Catfish

(Ariel Schulman & Henry Joost, 2010)

IMDB

Catfish is the somewhat worrying documentary following what starts out to be an innocent picture about, director, Ariel's brother Nev, but unfolds to be something completely unprecedented. The story is fantastic but most of all I enjoyed the way the information was presented to the audience. In today's consumer society and with social media being now, bigger than ever, I think that the way information was shown was a simple but clever- the perfect way to present things to the “Facebook generation”.

I refer to the landscape views, shown through the online satellite map, Google Earth, and the use of this tool's virtual pins to show the documentary's locations. Even the Universal logo at the start of the film is replaced by google's spinning earth, the text replaced with early computer type.

It also cleverly introduces new characters in the documentary through the, very familiar, Facebook tagging system, i.e. a mouse hovers over a face on screen and their name shows up. To highlight key information too, it is typed as we hear it being said, as if it were being entered onto a computer screen.

Handheld camera work throughout only amplifies that sense of this “facebook generation” in that everything is so instant and, in the sense of this documentary, we are to believe it's cinema verite, that these events are unfolding instantly, in this ever faster world. With another use of social technology, texts between characters are read to the audience to fill us in, to tell us what we need to know-- and quickly!