends, his family all genuinely believe Bruce has lost his memory. Indeed, if he is merely reconstructing the impression of being amnesic, he's doing it so effectively that there's little point in speculating as to whether he's truly experiencing the astonishing phenomena he reports in the film.

When it snows for the first outside Bruce's New York apartment, he videotapes it with the wonderment of a child. He rushes down to the street and picks up a handful as if he'd never experience such a substance, crushing it in his hand, amazed at its frigid malleability. When he meets friends and family for the first time after the event, it's as if he's meeting them for the first time. "You look just like your picture," he tells a friend of 20 years.

I do have one quibble with the science depicted in the film. The doctors tell Bruce there is a 95 percent chance he'll eventually get his memory back, and the filmmaker reports this back to the audience as if it's established scientific fact. In reality, there's no way they can indicate his odds with such precision: 95 percent simply reflects the concept of statistical significance. Researchers in this field will say a result is significant if they are replicable at least 95 percent of the time. His chances are likely better than 95 percent, but there's no way to give his chances with any better precision.

Despite these limitations, the film is a fascinating exploration of the experience of having retrograde amnesia. Even more fascinating is the fact that Bruce began filming himself just a few days after losing his memory, so we have a nearly complete record of a two-year period where we watch Bruce try to rebuild his life. It offers a profound exploration of the impact of amnesia, on both the victim and his friends and family. It leaves the viewer with nearly as many questions as answers about what amnesia must be like, but I view that as a good thing: we should be thinking about such things, if only to be thankful that amnesia is so rare.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What's it like to have all your memories erased? Well, not all your memories, because if that happened, you'd simply be like a newborn infant, and you'd have to relearn everything. The more interesting scenario is to lose only certain memories - the memories that most people think of as "true" memories: episodic memory.

# data[].attributes.body
- Voiceover w/ comic undertones creates doubt for the spectators
- fast paced editing
- change in filming style throughout the film
- Banksy interviews
- over a long period of time; not sure how much has been staged

# data[].attributes.body
- non-diegetic soundtrack to illicit emotion in spectators
- constructed scenes? (night driving)
- use of maps, social media etc
- highly edited

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Catfish may have generated an impressive buzz when it was unveiled at Sundance film festival in January, but few, after watching it, could say conclusively what exactly the film was. It appeared to be a documentary. And its star, the 24-year-old New York photographer Yaniv "Nev" Schulman, seemed innocent enough. Yet the story - on the surface a tale of Nev's online friendship with a prodigiously artistic eight-year-old and her sister - takes a darker twist that to some appeared too good, or too odd, to be true.

The directors of Catfish, 28-year-old Henry Joost and 29-year-old Ariel "Rel" Schulman, Nev's brother, denied all charges of fraudulence. It hardly matters. Their movie has proved bizarre enough on its own merits to withstand any doubt and dissent. Nearly a year after the Sundance premiere, as the film goes on general release, the mystique around it has only increased.

Catfish begins with Nev receiving a package at the New York office he shares with Henry and Rel. An eight-year-old girl named Abby, from the Michigan town of Ishpeming, has sent him a painting - a muted, pastel-coloured rendering of one of Nev's published photographs. It's an unconventional gift, but Nev is flattered, and impressed by the child's obvious talent. He encourages her - and she in turn posts him her latest works, hot off the easel. Eventually, they add one each other as friends on Facebook, where Nev is also accepted into his pen pal's social circle - her teenage siblings, her parents Angela and Vince, the babysitter Noelle, even the local art dealer, Tim. Nev's friends (the flesh-and-blood ones) warn him that it could all be a scam. But Abby has already sent Nev a share of her winnings from a local art competition, to repay his encouragement. What kind of con-artist gives money to their victims rather than taking it?

As the unlikely friendship grows, Henry and Rel document the New York side of this correspondence on the tiny digital camcorders that they always carry about their person. "For the first eight months, we thought it had the makings of a short film," Henry says when I meet him and Nev in a London hotel. "It was really Rel who had the instinct to start filming early on, and he was just waiting to see where it went. It could've been about Abby and Nev meeting up in real life, a cute friendship that comes out of the internet. That would've been a pretty good film, you know? A 10-minute short. Then Megan enters the picture. And that's when I started getting interested, too."

Megan is Abby's flirtatious but naive 19-year-old sister, and Nev, a handsome but apparently shy young man, quickly falls for her. His behaviour becomes giddy and schoolboyish: he digitally combines separate pictures of himself and Megan, to show how good they would look as a couple, and makes long, late-night calls to her, excerpts of which are shown in Catfish. For Rel, who had known his brother only as a withdrawn figure, it was a revelation. "I was so proud of him," he says. "He'd been closed off his whole life and this was the first time I'd ever seen him open up and really talk to somebody." Henry remembers being seduced by the poignancy of what he and Rel were shooting. "We thought, 'Maybe they'll get married and we'll show this at their wedding - won't it be great that we have this film of them talking on the phone for the first time?'"

