Performing History, Troubling Reference

Tracking the Screen Re-enactment

Megan Carrigy

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of English, Media and Performing Arts University of New South Wales

2011

Abstract

While the re-enactment is a form of historical representation that has not received the serious critical attention it deserves, it continues to be a pervasive form of historical representation in film and television. It plays a key role in a number of genres (most notably the documentary, the docudrama, and the biopic) and frequently appears in less expected locations (including video installations, remakes and police procedural television). While re-enactments pre-date cinema, it is cinema—and the technically reproducible image more generally—that has played a crucial role in the development of the re-enactment as both a form of historical representation and a genre. This thesis explores the pervasiveness of the re-enactment in film and other screen based media, tracking its evolution, its mobility and its adaptability in a range of genres and institutional contexts.

This thesis argues that in all its diverse manifestations, the re-enactment is always caught between two agendas. On the one hand it sets out to take things literally, to repeat things as they happened, and on the other seeks to foreground itself as a re- enactment, which requires that it self-reflexively foregrounds its theatrical, performative nature. Focussing on the tension between these two agendas, this thesis builds a ‘back history’ for the re-enactment and pursues its dispersal into areas where its persistence has not typically been acknowledged.

Because re-enactments perform pre-existing events, the issue of reference is paramount. To date, however, the questions that the re-enactment poses for reference have been overlooked in film and television debates. This thesis addresses this theoretical void by engaging critically with film theory debates that examine the relationship between technical reproducibility, time and reference. It argues that the re-enactment cannot be understood outside of its mediation and its relation to time, identifying transformations in the re-enactment that continue to take place as a result of its incorporation in different forms of technical media. It examines the functions of theatricality, temporality and indexicality in the re-enactment, investigating how these have developed in relation to shifts in the conceptualisation of the referential dimensions of the technically reproducible image.

This argument is developed through readings of an eclectic array of film, television and video examples. These include early film re-enactments; the storming of the Winter Palace sequence in October (Sergei Eisenstein,1927); the biopics Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008), Control (Anton Corbijn, 2007), Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003) and Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999); television drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000- ); Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998); Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993); and the uses to which the video of police assaulting Rodney King were put in the court case California v. Powell, Koon, Wind and Briseno (1992).

Acknowledgements

Thank you first and foremost to Jodi Brooks for her astute and rigorous supervision of this thesis from its inception. Thanks also to Lisa Trahair for her co-supervision of this thesis at a number of stages of its development. I am also grateful to John Golder for agreeing to put his enthusiastic and meticulous copy editing skills to work on the final draft.

Several chapters have benefited from feedback I received during annual reviews in School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales. Thanks to the Postgraduate Coordinators who facilitated this process: Gay Hawkins, Paul Dawson and Michelle Langford. My work also developed through the presentation of papers at local and international conferences. I am especially grateful for the funding I received from the Postgraduate Research Student Support Scheme to present at the Screen Studies Conference at Glasgow University in 2009. Thanks to the Graduate Research School at UNSW for administering this funding as well as my Australian Postgraduate Award.

Of course, I would also like to thank Holly Smolly for her company during the long hours I spent at my desk and Sal Browning, as always, for her love and support.

Contents

Abstract 1

Acknowledgements 2

Introduction Opening up the Re-enactment: Etymology and Technical Reproducibility 4

Part I: Back History

Chapter 1 Genre Trouble: The Dispersal of the Re-enactment 31

Chapter 2 All of Russia was Acting: October and The Storming of the Winter Palace 55

Chapter 3 Re-enactment and Researched Detail in the Biopic 81

Part II: New Directions

Chapter 4 Deixis, Trace and Cinematic Metaphor in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 108

Chapter 5 Re-staging the Cinema: Psycho and the Redundant New Remake 135

Chapter 6 Performing Differently in a Parallel Universe: Re-enactment, Delayed Cinema and Fugitive Testimony 162

Conclusion 188

Sources 195

Introduction 6

Introduction

Opening up the Re-enactment Etymology and Technical Reproducibility

The long-held belief that the re-enactment was a form of historical representation unworthy of critical attention has been stridently challenged during the first decade of the twenty-first century in the disciplines of history, contemporary art theory and performance studies. The disciplinary field of cinema and television studies, however, has by and large continued to neglect the persistent, widespread use of re- enactment in film and television. Cinema and television studies need to cultivate an approach to film and television re-enactment that is attentive to the specific dynamics and conditions that govern screen media. Especially pertinent to this task is a close consideration of the re-enactment’s relationship to debates about the shifting status of referentiality in technically reproducible media. Because re- enactments perform pre-existing events, the issue of reference is paramount and the ways in which the re-enactment makes its referential claims have become tied up in its technical reproducibility. A re-enactment must draw attention not only to itself as the performance of a pre-existing event, but also to the investments it makes in accuracy and authenticity. How these activities in the re-enactment have been shaped by its deployment in film and television remains under-investigated.

Introduction 7

Film theory is the disciplinary field in cinema and television studies that has engaged in an ongoing and rigorous debate about of the referential status of the technically reproducible image. I engage with some of the these debates in film theory to examine how the functions of theatricality, temporality and indexicality in the re- enactment have developed in relation to shifting conceptualisations of the referential dimensions of the technically reproducible image throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. As I will show, historians have tended to concern themselves with the role of performance and dramatisation in the re-enactment, while contemporary art theory and performance studies have highlighted the relationship between the re-enactment, performance and technical media. My approach to the re-enactment can, on the one hand, assist historians to investigate the relationship between historical thinking and technical reproducibility, and on the other, address questions that have been raised in contemporary art theory and performance studies about the nature of the re-enactment’s relationship to technical media.

One of the strengths of the emerging critical work on the re-enactment in history, contemporary art theory and performance studies is its emphasis on the re-enactment as a highly mobile, multi-modal and dispersed representational form. Ideas of re- enactment cross media and cultural forms and the re-enactment’s capacity for adaptation has been vital to its persistence over centuries. Film theory is a disciplinary field interested in intermediality and transmedia forms, and this constitutes one of its strengths in terms of its suitability to account for the re- enactment and to contribute to future cross-disciplinary work on this successfully trans-disciplinary form. Focussing on film theory, I nonetheless take up the enthusiasm historians, contemporary art and performance studies scholars have displayed for the mobility and adaptability of the re-enactment and take heed of their ability to embrace its wide, uneven and indiscriminate dispersal.

Diverse History-Themed Genres: Historians on Re-enactment Re-enactments have long been regarded by historians as a dubious and banal form of historical representation, an illegitimate form of historical thinking. For some they

Introduction 8

were essentially a marginal, amateur and unscholarly form of cultural expression, a naïve hobby for weekend enthusiasts, ‘merely the present in funny dress’, as Greg Dening put it, rather than a legitimate historical practice.1 Others tended to associate the re-enactment as an expression of popular culture, criticising the historicist and clichéd ‘consumption-oriented spectacles’2 and ‘Disneyfied history’3 produced by commercial operators in contexts where ‘gore, adventure and personal transformation sell’.4 Robert Hewison expresses an opinion shared by many historians that re-enactments turn the past into commodities designed to be diverting, pleasing and placating: ‘An actress mourning by a coffin may do her best to evoke the hardships of working class life in 1900, but her performance is an entertainment that helps to make the past seem picturesque and pleasing.’5 The use of re-enactment in the heritage industry has been charged with being ‘bad’ historical representation, accused not only of not being ‘real’ history, but, worse than that, being a threat to ‘real’ history. ‘[V]ivid spectacles and straightforward narratives’ are considered irresponsible, rose-coloured and vague: ‘bogus’ history ‘entertainingly and authoritatively presented’.6

1 Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 4. See also John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992); Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999). 2 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 30. 3 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. xv. 4 Vanessa Agnew, ‘Introduction: What is Reenactment?’ Criticism, 46.3 (Summer 2004), 327-39 (p. 328). See also Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1982). 5 The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (Methuen: London, 1987), p. 83. See also Dennis Hall, ‘Civil War Reenactors and the Postmodern Sense of History’, Journal of American Culture, 17.3 (1994), 7-11. 6 Hewison, pp. 137-8, 144; Agnew, p. 330. David Lowenthal calls this ‘a history lesson without the boring stuff’ in Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 98.

Introduction 9

Since historians have begun to critically re-assess the re-enactment in the last decade, there has been a concerted effort to define the place of the re-enactment both within the history industry and the academy. At the same time, and no doubt tied to this critical reassessment, re-enactments are increasingly pervasive in national and religious celebrations, on stages, inside and outside galleries and museums and on cinema, television and computer screens. Historians have even begun to celebrate these wide-ranging manifestations. Vanessa Agnew, for example, conceives of re- enactment as a highly mobile form of historical thinking that spans ‘diverse history- themed genres – from theatrical and “living history” performances to museum exhibits, television, film, travelogues, and historiography’.7 There has also been a revived interest in R. G. Collingwood’s re-enactment doctrine, which aligns the idea of re-enactment with the practice of historiography by arguing that, in order to write about it, a historian needs to be able to mentally ‘re-enact the past in his own mind’.8

Although there has been little agreement about the way in which the re-enactment should be defined, the broad diversity of historical representations that historians have recognised as re-enactments has made it a rich and burgeoning area of study. Agnew draws attention to the re-enactment’s capacity to break down traditional categories and distinctions and to transgress, interrogate and destabilise existing historical interpretations.9 Jonathan Lamb and Alexander Cook have each proposed a taxonomy for the diverse kinds of re-enactment that historians study, by grouping together those employed in different media (living history museums, public performances, television series, films, historical novels and so forth), based on their dramatic and investigative strategies. ‘House’, for example, one of Lamb’s four categories (the others are ‘pageant’, ‘theatre’ and ‘realist’), is characterised by investments in personal relationships and the ‘private particulars’ of everyday

7 ‘Introduction: What is Reenactment?’, p. 327. 8 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1956]), p. 246. See also William Dray, History as Re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Margit Hurup Nielsen, ‘Re-Enactment and Reconstruction in Collingwood’s Philosophy of History’, History and Theory, 20.1 (February 1981), 1-31. 9 ‘Introduction: What is Reenactment?’ p. 327.

Introduction 10

experiences.10 It includes living-history villages (such as Colonial Williamsburg, the outdoor living history museum in the United States) and reality-television series such as 1900 House (2001), Frontier House (2003) and The Colony (2005), which place participants in recreated historical situations.11 Cook, on the other hand, groups such reality-television programmes into the category of ‘investigative reenactments’, a category comprising examples that set out ‘to learn something about the past through the activity of reenactment itself and to communicate those findings to a wider audience’.12

While most historians acknowledge that in these taxonomies, and in wider conceptualisations, the re-enactment has been fully incorporated into popular media forms, the concept of mediation has received far less attention than those of performance, dramatisation and investigation. When it comes to the place of re- enactment in film and television, there has been a tendency to apply definitions associated with dramatisation and live performance. Stephen Gapps, for example, defines re-enactment as a ‘bodily, sensory engagement’ that emphasises participation and immersion, offering ‘connection to the past through performance, props, and stages of authenticating histories’, while Agnew defines it as ‘a body-based discourse in which the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experience’.13

10 Jonathan Lamb, ‘Historical Re-enactment, Extremity, and Passion’, Eighteenth Century, 49.3 (Fall 2008), 239-50. 11 The Ship (2001), the BBC series that used a replica of Captain James Cook’s Endeavor in a re-enactment of Captain Cook’s 1770 voyage from the east coast of Australia to Indonesia, is another much-studied series of this kind. The general consensus was that The Ship provided merely ‘a fig leaf of authority for a fundamentally antihistorical enterprise’ that was suffering an ‘identity crisis’, unable to decide whether it was historical documentary or reality television. See Iain McCalman, ‘The Little Ship of Horrors: Reenacting Extreme History’, Criticism, 46.3 (Summer 2004), 477-86 (p. 484). 12 Alexander Cook, ‘The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History’, Criticism, 46.3 (2004), 487-96 (pp. 487-8). 13 Stephen Gapps, ‘Authenticity Matters: Historical Re-enactment and Australian Attitudes to the Past’, Australian Cultural History, 23 (2003), 105-16 (p.106-7) and Agnew, ‘Introduction: What is Reenactment?’ p. 330.

Introduction 11

Clearly, when it comes to understanding the place of re-enactment in screen media, the emphasis on performance and dramatisation has its limitations. These stand out more starkly in the etymology of the word ‘re-enactment’ provided by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), which demonstrates that the significance of repetition and technical mediation for the re-enactment has increased over time. One of the SOED’s earliest definitions of the verb ‘to enact’ places performance and theatricality at its core, describing it as to ‘represent (a scene, play, etc.) on or as on a stage; play (a part); take part in (a drama or scene in real life)’.14 It is this definition that remains central to conceptualisations of the re-enactment by historians across all of the diverse manifestations they have identified. According to the SOED, this definition, which emerged in the fifteenth century, remained relatively constant and therefore adequate for describing the full range of representational activities, until the mid-nineteenth century. At this point, however, the term ‘to re-enact’ emerges and begins to be conceptualised as ‘to act or perform again; reproduce’.15

Etymology and Technical Reproducibility This new conceptualisation emerges at a time when new mass-reproduction technologies are beginning to impact dramatically on societies. Both Samuel Weber and Walter Benjamin identify the mid-nineteenth century as the beginning of the ‘age of technical reproducibility’, a period in which, ‘with the increasing mechanization of reproductive techniques, the traditional distinction between production and reproduction begins to break down’.16 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, repetition became tied up in forms of technical reproducibility.

14 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), I. 819. The terms ‘to enact’ and ‘to re-enact’ also have legislative connotations: ‘to enter among the public record’, ‘to make into an act; hence, to ordain, decree’; ‘to declare officially or with authority’ to appoint’. According to the SOED, II. 2505, the noun ‘re-enactment’ only came into usage in the early nineteenth century, several hundred years after ‘to enact’ and before ‘to re-enact’ even appeared. 15 SOED, II. 2505. 16 Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, ed. by Alan Cholodenko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 87, 82 and Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217-51.

Introduction 12

That this definition of ‘to re-enact’ should have emerged at this point in time suggests that, while the practice of re-enactment predates technically reproducible media, the re-enactment, live or mediated, has become informed by the logic of technical media. Moreover, while the re-enactment continues to exist in both live and mediated forms, it has been radically transformed through its incorporation within forms of technical media—something that necessarily has implications for its theorisation. The vast majority of historians have drawn almost exclusively on the pre-nineteenth-century lineage of the re-enactment, however, without really thinking through the consequences of its technical mediation.

Bill Schwarz argues that there is a reluctance among historians to ‘think about the consequence of media forms as mediated’, a reluctance that stems from the fear that ‘mediated time threatens to destabilize the very foundations of historical interrogation […] that mediated times transform historical times’.17 For Schwarz, media times constitute ‘both the narrative times of particular artefacts and the new sensations of experiences of time which are shaped by social institutions of the electronic mass media’.18 He argues that [c]inema, radio and television not only created new narrative times and organised new sensations of time (real and imagined, so long as those distinctions work); they also depended for their existence on unprecedented time frames and created new indices of social, or historical, time.19

Yet historical time, Schwarz argues, has generally been understood to be ‘external, social and in some sense objective’.20 To challenge this, Schwarz proposes that historians address the question, ‘How can we grasp the transactions between mediated times and historical time?’ by building on the insights about time and mediation that have been developed specifically by film, television and radio scholars.21

17 Bill Schwarz, ‘Media times/historical yimes’, Screen, 45.2 (2004), 93-105 (p. 102). Italics in the original. 18 18 ‘Media times/historical times’, p. 93. 19 ‘Media times/historical times’, p. 99. 20 ‘Media times/historical times’, p. 93. 21 ‘Media times/historical times’, pp. 93, 100.

Introduction 13

The etymology I have outlined suggests that the re-enactment offers an ideal form through which to pursue exactly this kind of dialogue between historians and media scholars. This is all the more so when we consider that the re-enactment, traditionally regarded as the domain of history (and its practice that of performance), rather than of media, is also a representational form predicated on, and drawing attention to itself as a repetition. Furthermore, the re-enactment’s investment in theatricality is always tied to its relationship to repetition. I am less concerned here with issues of staging, dramatisation and performance than with the contention that, in order for a re-enactment to be recognised as a re-enactment, it needs to foreground that it is staging and performing an event that has already taken place.

The re-enactment is always caught between two agendas. First, it sets out to take things literally, to be an exact repetition of a previous event. Secondly, it sets out to foreground itself as a re-enactment and it does so by emphasising its theatrical, performative nature. As a consequence, the most sustained representational code of the re-enactment, in all its diverse forms, is its presentational mode of address, which has been central to the way in which a re-enactment has signalled itself historically, in both its pre-and post-cinematic history. This presentational mode has typically been understood as either naïve or attention-seeking, rather than entailing any complex self-reflexivity. However, as we shall see presently, emerging work in documentary theory has begun to conceptualise the re-enactment in terms of its self- reflexivity. Other notable exceptions in film and television studies scholarship include Alison Griffiths, who, in an essay on the relationship between nineteenth- century panoramas and early cinematic re-enactments, argues that re-enactments ‘frequently signal their authored status in overt and self-conscious ways’, making them ‘highly reflexive speech acts’;22 and Michele Pierson, who, in relation to what she terms ‘avant-garde re-enactments’, argues that ‘the element of performance introduces a reflexive dimension into this mode of historical representation that it has not always been credited with’.23

22 Alison Griffiths, ‘“Shivers down your spine”: Panoramas and the Origins of the Cinematic Reenactment’, Screen, 44.1 (Spring 2003), 1-36 (pp. 28, 3). 23 Michele Pierson, ‘Avant-Garde Re-enactment: World Mirror Cinema, Decasia and The Heart of the World’, Cinema Journal, 49.1 (Fall 2009), 1-19 (p. 2).

Introduction 14

The negotiation of, and emphasis on, the tension between theatricality and repetition defines the re-enactment in all its diverse manifestations and is essential to the way in which the re-enactment signals itself. What has to be addressed is the way in which this negotiation continues to be transformed by the incorporation of the re- enactment within forms of technical media that are themselves characterised by frequent transformations. Transformations in the re-enactment’s negotiation between repetition and theatricality need to be understood in terms of transformations in the relationship between the concepts of technical reproducibility, time and reference in technical media. As I have suggested, the disciplinary field that has specifically addressed the relationship between these concepts is film theory. In recent years many of the most established thinkers in Anglophone film theory, including D. N. Rodowick, Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane and Philip Rosen, have produced sophisticated accounts of the current media climate through their investigations of the relationships between these concepts.24

So far, however, it has been in the fields of contemporary art theory and performance studies that the re-enactment has been conceptualised as a strategic form of repetition that opens up questions about the relationship between technical reproducibility, performance, mediation and idea of the event. There has been an explicit move in these fields to define the re-enactment against the impression of ‘a trapped medium, fundamentally conservative’25 and to draw attention to the work of re-enactment beyond the ‘uncritical repetitions’ and ‘entertaining diversion’26 produced by living history and heritage projects. This critical reassessment of the re- enactment has been made possible by, and is a response to, a growing body of artistic work that utilises re-enactment inside and outside gallery spaces as a potent

24 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006); Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency and the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 25 Robert Blackson, ‘Once More …with Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture’, Art Journal, 66.1 (Spring 2007), 28-40 (p. 33). 26 Alina Hoyne, ‘Doing it again: Re-enactment in Contemporary British Art (1996- 2007)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Melbourne, 2009), pp.7, 37.

Introduction 15

spectacular and investigative strategy.27 In this context, the tension in the re- enactment between the attempt at literal repetition and at the same time the need to draw attention to itself as a theatrical, performative repetition has been most explicitly understood as the re-enactment’s greatest strength.

Productive Repetition: Art Theory & Performance Studies Sven Lutticken, the curator of the 2005 exhibition Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art at the Gallery Witte de With in Rotterdam, argues that the re-enactment has the potential to challenge those forms of historicism it seems set up to perpetuate. He suggests thinking about re-enactment as ‘productive repetition’ and as a self-reflexive ‘performative strategy’, proposing the re-enactment as a form and a practice that have the capacity ‘to fight repetition with repetition’.28 Robert Blackson, writing about the exhibition Once More … with Feeling at the Reg Vardy Gallery in 2005, likewise argues that ‘all re-enactments are repetitions, but few repetitions become re-enactments’, defining the re-enactment specifically in terms of its ‘distinct emancipatory agency’.29 In line with this sentiment, Steve Rushton, writing about the group exhibition Experience, Memory, Re-enactment at the Piet Zwart Institute in 2004, proposes that contemporary art theory emphasise ‘not what re-enactment is but what re-enactment does’.30

Anke Bangma, also writing in the catalogue for Experience, Memory, Re-enactment, proposes using re-enactment as a ‘framing concept that would open up questions

27 Exhibitions include Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History at Mass MOCA (2006); Playback_Simulated Realities at Edith Russ House (2006); History Will Repeat Itself at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2007); and the event Re-enact organised by Casco and Mediamatic in Amsterdam (2004). 28 Sven Lutticken, ed., Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (Rotterdam, 2005), pp. 5-6, 19. 29 ‘Once More … with Feeling’, pp. 29-30. 30 Steve Rushton, ‘Preface One – Tweedledum and Tweedeledee Resolved to have a Battle’, in Experience, Memory, Re-enactment, ed. Anke Bangma, Steve Rushton, and Florian Wust (Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, 2006), p.11. Italics in the original.

Introduction 16

about the more fundamentally mediated nature of experience and memory’.31 Stressing that a re-enactment is ‘necessarily a performance of a performance’, Alina Hoyne points to the ways in which a re-enactment can highlight how its ‘original’ event was already highly mediated and staged.32 She argues that Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001), a collaboration between former Yorkshire coal miners, EventPlan, a professional re-enactment production company, and ArtAngel that staged a re-enactment of the infamous 1984 Sheffield Miner’s strike in South Yorkshire, showed that the original clash between police and miners had been ‘a carefully orchestrated piece of theatre’ instigated by Margaret Thatcher and supported by the media.33 Hoyne also focuses on how Rod Dickinson, the most prominent and prolific artist working with re-enactment, ‘consciously reveals and highlights the elements of trickery and artifice’ in the events he chooses to re- enact.34 For example, his 2002 work, The Milgram Reenactment, re-stages social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s 1960s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments in which volunteers were put into a fabricated situation and ordered to administer electric shocks.

Key works from the canon of performance art are also being re-enacted on stages, inside and outside gallery spaces, as part of a phenomenon stretching across Europe and the United States. Curated exhibitions of such work include A Little Bit of History Repeated at Kunst-Werke in 2001, A Short History of Performance at the Whitechapel Art Gallery between 2002 and 2006, and Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2005.35 These works are themselves necessarily performances of performances. Often, they are actually performances based on the documentation of the original performance, marking the original as a fundamentally mediated event. In Lutticken’s view the documentation

31 Anke Bangma ‘Preface Two – Contested Terrains’, Experience, Memory, Re- enactment, p. 14. Italics in the original. 32 ‘Doing it Again’, pp. 96, 240. 33 ‘Doing it again’, p. 116. A documentary was also made of this event, directed by Mike Figgis. It first screened on Channel 4 in the UK in 2002 and has since travelled to contemporary art events around the world. 34 ‘Doing it Again’, p. 120. 35 See Lutticken ed., p. 5; Blackson, p. 37.

Introduction 17

produced by a re-enactment can also become performative, and he suggests that the performativity of the re-enactment can enliven the temporality of technical reproduction: Like other performances, reenactments generate representations in the form of photos and videos. Is it the fate of the reenactment to become an image? And are such representations just part of a spectacle that breeds passivity, or can they in some sense be performative, active?36

In this way he yokes performance and technical reproducibility together, highlighting the fundamentally mediated nature of re-enactments themselves, not simply of the events on which they are based.

Contemporary art theory and performance studies have successfully engaged with the idea that the re-enactment is never limited to a particular medium or cultural form. As I have indicated, the definitions provided by historians also indicate that the re-enactment has always been a highly mobile and adaptable form, travelling easily across institutional contexts, deployed across a range of genres and styles, while not belonging exclusively to any. But unfortunately it is its broad dispersal across screen media and genres (from the biopic and the historical film to reality television) that has been at the heart of the problem posed by the re-enactment for the disciplinary field of cinema and television studies. This has led to its history in these fields, especially in relation to shifts in media, being rather chaotic and therefore going largely unrecorded. Attempts to come to terms with the film and television re-enactment have, like the practice itself, been scattered. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that scholarly work on film and television re-enactment has been piecemeal, fragmented and hard to find.

Only during the first decade of the cinema did the re-enactment operate as a particular film genre. While no longer thought of as a genre in its own right, re- enactments are acknowledged as playing a familiar role in documentaries and particular fiction genres such as historical drama, the biopic and docudrama. But even here, re-enactment is only recognised as being used in particular scenes and its

36 Life, Once More, p. 5

Introduction 18

very ubiquity has meant that there is little agreement as to what is recognised as a re- enactment in film and television. Indeed, so chequered has its history been that the early American cinema constitutes one of the few areas in which the use made of the re-enactment in film has become a serious element in critical debate. More recently, concerted efforts have been made to define re-enactment in film and television documentary studies and to develop critical frameworks within which to chart shifts in its status and currency in film, television and video.

Documentary Studies Only scholars of documentary have focussed on how and why the re-enactment has undergone multiple marginalisations and resurgences in status and currency. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) is now well-known to be, as Bill Nichols puts it, ‘one colossal, unacknowledged reenactment’.37 For Brian Winston it was the first decades of sound documentary, from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, which marked ‘the classic period of re-enactment’ in documentary.38 The filmmakers of this era, he argues, were ‘heirs to a persistent tradition of re-enactment’ that included ‘Nanook’s building of the igloo’; ‘Grierson’s construction of the trawler’s cabins’; and ‘the earliest days of the cinema’, when ‘footage of toy ships shot on a table top was presented as The Battle of San Juan Bay or the Boxer Rebellion was restaged in a building in upstate New York’.39 It is widely agreed that, from the late 1950s and the rise of cinéma vérité, the re-enactment lost currency as a form of documentary representation. Jonathan Kahana and Nichols argue that as the techniques of observational and direct cinema became considered ‘the “most” documentary of styles’, the re-enactment came to look more and more ‘inauthentic’.40

37 Bill Nichols, ‘Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject’, Critical Inquiry 35.1 (Autumn 2008), 72-89 (p. 72). 38 Brian Winston, ‘“Honest, Straightforward Re-enactment”: The Staging of Reality’, in Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, ed. by Kees Baker (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp.160-70 (p.164). 39 Ibid. 40 Nichols, ‘Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject’, p. 72; Jonathan Kahana, ‘Re-enactment’, 6 August 2008, Columbia University Press Blog, available at http://www.cupblog.org/?p=345 (accessed18 February 2011).

Introduction 19

It is Winston’s contention that, with the arrival of the 16mm synch-sound camera and cinéma vérité, documentary filmmakers thought they could dispense with re- enactment. However, he says, it persisted, ‘even more hidden than it had been. It lurked, lurks, behind the observational, hand-held, available-light, long-take style of Direct Cinema where it was, and is, more or less invisible’.41 Winston’s analysis suggests that the ways in which re-enactments signal themselves as re-enactments are often closely tied to the specific historical and cultural circumstances in which they were made. As a consequence, their recognisability has been quite unreliable and variable, and they have tended to rapidly appear outmoded. Kahana sees the current popularity of the re-enactment in documentary filmmaking as a ‘comeback’, a ‘return of techniques of historical restaging that had once been quite common in documentary and social realist films’ of the 1950s.42

Both Nichols and Kahana argue that, although the re-enactment has re-emerged in a vital role in documentary, the prejudice against the re-enactment that came with the rise of cinéma vérité has persisted. As a consequence, there remain ‘relatively few critical resources’ on which one can draw ‘to explain the critical and aesthetic power of reenactment’, making the re-enactment ‘one important but largely overlooked branch of the documentary tradition’.43 For this reason, these and other thinkers have recently made the deployment of the re-enactment in a wide range of film and television documentaries the subject of new critical discussion.

What their accounts of the relationship between the re-enactment and cinéma vérité suggest is that the marginalisation of the re-enactment in the 1960s was directly connected to the championing of a specific referential relationship for documentary filmmaking. The expectation set up by cinéma vérité that documentary filmmaking should capture the un-staged, un-rehearsed, pro-filmic event is one that the re- enactment was unable to meet. The shifts in the referential status of the re-enactment

41 ‘Honest, Straightforward Re-enactment’, p. 160. 42 Jonathan Kahana, ‘Introduction: What Now? Presenting Reenactment’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 50.1-2 (Spring & Fall 2009), 46-60 (pp. 46-7). 43 Kahana, ‘Introduction: What Now?’ p. 47.

Introduction 20

in documentary between the 1930s and 1960s—indeed, to the present day—suggest that shifts in the status of the re-enactment and documentary are connected to one another. Now, if documentaries use re-enactment, it is generally agreed amongst industry members and critics, that its use must be clearly signalled as such. In Janet Staiger’s view, [t]he question of the mixing of documentary and re-enactment material is not that mixing creates any more or less accurate interpretation of the event. […] Rather, the issue is that the mixing may confuse the audiences as to what is documentary evidence versus what is speculation or hypothesis by the filmmaker. […] What is at stake is the credibility of the image as it relates to spectatorial understanding of the technology of the camera, for even if the meaning of the image is ambiguous (as it appears to have been in the case of the Rodney King footage) that is quite a different matter than its credibility claims if it is a re-enactment rather than an inscription of the original event.44

Staiger’s comments demonstrate how debate about the use of re-enactment in film and television is tied up with debates about the referential status of the technically reproducible image.

The requirement that they be clearly signalled does not mean that re-enactments necessarily need to stand out explicitly from other kinds of imagery in documentary filmmaking. The documentary Man on Wire (2008), which investigates the events surrounding Philippe Petit’s illegal high-wire routine between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974, has actually been praised by critics for its ‘seamless melding’45 of ‘unobtrusive reenactments’46 with interviews and archive footage. In 2005, however, a major controversy around the Academy Award-winning short documentary Mighty Times: The Children’s March (2004), directed by Bobby Houston and Robert Hudson, centred on whether the audience was provided with

44 Janet Staiger, ‘Cinematic Shots: The Narration of Violence’, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. by Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 39-54 (p. 44). 45 Sandra Hall, ‘Review of Man on Wire’, Age, 16 October 2008, available at http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/film/film-reviews/man-on- wire/2008/10/16/1223750193910.html (accessed 18 February 2011). 46 A. O. Scott, ‘Review of Man on Wire’, New York Times, 25 July 2008, quoted in Kahana, ‘Re-enactment’, Columbia University Press Blog, available at http://www.cupblog.org/?p=345 (accessed 18 February 2011).

Introduction 21

enough information to enable them to distinguish re-enacted scenes from archive footage.47

The filmmakers had recreated scenes of the 1963 children’s civil rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama, using period props and costumes, vintage cameras, distressed film stock and more than 700 extras. But, the failure to clearly distinguish these re-enactments from the archived footage in some of the versions of the film was deemed deceptive and fraudulent by the documentary filmmaking community. In response, the filmmakers and their co-financier HBO asserted that every version of the film other than the one sent to the Academy clearly signalled the re-enacted scenes by the use of sprocket holes and an HBO-mandated disclosure statement about the re-enactments. However, the controversy prompted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to consider refining their definition of the category, which says that a submitted documentary ‘may be photographed in actual occurrence, or may employ partial re-enactment, stock footage, stills, animation, stop-motion or other techniques, as long as the emphasis is on fact and not on fiction’. 48 Frieda Lee Mock, the Executive Committee Chairwoman of the Academy’s documentary branch, warned that while the definition remains unchanged, ‘the failure to disclose their use of re-enactments called into question the nature of reality implied by the use of the term documentary’.49

Documentary scholars have begun to uncover and investigate the referential complexity of the re-enactment for documentary theory. Nichols draws attention to the self-reflexivity of the documentary re-enactment in order to explain how it makes clear its specific temporal and referential status: ‘Reenactments occupy a strange status in which it is crucial that they be recognised as a representation of a prior

47 See Errol Morris, ‘Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One)’, 3 April 2008, New York Times, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/play-it-again- sam-re-enactments-part-one/ (accessed 18 February 2011). 48 Quoted in Irene Lacher, ‘Documentary Criticised for Re-enacted Scenes’, New York Times, 29 March 2005, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/movies/29docu.html?_r=1&scp=14&sq=Might y+Times%3A+The+Children%92s+March&st=nyt (accessed 18 February 2011). 49 Ibid.

Introduction 22

event while also signalling that they are not a representation of a contemporaneous event.’50 Kahana points to the difficulties faced by the re-enactment in drawing attention to itself as a performance in film: since ‘the ontological ambiguity in the concept of enactment is practically unavoidable’, he writes, ‘it can be very difficult to distinguish “actual” actions from “performances”’.51 Ivone Margulies has focussed her investigations of documentary re-enactment precisely on examples in which individuals re-perform for the camera actions from their own lives, emphasising the tension between the original events and their repetition.52

A number of recent studies have focussed on investigations of the complex referential relations that are generated when re-enactment performances draw directly on mediated manifestations of the past. For example, Nichols argues that the video diaries in Capturing the Friedmans (2003) depict the self-conscious attempts of the father and his two sons, after allegations of abuse have destroyed their family life, ‘to reenact the form of spontaneous togetherness that has become the lost object captured in old 8mm home movies’.53 Both father and sons, he says, are ‘clearly aware their attempt is a reenactment rather than a genuine return to a lost object and irretrievable moment’.54

Ruth Erickson investigates the way in which Pierre Huyghe frames the performance of John Wojtowicz in the video installation The Third Memory (2000), a sequence in which Wojtowicz plays himself and self-consciously directs a group of extras in a re- enactment of his attempt to rob the Chase Manhattan Bank in Brooklyn, New York on 22 August 1972. The attempt became a massive media event because of the twelve-hour siege that ensued between Wojtowicz, police and FBI. Furthermore, in the intervening twenty-eight years between Wojtowicz’s attempted robbery and this re-enactment, Sidney Lumet’s Academy Award-nominated film Dog Day Afternoon

50 ‘Documentary Reenactment’, p. 73. 51 ‘Introduction: What Now?’, p. 53. 52 Ivone Margulies, ‘Exemplary Bodies: Reenactment in Love in the City, Sons and Close Up’, in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. by Ivone Margulies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 217-44. 53 ‘Documentary Reenactment’, p. 75. 54 Ibid.

Introduction 23

(1975) had been released, starring Al Pacino as Worzik, a character based on Wojtowicz. For Erickson, Wojtowicz’s re-enactment in The Third Memory negotiates a ‘tense dialectic’ between his past actions, their performance by Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon and the media frenzy that surrounded his lengthy negotiations with police and FBI.55

Re-enactment and Reference What is especially valuable about this work by scholars of documentary such as Winston, Kahana, Nichols and Erickson is that it grapples with the referential complexity of the re-enactment in terms of its relationship to the shifting referential status of the technically reproducible image. However, film theory has tended to overlook the referential complexity of the re-enactment because debates about the referential status of the technically reproducible image have been defined by and large in relation to the idea of the indexical sign.

The index constitutes one of a triad of signs conceptualised by Charles Sanders Peirce to explain different referential relationships between a signifier and its referent. In Peirce’s taxonomy there are three classes of signs – the icon, the index and the symbol – which are not mutually exclusive, and all three of which are at work in the film image. However, it is the index, characterised by a causal bond between itself and its referent, which has been the most prominent class of sign in film theory debates about reference. In particular, Peirce’s conceptualisation of the indexical qualities of the photographic image has been a cornerstone in debates about film’s referential claims. He writes: Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that in certain respects they are exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to

55 Ruth Erickson, ‘The Real Movie: Reenactment, Spectacle, and Recovery in Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory’, Framework, 50.1-2 (Spring & Fall 2009), 107-25 (p.120).

Introduction 24

correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection.56

The idea that the light reflected in the pro-filmic field has been burnt into the photochemical image, leaving an ‘indexical trace’57 that remains as testimony to that physical, material contact, has traditionally anchored the referential claims of both the photographic and the film image.

The re-enactment’s referential claims have never been predicated on the idea of the image as indexical trace. The concept of the indexical trace has played an important role in film and television re-enactments throughout the photochemical era, but rather than invest in the idea of the photochemically produced indexical trace, film and television re-enactments have regularly activated other indexical traces (remnants of history, survivals, ruins and vestiges) as referential devices, either imitating or placing them in sets, props, costumes and performances in order to make referential claims. Because film and television re-enactments have traditionally made such claims primarily through investments in the theatrical dimensions of the pro- filmic field, they have not been understood as heavily invested in the medium- specific qualities of film. Moreover, the referential relationship that the re-enactment sets up between itself and a pre-existing event has typically been understood as one of resemblance, relegating the re-enactment to the iconic sign, characterised by a relatively straightforward verisimilitude and therefore, non-indexical.

However, the imminent disappearance of photochemical celluloid has prompted a crisis in those film debates previously entrenched in conceptualising the referential dimensions of the film image in terms of the photographic basis of the analogue production process. Scholars are coming more and more to acknowledge the limitations of this longstanding approach. In Rosen’s view, for example, the ‘constant recourse to research and researched detail throughout the history of

56 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Elements of Logic, ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 8 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), II.159. 57 Rosen, Change Mummified, p. 20.

Introduction 25

mainstream film’ has not been of ‘intensive film-theoretical concern’. 58 And he goes on to ask, ‘What is implied when a medium that is supposedly indexical requires such labour to secure its referentiality?’59

The re-enactment offers an ideal form through which to pursue a reconsideration of referentiality for film theory. It can be used as a tool with which to pursue Rosen’s concerns about researched details and, as I will argue, Tom Gunning’s discussions of the shifting status of reference and theatricality in relation to the early cinema. Furthermore, as film theory grapples with a period of intense technological change for the cinema, the trans-historical, trans-disciplinary movement of the re-enactment across media platforms also provides a valuable accomplice for thinking through current debates about the digital remediation of the film image.

Chapter Overview Using the re-enactment to think through film theory debates about reference requires understanding the re-enactment as thoroughly entangled with film. Each chapter of this thesis identifies transformations in the re-enactment as a result of its incorporation within forms of technical media. Drawing on recent work in documentary studies that has explored the relationship between re-enactment and reference, I propose to pursue the re-enactment across institutional contexts, media, genres and styles. And by bringing together an eclectic array of film, television and video examples, I shall examine the various ways in which the re-enactment has been marked by a whole range of shifts in the conceptualisation of the referential dimensions of the technically reproducible image. The incorporation of a diverse range of examples is at once unavoidable and appropriate, as it reflects the wide and uneven dispersal of the re-enactment across a range of media.

Part I: Back History The thesis is divided into two parts. Chapters 1-3 provide a ‘back history’ for the film re-enactment, building a framework for thinking through its emergence,

58 Change Mummified, p. 149. 59 Change Mummified, pp. 154-5.

Introduction 26

persistence and dispersal in film. Examples are drawn from situations in which the re-enactment is already fairly well recognised, even if under-investigated: the first decade of the cinema, as well as the historical film and its sub-genres, constitutes my focus. In these chapters, I develop a film-specific approach to the re-enactment that focuses on shifts in the status, function and currency of the re-enactment, as well as on transformations in its codes, practices and modes of address that have occurred in response to its incorporation into film.

In Chapter 1, ‘Genre Trouble: The Dispersal of the Re-enactment’, I examine the early American cinema, the historical period in which the use of re-enactment has received the most recognition and critical attention. Focusing on debates about significant shifts in the cinema’s status and currency between 1898 and 1907, I highlight the significant role that the re-enactment played in the development of narrative cinema, and interrogate accounts of how and why re-enactment became marginalised with the rise of narrative cinema. I align theatricality in the early film re-enactment with Tom Gunning’s conceptualisation of the ‘cinema of attractions’60 and show how the shifting status of theatricality during the first decade of the cinema was directly connected to the emergence and solidification of a historically specific conceptualisation of referentiality for the cinema.

In Chapter 2, ‘All of Russia was Acting: October and The Storming of the Winter Palace’, I investigate the storming of the Winter Palace sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film, October. Both in the popular imagination and in its regular misreading and re-circulation as documentary footage, this sequence has come to stand in for the historical storming of 1917. Yet, I shall argue, it is an even more complex re-mediation of the historical event than its ambivalent status evokes. I analyse the relationships between this sequence and another re-enactment: a popular mass spectacle entitled The Storming of the Winter Palace, staged in the Winter Palace Square in 1920 for the third anniversary of the October Revolution. Both re-

60 See Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame Narrative, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (BFI Publishing: London, 1990) pp. 56-62. [originally published, under the same title, in Wide Angle, 8.3-4 (Fall 1986), 63-70].

Introduction 27

enactments changed not only the way in which the historical event was understood, but also, effectively, the event itself. Both therefore raise the question of whether the past can be separated from its representation. I investigate how both re-enactments engage their spectators at the intersections of the theatrical and the film-specific dimensions of re-enactment by creating spectacular representations that facilitate identification with the historical event.

Chapter 3, ‘Re-enactment and Researched Detail in the Biopic’, deals with the extent to which our increasing capacity to document, circulate and access photographs, film, television and video footage has shaped the referential status of the researched details employed in the re-enactments performed in four contemporary biopics: Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008), Control (Anton Corbijn, 2007), Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003) and Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999). I investigate the ways in which the re- enactments employed in each of these biopics call attention to the authenticity of the researched details they incorporate into the mise-en-scène, focusing on the ways in which each of them emphasises the labour of research; closeness between filmmakers, actors, eyewitnesses and historical persons; and pre-existing accounts of the events they depict.

Part II: New Directions The emphasis in Chapter 3 on the ways in which changes in the circulatory capacities of technical media have shaped the referential claims of the re-enactment sets the stage for the second part of the thesis. In Part II, consisting of Chapters 4-6, all three chapters focus on the relationship between the re-enactment and a changing media landscape, raising questions about the ways in which shifts in the production and distribution of film, television and video images in an increasingly digital media environment have impacted on the re-enactment. I stage direct encounters between transformations in the re-enactment and debates in film theory about digital remediation. In each of these chapters I continue to focus on shifts in the status, function and currency of the re-enactment as well as transformations in its codes, practices and modes of address. I also continue to pursue the dispersal of the re- enactment across genres and institutional contexts. While this pursuit informs the

Introduction 28

first half of the thesis, in the second half I explicitly track this dispersal into arenas where the re-enactment’s presence has not typically been acknowledged. This emphasis is designed to push the concept of re-enactment in new directions.

Just like the re-enactment, film and cinema are not static, unchanging concepts, but have become thoroughly remediated in their encounter with digital production and distribution technologies. The coexistence of different media technologies in contemporary film production and the dispersal of film across a broad range of media distribution platforms mean that it has become increasingly difficult to cordon off cinema and study it in isolation. Rodowick argues that the current technological transformations in moving-image production serve to highlight that ‘cinema studies can stake no permanent claims on its disciplinary territories; its borders are in fact continually shifting’.61 In the second half of the thesis, therefore, I shall consider examples from television, video and DVD. The focus on film and film theory opens up to a consideration of exchanges between film, cinema and other media.

Chapter 4, ‘Deixis, Trace and Cinematic Metaphor in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation’, provides a close analysis of the police-procedural television crime series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000- ). I focus on the series trademark ‘CSI- shot’, in which computer-generated special-effects sequences re-enact the proposals put forward by forensic investigators about how the events of a crime took place. Because CSI-shots celebrate the unprecedented manipulability available to digital image production and are re-enactments only in the context of the diegetic world in which they exist, they have often been implicitly recognised as re-enactments, even though ‘re-enactments’ is not a term typically used to describe them. The fiction film and television genres in which re-enactments most commonly appear (such as those discussed in Chapters 1-3) incorporate the re-enactment of pre-existing, real events within a fictional narrative. By contrast, CSI-shots are re-enactments of fictional events within a fictional narrative. I use these sequences to investigate the ways in

61 D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 23.

Introduction 29

which film and television re-enactments declare and authorise themselves in an increasingly digital media environment.

In Chapters 5 and 6, an emphasis on the relationship between the re-enactment and media time is central to my endeavour to push the concept of re-enactment in new directions. These chapters revolve around my argument that repetition as a temporal form has become influenced by technical reproducibility and that the re-enactment, as a form predicated on repetition, is implicated in shifts in the nature of media time. Both chapters build on Laura Mulvey’s analysis of new conditions in film spectatorship opened up by replay technologies, such as the DVD player, that increasingly allow us to gain control over the temporality of audio-visual materials.62

In Chapter 5, ‘Re-staging the Cinema: Psycho and the Redundant New Remake’, I consider the relationship between the film remake and the re-enactment, and present a case study of Gus Van Sant’s controversial 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, Psycho, originally made in 1960. Van Sant’s Psycho, which presents itself as a new performance of an existing film, suggests that the forms of repetition that characterise the remake mark an unacknowledged manifestation of the re-enactment in a practice and a form not normally thought of as re-enactment. I argue that the self-conscious emphasis on staging, performance and literal repetition in Van Sant’s Psycho foregrounds repetition in the remake very explicitly and brings out the self-reflexivity of the re-enactment in the remake. I put this self-reflexivity to work in a consideration of the ways in which the film remake and the re-enactment are implicated in the shifting and multiple forms of repetition available to cinema, from replaying to redistribution.

In Chapter 6, ‘Performing Differently in a Parallel Universe: Re-enactment, Delayed Cinema and Fugitive Testimony’, I extend the idea of re-enactment and argue that the control we have over the temporalities of technical repetition has become so commonplace that it must impact on our understanding of the re-enactment, a form predicated on the idea of repetition and already radically transformed through its

62 Death 24x a Second, pp. 22-6.

Introduction 30

incorporation in forms of technical media. I contend that the kinds of re-timing made available thorough contemporary replay technologies have opened up a new form for the re-enactment, one that raises new questions about how we understand re- enactment as a form of historical representation. I focus on two instances of a familiar film or media event being made to perform differently by reworking the temporal structure of their original moving-image form: Douglas Gordon’s 1993 video installation 24 Hour Psycho, which digitally slowed the whole of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to a rate that simulates two frames per second; and the infamous re-timings of a video of four Los Angeles police officers assaulting Rodney King by defence lawyers during the six-week court trial, California v. Powell, Koon, Wind and Briseno (1992). I look at the way in which each of these examples negotiates directly with the tension between performance and repetition that defines the re- enactment.

The critical terms I focus on across these chapters are based in the concepts of theatricality, temporality and indexicality. I also investigate shifting conceptualisations of the event, performance and repetition in the re-enactment. Throughout the thesis I show how when analysing the re-enactment these concepts cannot be thought without one another. I develop the concept of the event in relation to its re-enactment, arguing that an event must always be understood in terms of its mediation. I show how in the re-enactment the idea of the event is always conceptualised in relation to its repetition. My investigations of the relationship between events and their mediation are frequently tied to an analysis of the status of performance in the re-enactment. I emphasise how ideas of performance are informed by changes in media. I consider how the circulation of film and media events shapes performance in the re-enactment and how a performance can become an event or turn the past into an event. I propose that performance is no longer only what happens in front of the camera, investigating digital performances in which there are no ‘real’ actors at all and performances are produced by manipulating existing moving imagery.

Introduction 31

I emphasise the re-enactment’s relationship to the indexical sign, a relation that, as I have indicated, has traditionally been made through the re-enactment’s investments in the theatrical dimensions of the pro-filmic field, rather than the medium-specific qualities of the film image. By concentrating on the re-enactment, I highlight that film theory cannot think about the indexical sign without thinking about its relationship to the idea of the event. I also foreground the performative and demonstrative dimensions of the indexical sign to show that the theatricality of deictic indexicality, characterised by acts of showing and by acts of directing attention, has always been present in the re-enactment.

Throughout the thesis I examine the relationship between shifts in the status of self- reflexive theatricality in the re-enactment and the changing ways in which its relationship to reference and authenticity are performed. The definition I have provided for the re-enactment demonstrates that we cannot think theatricality in the re-enactment without repetition, and from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, without thinking about how repetition as a temporal form became tied up in forms of technical reproducibility. I foreground the relationship between the re-enactment’s emphasis on performance and theatricality and its emphasis on repetition. It is for this reason that I have chosen to hyphenate the word ‘re-enactment’. The hyphen serves to emphasise the relationship between repetition and performance in the re- enactment.

The existing critical work on the re-enactment across disciplines of history, contemporary art theory, performance studies and cinema and television studies sometimes hyphenates ‘re-enactment’ and sometimes does not. In documentary studies – where the most explicit discussion of re-enactment in film and television has taken place – the tendency is not to hyphenate. I suggest that this is partly because in documentary studies there is an emphasis on thinking about ‘the’ re- enactment as a form and a genre. I also approach the use of re-enactment in film, television and video in these terms – by thinking about the re-enactment as a representational form and a genre – but I choose to use hyphenation because in my approach I also want to re-investigate the question of what it is to re-enact. It is by

Introduction 32

re-opening this question that I can cultivate a conceptualisation of re-enactment for film theory, and more generally for cinema and television studies, that puts the re- enactment to work as a self-reflexive form of repetition that opens up questions about the relationship between temporality, theatricality and referentiality in screen media.

Chapter 1 33

Chapter 1

Genre Trouble The Dispersal of the Re-enactment

The re-enactment is always predicated on the performance of a pre-existing event. Its investments in theatricality are directly connected to its investments in referentiality. In this chapter I want to pay close attention to the early history of the film re- enactment to highlight the historical specificity of the referential distinctions into which the cinema has now settled. I chart shifts in the status of theatricality in the film re-enactment in order to foreground the ways in which these are directly connected to ideas of reference. I focus on the shifting status of the early film re- enactment in order to open up debate about the relationship between the re- enactment and the shifting referential dimensions of the technically reproducible image. By revisiting and building on existing scholarly accounts of the early film re- enactment, I propose to develop a critical framework for conceptualising the shifts in status and currency of the re-enactment in film, television and digital media that continue to take place. Tom Gunning argues that the history of the cinema has generally been ‘written and theorised under the hegemony of narrative films’ and that, as a consequence, important aspects of early cinema history have been distorted and overlooked.1 Close attention to the uses of re-enactment in the first decade of the

1 ‘Cinema of Attractions’, p. 56.

Chapter 1 34

cinema will enable me to intervene productively in stale accounts of the rise of narrative cinema, accounts in which the ongoing impact of the re-enactment on the referential dimensions of the film image has largely gone unrecognised.

During the cinema’s first decade the re-enactment was a major force shaping the referential dimensions of the film image, but with the rise of narrative cinema it lost currency. That the re-enactment began to be conceptualised as out-of-sync with the norms established in this first major paradigm shift for the cinema reveals much about the framework through which we have come to understand the cinema today. By returning to the period 1895-1907, it is possible to understand how the re- enactment both shaped, and was shaped by, the shift to narrative cinema. Critical engagement with some of the theoretical debates about early shifts in the status of the re-enactment can help to cultivate the critical resources necessary for more rigorous and widespread scholarly discussion of the relationship between theatricality and reference in film and television re-enactments.

Historians and theorists of the early American cinema have shown that the emphasis on dramatising topical events in early re-enactments during the first decade of the cinema presented no problem for prevailing standards of reference. Pointing to the fact that in the early American cinema the distinction between categories such as newsreel, documentary, drama and reproduction was often blurred, David Levy has shown that identifying the kinds of films that were considered records or documents of a real event is less straightforward than one might have imagined.2 As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith insists in his discussion of the staged newsreels of the 1898 Spanish American War, It would be wrong to regard this material as, in a serious sense, forged, since the deception planned did not really amount to a falsification of the historical record, and in any case the ethic of authenticity of the filmed record was not yet in place.3

2 David Levy, ‘Re-constituted Newsreels, Re-enactments and the American Narrative Film’, in Cinema 1900/1906: An Analytical Study, ed. by Roger Holman (Brussels: Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film, 1982), pp. 243-58 (p. 249). 3 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘On History and the Cinema’, Screen, 31.2 (1990), 160-71 (p. 162).

Chapter 1 35

I argue that the film re-enactment continues to embody this ambivalence that characterised the early cinema and in so doing emphasises the artificial nature of the referential distinctions that today’s cinema has settled into.

The early film re-enactment was conceived primarily as a transitional form. Debate among film historians and theorists has tended to focus on the absorption and marginalisation of its techniques after 1907. As I will show, David Levy, Mary Ann Doane and others have demonstrated that the early film re-enactment played a crucial role in the development of film language, thus identifying it as a significant feature of the transition from actuality film production to narrative fiction. Levy and Doane have drawn particular attention to the absorption of the staging and editing techniques of the early film re-enactment into the emerging conventions of narrative fiction.4 At the same time, they have demonstrated that, with the consolidation of these techniques into the conventions of narrative fiction, the re-enactment’s openly presentational mode of address; straightforward, undisguised emphasis on staging; foregrounding of performance and spectacle; and explicit association with a pre- existing event fell out of favour because the conventions of narrative cinema typically work to mask staging techniques in order to produce a self-contained fictional world.

Of course, the re-enactment has never been fully absorbed and continues to operate across a range of film genres. In this chapter I align the re-enactment with what Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault called ‘cinema of attractions’, a term that drew attention to the exhibitionism that characterised the cinema’s first decade and the persistence of an exhibitionist mode of address in cinema after 1907. The cinema of attractions is characterised by a willingness ‘to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator’.5 Gunning argues that, with the rise of the narrative film, the cinema of attractions does not disappear, but rather ‘goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component

4 See Levy, ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’; Doane, ‘Dead Time, or the Concept of the Event’, Emergence of Cinematic Time, pp. 140-71. 5 Gunning, ‘Cinema of Attractions’, p. 57.

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of narrative films, more evident in some genres (e.g. the musical) than others’.6 Film debates that have used Gunning’s argument to help them rethink theatricality in the cinema have tended not to consider the re-enactment. Nonetheless, the broad acceptance of Gunning’s argument that the cinema of attractions persisted as a component of narrative and non-narrative films has contributed significantly to the study of the cinema over the past 25 years.

Scholars have investigated in great detail the way in which the cinema of attractions operates within many different kinds of cinema, well beyond the scope of avant- garde cinema and the musical genre, which were Gunning’s initial examples. Gunning has been particularly useful in discussions about special effects in the cinema, a topic to which he gestures in his reference to the ‘traditional spectacle film’ and also the 1924 version of Ben Hur, posters for which announced its major spectacular attractions. Gunning himself describes the ‘cinema of effects’ as ‘tamed attractions’, but also suggests that the ‘spectacle cinema’ of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola ‘has reaffirmed its roots in stimulus and carnival rides’.7 Here I argue that in the re-enactment’s self-conscious, presentational mode of address too we can see the persistence of exhibitionist theatricality.

The re-enactment, predicated on a self-conscious emphasis on staging, performance and spectacle, was utilised extensively in the first decade of the cinema. Aligning the re-enactment with Gunning’s concept of the cinema of attractions, therefore, enables me to track the shifting status of the re-enactment. Indeed, as Thomas Elsaesser has written, the re-enactment embodies the ‘reflexivity and self-reference, display and performativity that we have come to associate with the “cinema of attractions”’.8 The alignment I propose is also apt because the cinema of attractions denotes practices that are both trans-historical and specific to the particularities of the early cinema. Gunning successfully challenged the commonly held view that while the films of

6 Ibid. 7 ‘Cinema of Attractions’, p. 61. 8 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film between “Attractions” and “Narrative Integration”’, in Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. by Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), pp. 205-23 (p. 211).

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cinemas early years were distinguished by the use of direct address, those of the later period, when narrative fiction dominated, were characterised by spectatorial absorption: the distinction was far too neat. His now well-rehearsed argument—that there are still many diverse instances in which ‘theatrical display dominates over narrative absorption’9—enables us to rethink the status of theatricality in the first decade of the cinema and in the subsequent developments of narrative and non- narrative cinema.

The alliance also enables me to demonstrate that the significant ways that the re- enactment continues to impact on and trouble the referential dimensions of the cinema have largely gone unrecognised because its particular forms of theatricality fell out of favour. What is more, because Gunning detects evidence of his cinema of attractions across genres and across narrative and non-narrative filmmaking, he legitimises a way of approaching the theatricality of the re-enactment other than through the histories of documentary or fiction.10 As I suggested in the Introduction, while in its earliest forms in film the re-enactment operated as a genre, it has since become dispersed and continues largely as a residual representational practice within a variety of film genres. The re-enactment has never fitted comfortably in the representational codes that have established themselves on either side of cinema’s primary generic distinction, between fiction and documentary. Though neither one nor the other, its mongrel heritage allows it to exist in both camps.

While, as I have explained, I align it with Gunning’s cinema of attractions, I also set the re-enactment up as a trans-generic category in its own right—one that disappeared underground after the first decade of the cinema, but subsequently resurfaced to shape cinema in deeply significant ways. It is as a trans-generic form that the re-enactment troubles the generic boundaries between documentary and fiction. Its persistence across both points to the ways in which genre, ontology and reference are connected. Fiction and documentary are distinguished generically in

9 ‘Cinema of Attractions’, p. 59. 10 ‘Cinema of Attractions’, p. 57.

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terms of the different referential relationships they claim to negotiate between filmic and pro-filmic reality.

Early Ambivalence: Multiple Categories and Fluid Boundaries The earliest surviving re-enactments in the American cinema are a pair of films entitled Ambulance Call and Ambulance at the Accident, which were registered by the Edison Company in 1897. It is commonly agreed, however, that the practice of producing films modelled on topical events, staged in the style of actuality footage, first attracted attention in the United States in 1898. It was then that film producers realised that in order to satisfy the popular demand for up-to-the-minute material about the Spanish-American War, they did not have to be on the battle-field with a camera.11 These staged actualities became the first popular re-enactments in American cinema.

The practice was taken up promptly and widely, and using it to sate the appetites of viewers eager for topical material they were unable to see in the flesh led to a major shift in the conceptualisation of the role of the institution of cinema in American society. Charles Musser argues that as the industry capitalised on its new role as a visual newspaper, it gained in confidence and size.12 Parallel developments occurred in Europe. In France, Georges Méliès, who had actually produced reconstructed scenes of the Greco-Turkish War as early as 1897, staged courtroom scenes from the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, and in 1898 produced two films staging the sinking of the ‘Maine’ during the Spanish-American War for American audiences.13 At the end of the century in Britain, a number of producers were manufacturing footage of the Boer War, advertising it as ‘Dramatic Representations of Current Events’. The attempt to meet the demand for topicality in the American cinema extended well beyond the end of the Spanish American War, as films ‘staged’ boxing matches,

11 According to Levy, ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’, p. 246, most of the surviving manufactured Spanish-American War material is registered by the Edison Company. 12 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 225. 13 Levy, ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’, pp. 247-8.

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prison escapes, executions, murders, robberies, fires, natural disasters and police apprehension of criminals.

It was not hard for filmmakers to cross the generic boundary-lines during the first decade of the cinema. The ‘sensationalist appeal of [early execution] films cut across documentary and fictional modes of representation’, according to Miriam Hansen, who contends that generic boundary-lines ‘seem to have mattered less than the kind of fascination’ that these films held for turn-of-the-century viewers.14 One such film is Execution by Hanging (Mutoscope/Biograph, 1905), in which a woman is led onto a stage and a noose and hood put over her head, before an imperceptible cut in the film replaces her body with a dummy, which is hanged. Others included the re- enactment of historically significant executions, such as the highly presentational The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (