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Introduction: What Now? Presenting Reenactment

Jonathan Kahana

Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Volume 50, Numbers

1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 46-60 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/frm.0.0030

For additional information about this article

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Framework50, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 4660.Copyright 2009 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

This dossier of articles on the uses of reenactment in documentary-basedfilm, video, and performance art of the past quarter-century originated inpanels that I organized and participated in at the Society for Cinema andMedia Studies and Visible Evidence conferences in 2007 and 2008. Theimpetus for those panels was a critical hunch that reenactment was mak-ing a comeback, a feeling that throughout the landscape of contemporarymoving-image culturein mainstream film and television, at festivals of

documentary and avant-garde cinema, and in galleries and museumsonewas seeing the return of techniques of historical restaging that had oncebeen quite common in documentary and social realist film.

The eureka moment for me came when I found myself, in the space ofa week or so, listening to presentations at my university by two quite dif-ferent American filmmakers, George Stoney and Liza Johnson. Both hadbeen invited to discuss projects that had taken them to impoverished areasof the American South, where two quite different (but not unrelated) kindsof oppression and neglect had made daily life a struggle. The resulting films

had been crafted with local residents, whom the filmmakers had asked toplay themselves in small quotidian dramas. A half-century apart, Stoneyand Johnson had created American versions of what Cesare Zavattini, oneof the pioneering theorists and practitioners of Italian neorealism, called

pedinamento, which Ivone Margulies translates in an important essay on cin-ematic reenactment as the shadowing of everyday facts at close range.1Margulies uses the documentary work of Zavattini and his fellow neoreal-ists as the model for a social pedagogy of reenactment in cinema, in whichordinary people are given the task of interpret[ing] their human rolesin society, so as to give themselves and others a second chance, when

Introduction: What Now?Presenting Reenactment

Jonathan Kahana

DOSSIER: REENACTMENT IN CONTEMPORARY

DOCUMENTARY FILM, VIDEO, AND PERFORMANCE

What Now?

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psychological or social circumstances have initially prevented them fromacting as they would have liked.2

We tend to think that documentary filmmaking became aware of itself(or, in the critical jargon, self-reflexive) quite recently: at some point, say,

after Stoney made his classic works of documentary reenactment for theGeorgia State Department of Health, includingPalmour Street: A Study of Family Life(US, 1949), his first film as a director, and All My Babies: A Mid-wifes Own Story(US, 1953), the film I had heard him speak about at NYU.Made in a semi-narrative style that had been conventional for decades, theinnovation ofPalmour Streetand All My Babieswas to put black people inspeaking roles in which they could act out the challenges for impoverishedcommunities of maintaining good health (mental health, in Palmour Street;natal and maternal health in All My Babies), as well as some of the methods of

addressing them and the racial discrimination that was the unspoken subjectof both films, and of Stoneys interracial production methods.3 It has beenconvenient to distinguish the era of Stoneys earliest films from a later periodof filmmaking and viewingarriving some time in the 1980s or 1990sbythe term postmodernity, which has been taken to mean, when applied torealist and documentary cinema, the end of credulity in methods of narra-tive construction and historical explanation. But it was clear to me that thefilm I heard Johnson discussing, South of Ten(US, 2006), an experimentaldocumentary made with residents of the devastated Gulf Coast of Missis-

sippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, was no less a work ofpedinamentothan Stoneys. Both films could be said to serve the exemplary or redemptivefunction that characterized, according to Margulies, the neorealist sense ofreenactment. And in both films, acting serves as the critical, if not contradic-tory, foundation of a documentary effect, wherein the nonprofessional actorstheatricality calls into question the authenticity of [their] gestures.4

My interest in convening public conversations on reenactment wasspurred, in part, by the coincidence of these two film presentations, and thedj vuexperience of seeing methods of performance and storytelling in doc-

umentary film of the 1950s apparently revived for a film of the recent past.Equally significant, however, was my discovery that there were relatively fewcritical resources on which one could draw to explain the critical and aes-thetic powers of reenactment in both filmmakers work, or the relation of thiswork to one important but largely overlooked branch of the documentarytradition. In this respect, it seemed that filmmakers and artists had been outahead of the critical field in showing renewed interest in the powers of reen-actment. This impression is confirmed when one considers the ubiquity andvariety of reenactment, in the broadest sense of the term, in moving-imagework made and shown on television, in theaters, and in galleries today.

In recent years, the spectrum of reenactment-based screen art andentertainment has stretched quite wide. The life stories of famous men have,of course, been fodder for commercial feature cinema for decades, and the

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portrait of the man of historical influence continues to operate as a prestigegenre in Hollywood and for international art cinema. 5 Prominent exam-ples from the last several years include Downfall(Oliver Hirschbiegel, DE,2004), Milk(Gus Van Sant, US, 2008), and the films of Oliver Stone, who

has made a sideline of the genre with such films as JFK(US, 1991), Nixon(US, 1995), and his post-9/11 pair World Trade Center(US, 2006) and W. (US,2008). Recently, the genre has also been of interest to filmmakers workingin the spirit of experimental film, while remaining within the feature narra-tive structure, like Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterf ly[FR/US,2007]), Todd Haynes (Im Not There[US, 2007]), Anton Corbin (Control[UK,2007]), Steve McQueen (Hunger[UK, 2008]), and Guy Maddin, who uses hisown biography as the inspiration for films like Cowards Bend the Knee(CA,2004) and My Winnipeg(CA, 2008), a film that features the restaging of some

important moments in the Maddins family life, including the daily adjust-ment of a hall carpet. Reenactments in the loosest sense, these films adheremore or less to the details of their subjects lives while indulging in cinematicliberties of scenic and characterological reconstruction. In the same period,a vein of historical film has taken the authenticity of cinematic biography astep further, featuring performances by actors who play themselves in minoror central roles. In the recent films of directors like Paul Greengrass (BloodySunday[UK, 2002]; United 93 [US, 2006]) and Michael Winterbottom (24Hour Party People[UK, 2002]; In This World[UK, 2003]; The Road to Guan-

tanamo[UK, 2006]), one sees the influence of television docudrama, wherereenactment has a particularly rich life on both sides of the Atlantic: themade-for-television true story is a mode well known to American televi-sion audiences from earlier true-crime reality shows like Fox TelevisionsAmericas Most Wanted(US, 1988), as is the sensationalist appropriation ofsuch techniques for gutter journalism (as with the E! channels use of nightlyreenactments during its reporting of the 1996 murder trial of O. J. Simpson),techniques revived for the infamous ABC television account of the causes ofthe September 11 attacks, The Path to 9/11 (US, 2006). Reenactment has also

been a staple of the commercial documentary work of filmmakers tired orsuspicious of the claims of veracity made by proponents of the various formsofcinma vrit. Among the most visible and rigorous opponents ofvritstyle,at least at the level of cinematography, is Errol Morris, whose The Thin BlueLine(US, 1988) might be seen as the film that revived interest in reenactmentamong serious documentarians (like Alex Gibney, whose Enron: The Smart-est Guys in the Room[US, 2005] borrows directly from Morris) and tabloidtelevision producers alike. In The Thin Blue Lineand the documentary filmsthat emulate it, reenactments are used to supplement historical methodsthat viewers have grown to see as more authentically documentary: inter-views, archival or observational footage, and expository narration. Morristook this hybrid method to new heights (or, according to some critics, newlows)6 in his own film about the Iraq War, Standard Operating Procedure(US,

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2008), a film that drew fierce criticism for its luridly stylized dramatizationsof torture and beatings of detainees by American military personnel andmilitary contractors at the Abu Ghraib facility. (Around the release ofStan-dard Operating Procedure, Morris himself devoted a number of columns of hisNew York Timesweblog, Zoom, to the topic of reenactment, writings that areamong the most thorough reflections on the meanings and uses of reenact-ment by any current practitioner or critic.)7 At some aesthetic and concep-tual distance from these practices of docudramatic narrative, a parallel trackwas established by a number of documentary filmmakers in different partsof the world. Their work employed an unsettling combination of Freudiantechnique and method acting to unearth traumatic histories through har-rowing on-location interviews, in films like Claude Lanzmanns epic oralhistory of the Holocaust, Shoah(FR, 1985), or Werner Herzogs film about

an American pilots experience as a Vietnam War POW, Little Dieter Needs toFly(US, 1997), and Rithy Panhs films about Cambodia in the aftermath ofthe Khmer Rouge, includingS-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine(FR/KH,2003) and Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers(FR, 2007).8 At about the same time,a small wave of filmmakers better known in art world and academic circleswere engaged in an entirely different sort of reenaction, remaking earlierworks of documentary and avant-garde film. Jill Godmilows remake of a1969 film by German filmmaker Harun Farocki, What Farocki Taught(US,1997) and Elisabeth Subrins Shulie(US, 1997), the remake of a 1967 student

film produced by Chicago acquaintances of radical feminist Shulamith Fire-stone, received considerable attention from critics and curators when theywere released in the same year, and likely played some role in generatinginterest among American experimental film and video artists in remountingthe work of earlier experimental filmmakers.

In the related but culturally distinct domain of contemporary art, onecould find ample evidence of a similar preoccupation with quasi-documen-tary techniques of historical fiction and historical performance among themakers and critics of experimental film and video, including those dis-

played and discussed in various kinds of large group shows, like HistoryWill Repeat Itself, a 20072008 curatorial collaboration between the Hart-ware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund and the KW Institute for Contem-porary Art, Berlin; Not Quite How I Remember It, a 2008 show at thePower Plant gallery in Toronto; and Realisms, the second part of a year-long show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington,D.C., called The Cinema Effect. Many of the same artists could be foundin these shows: a number of them combine performance art with film andvideo installation to restage a variety of historically significant events. Nota-ble examples included the British conceptual artists Jeremy Deller, whoseBattle of Orgreave reconstructs a 1984 confrontation between striking Brit-ish coal miners and the police, and Rod Dickinson, who has organized reen-actments of the so-called Milgram Experiment, the FBI siege of the Branch

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Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and other events; the Israeli-Americanvideo artist Omer Fast, maker of a series of long, multi-screen videos that mixdocumentary conventions like the interview with non-narrative montage andtableaux on the topic of military action and reenaction; Pierre Huyghe, the

French video artist whose double-screen film The Third Memory(FR, 1999),re-creating the bank robbery in Dog Day Afternoon(Sidney Lumet, US, 1975),is one of the most widely shown works in this style; the American concep-tual artists Sharon Hayes and Mark Tribe, both of whom use performanceand video to revisit signature moments in the recent history of Americanradical politics; and Artur Zmijewski, a Polish artist who has made a numberof works revisiting traumatic acts of institutional violence through differentforms of historical performance, and who was represented in the Hirshhornshow with a piece re-creating Philip Zimbardos so-called Stanford Prison

Experiment.It would seem to strain credibility to use the same namereenactmentfor

such a methodologically, institutionally, and geographically diverse culturalphenomenon. Although it is the job of publicists, journalists, and curators toinsist that azeitgeistcan be identified, and that doing so is of some intellectualvalue, a properly historical analysis of the cultural production of now wouldremain skeptical of such a one-dimensional view of the present, especiallyone that maintains the importance of what curators like to call site-specificart, while relying on the internationally non-specific flows of financial and

cultural capital represented by the usual-suspects list in the previous para-graph. But testing and straining belief in the now and in the habits, rituals,and laws that keep it in place is precisely the aim of the works consideredby the contributors to the dossier that follows. By bringing together work ondocumentary and narrative cinema, ethnographic film, forms of film andvideo essay, and performance and installation art, the interview and articlesthat follow provide some sense of the continuities between projects conceivedfor very different purposes and audiences.

Ranging across this landscape of styles and settings, from the conventional

devices of the biopic and the sanctified space of the museum to collaborative,experimental, and radical structures of cinema, video, and performance, thefollowing articles take up issues common to this wide variety of rehearsals,whether these are explicitly articulated in the works as problems, or merelylatent, coming to light only through interpretation. These themes include theplace of memory, testimony, and narrative construction in historical knowl-edge; the ritual and unconscious dimensions of action; the function of filmand other recording media for the production or preservation of cultural andcollective memory; the imaginary and fantasmatic aspects of character andperformance in documentary film and media, and the role of documentaryin the construction of social fantasy; the therapeutic value of reenactment;the uses of embodiment in various kinds of learning and pedagogy; the ten-sions between political, social, and theatrical senses of acting; predictive and

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future-oriented applications of reenactment; and the nagging feeling that aculture of nostalgia, repetition, and simulation have limited our capacity fororiginality, authenticity, and agency in our media and our actions. To preparethe reader to follow some of these threads through the analyses that follow,

and to see them as the continuation of enduring concerns, it will be usefulto briefly mention the multifarious identity of reenactment in the history ofdocumentarywhich cannot be recounted at any length hereand to com-pare two different treatments of this problem to the convolutions of the veryconcept ofenactment, sedimented in the oldest English-language appearancesof the term.

One of the few contemporary historians of documentary to pay signifi-cant attention to reenactment, Brian Winston, goes so far as to propose adefinition of documentary based on reenactment, in which detail, public-

sphere interaction of subjects, and plot simplicity are just as viable as theusual indexes of documentary ontology: authenticity of the documentaryactor, his or her actions, and the locations. Commenting on the use of reen-actment by filmmakers like Joris Ivens and Humphrey Jennings in the 1930sand 1940s, Brian Winston places their work on a spectrum of reconstructionthat stretches all the way from the lowest level of filmmaker interventionthepure recording of natural disasters and other events uncontrolled by thefilmmakerto historically or physically impossible situations that are entirelyfabricated by the filmmakers. Between these two extremes, the degrees of

construction and intervention by the filmmakers steadily increase, from sim-ple requests for permission to film people as they go about their lives, orminimal acts of staging, like asking documentary subjects to repeat an actionthe cameraperson missed, to the dramatization of events that may or maynot actually have taken place, with or without the participation of the actualpeople whom the depicted events concern.9

Anticipating the revival of critical interest in reenactment, Bill Nichols hasrecently followed Winstons lead, proposing a helpful taxonomy of varietiesof reenactment that echoes Winstons, but with a tentative teleologytoward

self-reflexivitythat is absent from Winstons account. This spectrum of typesranges from less reflexive forms like docudramatic realism, of the sort wefind in historical dramas and true-crime television, to the more stylized, self-conscious, and ironic forms we are likely to find in activist and experimentalfilm and video practice. As is true also of his well-known enumerations of themodes of documentarya list which has grown from two, in his 1981 bookIdeology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media, to fourin his 1991 book Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary(via Juli-anne Burtons reworking of the first list in Toward a History of Social Docu-mentary in Latin America), to six in Introduction to Documentary(2001)10typesof reenactment can be found at different periods, although it is clear that morerecent forms are privileged for their reflexive relation to older, realist forms,where the staging of history is meant to have evidentiary value. Drawing on

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both anthropology and Freudian psychoanalysis, Nichols argues for fantas-matic styles of reenactment, rehearsals that stand in for a historical event whileindicating that they are, at the same time, neitheran indexical record of thatevent nor merely a later act of representation, but rather some uncanny combi-

nation of the two. (This ingenious formulation draws from Gregory Batesonsgloss on how animals explain to themselves the rules and the meaning of theirplay-fighting: These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote whatwould be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.)11 Both authorsreturn to reenactment (or regard its return) as a hidden foundation within thehistory of documentary, one that, excavated by historians or filmmakers, mightbe employed in the remaking or deconstruction of the contemporary conceptof documentary. But where Winstons typology sees reenactment in semioticterms, as a language out of which different rhetorics or paradigms of true

story are shaped and contrasted to each other, thus making it appear as if thedocumentary tradition had a progressive history, Nichols views reenactmentas a kind of repressed instinct in the unconscious of the form, one that can be,in Freudian terms, worked through.

As a threat to the supposed indexical base of documentary cinema, reen-actment raises the possibility of histories of the form that predate film, andalthough Winston and Nichols are concerned only with cinematic reenact-ment, their taxonomies open onto much longer genealogies. One genealogywould start with the term reenactment itself. According to the Oxford English

Dictionary, enactment is itself already a concept in which the problems of stag-ing and mediation figure quite significantly, even before the belated addition ofthe prefix re-. To enactis, in the first three senses provided by the OED, to effecta permanent change in a social or institutional body with a singular utterance:

1. To enter among the actaor public records; also, to enter in a recordor chronicle.2. To make into an act; hence, to ordain, decree.3. To declare officially or with authority; to appoint.

These definitions, which date from the fifteenth century, are speech acts,in the linguistic sense of the term: they are their own audience and haveimmediate significance. To enact in these senses of the term is to rendera judgment, make a decision, or establish a fundamental principle for agroup without passing through a stage of mediation beside the medium ofthe declared idea itself.

But a second set of definitions, also originating in the early modernperiod, places more emphasis on the staging of the announcement of the newcondition and on its presentation to and effect upon an audience:

4. To work in or upon; to activate, influence. Also, to implant, inspire(a feeling, etc.) intoa person.

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5. To represent (a dramatic work, a scene) on or as on the stage;to personate (a character) dramatically, play (a part). To perform (aceremony).12

In these latter definitions, a material and human transformation of some sortmust take place before it can be said that enactment has occurred. Enactmentin these senses is both a temporal and spatial process, one that can not onlyfiguratively but also literally take place, and one that covers a social distance:between one person and another, or between one or more and more thanone. In contradistinction to enactment as an official declaration or inscrip-tion, these last two definitions suggest an impermanent and intersubjectiveprocess, a rhetorical or mimetic effect dependent upon anothers belief in orreaction to the act-ing in question. It is something of a letdown, after all the

intriguing play of contradiction between these various definitions, to see thatthe OEDhas relatively little to say aboutreenactment, which it defines merelyas a rehearsal or repetition of the two broad categories of enactment:1. Toenact (a law, etc.) again.; 2. To act or perform again; to reproduce.13

The enmeshment of the two actions of enactmentto do;to performisa centuries-old problem, captured in its etymology and revived over a cen-tury ago in the birth of the moving image. Filmed reenactmentswhich datemore or less to the origin of cinemareopen the gap between the two originalsenses of enactment. It would, of course, be a mistake to claim that film single-

handedly revived this problem, or that there were no institutional, public, orcollective practices of reenactment prior to or beside cinema. Various kindsof historical re-creations helped establish the public face of the American leftin the early twentieth century, for instance; and in the same period, the stag-ing of lost, disappearing, or outlawed indigenous cultural and ritual practiceswere central to the commercial-public exploitations of American salvageanthropology. And for centuries prior, reenactments of the Passion were astaple of Christian communities. But with cinema, the ontological ambiguityin the concept of enactment is practically unavoidable. Because the moving

image comes to us with an effect of immediacy built in, one that installs itselfin and as an authoritative record of the past simply because of the technicalconditions of its production and its exhibition, the medium already seems tohave the effect of public history, decreeing to audiences of any filmed eventthatit was this way, this happened. Under the conditions of these public displaysof social recording, of a past that lives again before us, it can be very difficultto distinguish actual actions from performanceswhich hasnt stopped crit-ics of moving images from trying, for over a hundred years.

Filmed reenactments are thus of a piece with the problems apparentlyposed in a new way by those more recent forms of docudrama or metafictionswhich place in abeyance, according to Hayden White, the distinctionbetween the real and the imaginary. Everything is presented as if it were ofthe same ontological order, both real and imaginaryrealistically imaginary

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or imaginarily real, with the result that the referential function of the imagesof events is etiolated.14

Writing a decade and a half ago, in the wake of yet another postmoderncrisis of the historical referentin this instance, the scandal of Oliver Stones

paranoid retelling of the Kennedy assassination inJFKWhites commentsare meant to remind his audience this crisis is a modernist problematic,not a postmodernist one, and its emergence can be dated to any number ofhistorical and cultural events of the previous century or so. But an etymologi-cal perspective suggests that theres no reason to stop there in looking for asource of the confusion that moving images of history produce.

If the recent resurgence of interest in historical reenactment among mak-ers of moving images is any indication, the crisis marked in different butoverlapping publics by Stones film and by the volume of scholarly essays

which includes Whites reflections seems, in fact, to recur in a regular way.As Vivian Sobchack says in her introduction to The Persistence of History: Cin-ema, Television, and the Modern Event(where Whites essay appears), this is itself

just a reflection of the intertwining of representational media and historyin everyday life. (That it is nearly impossible to remember what could haveseemed, a decade and a half ago, so world-historically significant about themass media examples Sobchack uses to signify this developmentForrestGump, the Disney controversy, the O. J. trial, the History Channelseemsin itself to prove her point that the public significance of the mass media had

come to depend upon the constant announcement of crises whichlike theSimpson trial of the centurywere on the one hand special and historicand on the other diurnal and temporally repetitive.)15 Like the essays in ThePersistence of History, the following articles assume that a question about theability of moving image media to make history hurt is once again beingposed.16 In them, techniques of reenactment appear as a return of sorts toprimordial questionspresent from the start in the very definition of enact-ment as a public and historic act of representationabout the capacity of anyhistorical medium to keep separate the signifiers and signifieds of history.

But unlike that earlier volume, the authors in this dossier do not necessar-ily seek an escape from this vertiginous spiral. Nor do they see it necessarilyas yet another form of mass deception channeled through the commercialmedia. (For that reason, many of the works of documentary and avant-gardefilm and video discussed in the following pages are likely to be much lessfamiliar to many readers than Forrest Gump [Robert Zemeckis, US, 1994],

JFK,Schindlers List[Steven Spielberg, US, 1993], The Thin Blue Line, and theother works of mainstream American commercial cinema used to make theargument for or against a postmodern historical sensibility in contemporarycinema.) Indeed, even within the same article, the reader of this collection ofessays will find a remarkable diversity of opinion on the effects and mean-ings of reenactment, as it is practiced in the wide range of moving imageforms represented. If there is some agreement among the contributors to this

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dossier (and the filmmakers about which they speak) that this is a momentin which reenactment again raises questions of some urgency for filmmakers,artists, and critical thinkers, it is just as true that, for each of these authors andfilmmakers, reenactment troubles the now in which any definite statement

of its coordinates or its meanings could be made.And to that end, the place and time of the contemporary has been estab-

lished in the broadest possible terms in this collection of articles, three ofwhich consider forms of reenactment in cinema and three of which discussmore recent appearances of reenactment in the world of contemporary artand art criticism. The first article, my interview with Alessandro Cavadiniand Carolyn Strachan, about their important but rarely seen film Two Laws(AU, 1981), serves as something of a historical reference point for the articlesthat follow. Made between 1979 and 1981, Two Lawswas, in part, a response

(as Cavadini and Strachan make clear in the interview) to the prevailing eth-ics and aesthetics of documentary and of ethnographic filmmaking in theWest. But it was also an attempt to incorporate olderin some importantsenses, immemorialand non-Western cultures of reenactment into Westerndocumentary film practice and documentary consciousness. By doing so,Strachan and Cavadini were establishing some lasting questions about theagency and action of filmic representation, and making clear that such ques-tions must be posed in transnational political terms.

In The Black Holes of History: Raoul Pecks Two Lumumbas, Christo-

pher Pavsek considers the authorship of reenactment in Raoul Pecks two filmsabout the life and short political career of the Congos first democraticallyelected leader, Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba: la mort du prophte/Lumumba:Death of a Prophet(CH/DE/FR, 1992) and Lumumba(BE/DE/FR/HT, 2000).Where the first film is a reflexive essay, concerned as much with the presentstruggle to make a film about the past as it is with its ostensible subject, thesecond is made in a style familiar to viewers of the classical Hollywood bio-graphical narrative. Drawing out the Freudian themes articulated explicitlyin Death of a Prophet, Pavsek calls it a film about failure itself . . . marked by

the great historical failure of Lumumbas project for Congolese independenceand national unity. Pavsek notes that the incorporation of this failure intothe structure of the first filmwhich fails in various ways to function as adocumentary, insofar as it demonstrates the political and artistic difficulty ofreturning to the literal and figurative scenes of imperialist and neocolonialcrimesis one of that films strengths, creating black holes of history thatmark the sites of another possible future. Pecks inability to enact a properdocumentary statement, in other words, becomes a way for Peck to tease outthe layers of political history, through what Freud called the screen memoriesof everyday forgetting. Looking into the gap of years and styles between thefirst and second films, Pavsek finds a similar forgetting taking place in Pecksrestaging of historiesLumumbas, and Pecks ownin the narrative consola-tions of the biopic genre.

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Collective histories of state violence and the cinematic forms appropriateto them are also the subject of Shattering Silence: Traumatic Memory andReenactment in Rithy Panhs S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, DeirdreBoyles reflection on the use of reenactment in Panhs powerful interview-

based documentary S-21, which stages the return of survivors and perpetra-tors of the Cambodian genocide to the site of their conjoint traumatization.Taken together with Cavadini and Strachans commentary on the makingofTwo Lawsand Pavseks discussion of Pecks films, Boyles reading ofS-21demonstrates the importance of a local theory of reenactment, one calibratedto the methods of reenactment employed by filmmakers to address particularproblems of history and memory, even when the institutional and politicalsources of the collective trauma in question are roughly comparable, as istrue of these films subjects. In the case of Boyles analysis of Panhs film-

making, the theoretical apparatus includes a genealogical investigation of thehistory of psychology, where Boyle finds alternatives to the Freudian conceptof repression. The Freudian model has been central to critical work on manyvarieties of the literature and culture of genocide work which is sometimesorganized under the heading of trauma studies. Against the universalizingtenets of this work, Boyle argues, however, that Panhs practice of reenact-ment is designed specifically to deal with Cambodians dissociated memoriesof the Khmer Rouge period. The resulting film is, in this sense, both a way toengage public conscience about the evil done in the name of the stateas is

true of many works of political documentaryand a way to realize the limitsand barriers to cinematic transmission of such horrors.The next three essays in the dossier move from the aesthetic and social

structures of cinema to works of reenactment designed for the diverse spacesand screens of contemporary video art. In The Real Movie: Reenactment,Spectacle, and Recovery in Pierre Huyghes The Third Memory, Ruth Erick-son takes up one of the best-known examples of reenactment in the art world,Huyghes ten-minute restaging of the events chronicled in Dog Day Afternoon,featuring John Wojtowicz, the man on whom Al Pacinos gay bank-robber

character was based. Wojtowicz is seen in Huyghes reconstruction of a fewscenes from the film directing himself and others in what he calls the realmovie, a more authentic version of the events from which Pacino, directorSidney Lumet, screenwriter Frank Pierson, and other high-priced Hollywoodtalent made Dog Day Afternoon. Noting the increasing interest in reenactmentamong contemporary artists and curators alike in the decade since Huyghesproject was first exhibited, Erickson observes a tacit understanding of its criti-cal function in this period, one not altogether different from the modernistcritique of historiography outlined by Hayden White: contemporary art,argues Erickson, employs reenactment to champion viewpoints tradition-ally kept outside the grand narratives and to deconstruct the images andaccounts that have comprised these narratives. But by reading Huyghessimulation through the Situationist concept of spectacle, Erickson suggests

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that The Third Memory resists such a neat narrative of liberation, whilecalling attention as well to its rampant textual and contextual contradictions,wherein the goal for both Huyghe and his subject is to claim an image andeconomic gain closely associated with stardom.

With its highly personal content, its auteurist aspirations, and its rari-fied conditions of exhibition and reception, Huyghes multi-screen and mul-timedia installation marks, at first glance, the dramatic differences betweenthe art world and the public spheres of social documentary film. But it couldalso be argued that Huyghe and many contemporary artists have turned todocumentary methods and to the matter of the everyday precisely to breakdown such sociological and formal boundaries; and from a certain perspec-tive, Huyghes work with Wojtowicz derives from the same ameliorativeprinciples as Pahns work with the victims of the Khmer Rouge, Cavadini

and Strachans collaboration with Aboriginal groups in northern Australia,or, for that matter, the Italian neorealists work with peasants and the urbanworking class in postwar Italy. In Gender, Power, and Pedagogy in CocoFuscos Bare Life Study #1 (2005), A Room of Ones Own(2005), and OperationAtropos(2006), Karen Beckman explores the work of another contemporaryartist whose use of reenactment brings together aesthetic experimentationand corrective social analysis. Placing herself in the frame of this multime-dia group of performance works, Fusco attempts to learn by reenactment themethods and effects of military discipline and punishmenton the militarys

own operatives and on enemy combatantsand, in doing so, to learn some-thing about how learning and torture are connected. At the same time, how-ever, Beckmans essay establishes a contrast between Fuscos work and someother uses of reenactment described in the dossier, in which experience andthe personal rise above ideology, and are the basis for a claimby artistsand by criticsthat reenactment is a redemptive or progressive technique.Opening on journalist Christopher Hitchenss bathetic performance of hisown torture for aVanity Fairarticle,Beckman contrasts the ethical clarityHitchens reaches by reenacting the waterboarding of prisoners and detainees

held by American military forces with Fuscos discovery of how difficultit is to determine what torture is, and how to prevent it from happening.Tracing this troubling theme through a set of related stagings by Fusco ofpedagogical theory and practice, Beckman comes to the bracing conclusionthat re-enactments constitute central and paradoxical components of ouroppositional discourse, including the spaces of liberal education. Beckmansreading helps us understand reenactment as adiscipline, with both punitiveand critical valences, both of which are present where we re-enact elementsof the structure of power that makes torture possible.

The final essay in the dossier, Paige Sarlins New Left-Wing Melancholy:Mark Tribes The Port Huron Project and the Politics of Reenactment, returnsus to another immemorial problem for documentarythat of the documentviaa critical examination of Tribes Port Huron Project, a multimedia initiative

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to restage a number of landmark political speeches by American radicals inthe 1960s, and to archive and distribute the performances in digital form.Placing the work of Tribe, a Brown University professor of modern cultureand media, in a context of nostalgia for an authentic left politics, Sarlin raises

valuable questions about the use and abuse of historyand of the concept ofthe archive, a term stretched so thin at present that it is practically meaning-lessin contemporary cultural criticism. Sarlin diagnoses a modern variantof what Walter Benjamin called left-wing melancholy in the performancesstaged, recorded, and circulated by Tribe, as well as appreciations of Tribeswork in venues like October, the journal of aesthetic and cultural theory, asa model of how to return art to political relevance at a time of war. Sarlinmaintains that, on the contrary, Tribes project gives a blank form to thedifferences and the similarities between then and now, assuming a form of

resonance and significance that the project then re-produces and amplifies,but which allow it and its champions to avoid important questions about thehistorical models they adopt.

By raising the question of how the activities and technologies of record-ing and collecting conduce to collectivity, Sarlin returns readers to questionscentral to the problem of thinking about documentary as a form of social orpolitical enactment. This problem subtends every documentary work worthyof the name, since that namedocumentarycontains the problem of howa document can become a likeness of itself, and projects the presence of a

reader or observer, one who measures the distance the documentary travelsfrom its source in the document, and for whom this travel is made to mat-ter. Applied to situations of reenactment, in all the forms this activity cantake, documentary foregrounds this problem in terms of movement. If socialdocumentary is always at some level a problem of movementfrom artifactto explanation; from viewing to affect or actionthe use of reenactment indocumentary reinforces it, moving the documentary viewer between Europein 1968 and Aboriginal Australia; between Brussels and Kinshasa; betweenthe Vietnam era and the period of Iraq; between crime, art, and mass

culture; between the methods of torture and of pedagogy, or of torture anddocumentary itself. But while they animate this movement, the following dis-cussions help us narrow the apparent distance between the past and presentforms of documentary. In this way, documentary reenactment can be seennot as a turning away from the present, but as a way of posing the question,what now?a question whose meaning changes depending on how it is per-formed, and one that it might now and again be more important for docu-mentary to ask than to answer.

Jonathan Kahana is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University,where he co-directs the graduate program in Culture and Media. He is the author ofIntelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (Columbia Uni-versity Press, 2008) and of articles on documentary and avant-garde film, cultural

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theory, and American politics inCamera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Millen-nium Film Journal, and Social Text. He is the editor ofThe DocumentaryFilm Reader (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Notes

Thanks are due Erin Baysden and Anne Ellegood of the Hirshhorn Museum andSculpture Garden, who provided materials from the Realisms show for me toconsult (as well as arranging for me to discuss her curation of the show with Elle-good), and to Paul Fileri, whose editorial acumen I relied on to shape the finalform of this introduction and the articles that follow it.

1. Ivone Margulies, Exemplary Bodies: Reenactment in Love in the City,Sons, andClose Up, in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 221.2. Ibid.3. On Stoneys production methods for both films, see Lynne Jackson, A Com-

mitment to Social Values and Racial Justice, Wide Angle21, no. 2 (March 1999):3337; and Jacksons The Production of George Stoneys Film All My Babies: AMidwifes Own Story, Film History1 (1987): 36792.

4. Margulies, Exemplary Bodies, 227.5. For an excellent account of the historical biography film and its importance to

the early sound era in Hollywood, see Leger Grindon, Shadows on the Past: Studiesin the Historical Fiction Film(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

6. See, for example, Manohla Dargis, We, the People Behind the Abuse, New YorkTimes, April 25, 2008, www.movies.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/movies/25stan.html; Richard Schickel, Standard Operating Procedure, Too Much Style?, Time,April 24, 2008, www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1734936,00.html; J.Hoberman, Errol Morris Lets Torturers Off Easy, Village Voice, April 22, 2008,www.villagevoice.com/2008-04-22/film/get-out-of-jail-free/; Paul Arthur, TheHorror, Artforum(April 2008), www.artforum.com/inprint/id=19738.

7. Errol Morris, Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One), Zoom, NewYork Times, April 3, 2008, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part-one/; Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments,

Part Two), Zoom,New York Times, April 10, 2008, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part-two/; Cartesian Blog-ging, Part One, Zoom,New York Times, December 10, 2007, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/primae-objectiones-et-responsio-auctoris-ad-primas-objectiones-part-one/; Cartesian Blogging, Part Two, Zoom, New York Times,

June 9, 2008, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/cartesian-blogging-part-two/; Cartesian Blogging, Part Three, Zoom,New York Times, November 12,2008, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/cartesian-blogging-part-3/.

8. This influence of these films can be sensed, in turn, in Errol Morriss own Mr.Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (US, 1999), which reviews the his-

torical and historiographic terrain covered, quite literally, by Shoah, while givingequal time to the unconvincing arguments of the Holocaust deniers against (orfor) whom Shoahwas made. Morriss use of his by-then conventional style ofreenactments to dramatize certain details of his subjects speech raises implicitly

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the question demanded by the whole project: After Shoah, why did such a filmneed to be made? The answer is discovered, at least in part, when the film fol-lows Leuchter to Auschwitz, where he is caught on an assistants amateur videochipping away at the ruins of the gas chambers, in a horrifying imitationone

could say, a reenactmentof the professional historian, a grotesque performancethat is also meant to enter the as-if of the most pernicious kind of historical fic-tion: What if the Nazis were telling the truth and these really were just the wallsof ordinary showers?

9. Brian Winston, Honest, Straightforward Re-enactment: The Staging of Real-ity, in Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, ed. Kees Bakker (Amsterdam:Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 169.

10. See Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema andOther Media(Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 18285; Representing Real-ity: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1991), 3275; Julianne Burton, Toward a History of Social Documentary inLatin America, in The Social Documentary in Latin America, ed. Julianne Burton(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 36; Bill Nichols, Introductionto Documentary(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 99138.

11. I am here paraphrasing Bill Nicholss argument in Documentary Reenactmentand the Fantasmatic Subject from the form in which he presented it on thereenactment panel I organized for the SCMS conference in 2007. Nichols gener-ously allowed me to review the manuscript of the full-length version of his essay,which has recently been published as Documentary Reenactment and the Fan-tasmatic Subject, in Critical Inquiry35, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 7289. Gregory

Batesons formulation appears in A Theory of Play and Fantasy, in Steps to anEcology of Mind(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1972]), 180.12. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. Enactment.13. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. Re-enactment.14. Hayden White, The Modernist Event, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Televi-

sion, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (London: Routledge, 1996), 19.15. Vivian Sobchack, Introduction: History Happens, in The Persistence of His-

tory, 4.16. History is what hurts is Fredric Jamesons coinage. See The Political Uncon-

scious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1981), 102.