In fact, Nev and Megan don't make it to the altar. International law leaves no room for manoeuvre on this issue: a person may not enter into the holy union of marriage with someone who does not exist.

When Nev, Rel and Henry make an unannounced stop in Ishpeming one sunny morning, they discover that the woman with whom Nev has been trading sweet nothings for many months is not a rural teenage virgin with a passing resemblance to Natascha McElhone, but instead a shy, physically unremarkable 39-year-old named Angela Wesselman - the same Angela who has been presenting herself as Abby's mother. That part is true: Abby is real enough, even if she is oblivious to her supposed friendship with Nev, or to the art works she is supposed to have painted (which transpire to be Angela's work). And while Angela does have an estranged teenage daughter named Megan, the Megan with whom Nev has fallen in love is a fictional character played by Angela.

No less virtual are Tim, Noelle and the 17 other online "friends" with whom Nev has exchanged chitchat, photos and "pokes" on Facebook for the preceding eight months. Angela has invented them all, conjuring for each a distinctive voice, idiom and personality, in the manner of a master dramatist; these phony avatars post messages on one another's Facebook walls, and play chess online.

Of the three men, Nev was naturally the one hit hardest by Angela's deception. "It didn't really sink in for me until we got back from Michigan that everything was gone. This world I'd been so involved in and excited about and hopeful for had just evaporated." Henry was quicker to see the skill of Angela's masquerade. "Facebook is a medium for communication," he reflects, "but she figured out how to turn it into a medium for interactive storytelling." Rel goes even further: "She's kind of brilliant," he says admiringly. "She's like this fountain of creativity."

Indeed, Angela is in many ways the true author of Catfish. She had followed the film-makers' work closely in advance, and there is an unnerving sense in which she seems to have chosen them. "I don't want to say she had a master plan," Henry says, "but she even said in one of her emails, 'You guys should make a movie about our family.' She wanted her story to be told. But she also invited us to tell it, in a strange way." In supplying Nev with her home address, she gave him the means to find her out: far from being at the hub of a vibrant artistic community, Angela spent her days caring for Abby and Vince, and for Vince's two severely disabled sons. The disparity between the world Angela created for herself, and the one she inhabited, is what gives Catfish its poignant kick. Even those of us who have never ventured online can't claim to be innocent of false advertising; we have all exaggerated our plus-points, concealed our flaws, mis-sold ourselves in some way. Angela's intricate fantasies are, in some ways, the most extreme extension of that.

The suggestion that the movie indulges in some falsehoods of its own while documenting the ones cooked up by Angela is one with which the film-makers have little patience. There are those who believe the whole film is a hoax performed by actors; those who think its elements of truth have been manipulated by the film-makers; and those who believe in the picture as a documentary, but object to what they regard as its parasitic approach to Angela and her family. It has been compared to mockumentaries such as I'm Still Here and Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop documentary. "I'd rather it wasn't lumped in with those films," Rel says. "I know people are tired of being duped, but I don't want to be considered a duper either."

Early in our conversation, Henry whips out his own recording device and slides it across the table to me. "I'm going to record this, too, if you don't mind," he says. "It's just something I've been doing. For fun." Near the end, he also produces a miniscule video camera, which he leaves running for the final 20 minutes of the interview.

"Fun" in this context sounds like a euphemism for "legal reasons". When your film has been accused of using for commercial gain a person who may be suffering from mental illness, it can't hurt to have everything on the record. "I guess so," Henry agrees, "but that isn't really it." Nev explains: "Our lives are undefined. For all we know, our next movie could involve this process somehow" - "this process" being the business of promoting Catfish - "and if we hadn't filmed the past few years, we wouldn't have that movie, so if we don't record this, we won't have whatever's next. Better to have it than to not have it."

Perhaps it is a consequence of the film's interest in deception that Catfish was regarded with suspicion even before its barnstorming Sundance premiere. It was at a private screening, held for friends of the movie's producer, Andrew Jarecki (director of another controversial documentary, Capturing The Friedmans), that the film-makers first realised that not everyone was going to swallow their story wholesale. The veteran documentary maker George Butler ( Pumping Iron) liked Catfish, but wanted to know not if but how much was staged. "Lemme see, uh - zero," Rel replied. In an article titled Does Sundance Sensation Catfish Have A Truth Problem?, Movieline.com reported that an audience member at a Sundance Q&A session had told the film-makers: "You did a great job, but I don't think it's a documentary."

Again, it was Rel who took particular umbrage. "I guess I got defensive because it caught me by surprise," he insists, "and it was someone telling me that my brother's deepest experience had been faked. He'd been heartbroken. He was in a pretty dark funk for about six months after. After Sundance, people told me, 'Rel, take it easy. It's good for the film.' And I came round to the view that it's good that there's a conversation to be had. You see, people have been watching reality TV too long, and we all know it's constructed. So the word 'documentary' doesn't give you the same guarantee of truthfulness that it once did." Still, some observers have pointed out that the film is, if not plainly fraudulent, at least heavily manipulated. The US critic Amy Taubin, who has described the film as a "sneak attack" on Angela, wrote, "Had the Catfish film-makers done a Google search when Nev received that first painting - and I find it inconceivable that as linked-in media types they didn't - they wouldn't have been fooled, but they wouldn't have had a film either. (Or they would have had a different, less sympathetic film about how they spent a year hoaxing the hoaxer.)"

But it's the charge of exploitation that may prove harder to shake, at least while Angela herself is muddying the waters. In an interview she gave last month for the ABC programme 20/20 - the only contact with the media to which she has consented so far - she claimed that it was she who exploited the film-makers, rather than vice versa. It's understandable that, as an apparently controlling and delusional personality, she would want to see it that way. And while she was paid for her contribution, and even involved in designing posters for the movie, it is still the case that securing a signature on a release form from a woman who is at best emotionally fragile might politely be called a moral grey area.

"When you meet her and spend time with her, you don't get the impression she's unstable," Henry protests. "She has problems, she has an active imagination. But it's not like she doesn't know the difference between fantasy and reality."

And yet, in the 20/20 interview, she confesses to having been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Rel agrees it can be hard to accept the words of a fantasist. "You've got to take everything with a grain of salt. I've talked to her a lot and she's extremely present. If she has bouts of schizophrenia, I haven't seen it. She's very aware. Very lucid."

But she duped the three of them.

"Yeah, but it wasn't malicious or really intentional. She fell in love with the fantasy because it provided such a stark contrast to her real life."

Do they believe she's schizophrenic?

"I dunno," he says with a sigh. "She's my friend and I want to believe everything she tells me."

Yet she lies in the film about suffering from uterine cancer when they turn up on her doorstep. "I think that was a moment of self-defence, along the lines of, 'You can't hit a man with glasses'. I've asked her about the schizophrenia and she said it's true."

Even if we believe Angela's claims that she hasn't been exploited, there is one undoubted victim in the Catfish saga: Abby, now 10 years old, who will presumably have to face the fall-out from her mother's fantasy life without the defence mechanisms to help her cope. "That's the thing I worry about," Henry says. "There's going to be a conversation one day where Angela will need to tell Abby about everything that happened. Who knows how she'll feel?"

How does Rel feel about Abby? "I guess she's got an interesting childhood that she's already lived, and an interesting childhood ahead of her. I'm happy her mum's story is out there because I don't believe in secret shame or in keeping it private. Abby will come to understand that her mum's not a typical mum. She's got a funky mum. And one thing I know for sure is Angela's a great caretaker. She loves Abby with her entire being."

But coming to terms with problems as a family is very different from having that process on display in cinemas across the world. Angela made that decision, but Abby had no say in it.

"I hear you," Rel says. "All I can say is I hope it makes her stronger and more interesting."

Didn't the potential damage to Abby from the film ever give them pause? "Sure, I spent a lot of time worrying if it was the right thing to put it out there. We decided it's better to share it because it's an important story, and a lot of people can learn from it."

Nev, who was once a promiscuous and trusting Facebooker, appears to be among those who have learned a lesson. Does he consider Angela to be a friend? "Um, I don't know if I'd call her a friend. We're eternally connected. We shared an experience - an unusual experience. The reason I don't consider her a friend is I've really worked on my definition of that word since all this happened. I have a very strict outlook now on what classifies a friend. It has to be someone who'll stop whatever they're doing in their life to come help you if you need it. So, you know, she's got her own life and I've got mine. We're certainly friendly. But it's hard to say we're friends."

Rel's online activities have also been altered for ever. "I've pulled back from exposing my life," he says, "though I am seeing a girl I met on Facebook. She Facebooked me out of nowhere and the first thing I said was: 'You look and sound great, but I'm not going to invest emotionally in this until we meet in person.' One of messages of the movie is you can't trust social networking at first glance. You've got to do your research and you've got to be defensive. But don't be too defensive, because it might be a real opportunity on the other end."

* Catfish is released on 17 December.

This article was edited on 22 November 2010. In the original, we failed to include a spoiler alert about the content. This has been rectified.

This article was edited on 29 November 2010. The original described Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop as a mockumentary.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trust me, I'm a film-maker | Catfish | Film

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Catfish may have generated an impressive buzz when it was unveiled at Sundance film festival in January, but few, after watching it, could say conclusively what exactly the film was. It appeared to be a documentary. And its star, the 24-year-old New York photographer Yaniv "Nev" Schulman, seemed innocent enough.

# data[].attributes.body
- does the creative treatment of documentary detract from the authenticity or message of the film?
- how does a modern filmmaker keep spectators interested whilst also keeping the documentary authentic?
- how far can a documentary be edited/ changed before it's not considered a documentary anymore?
- manipulation
- editing / music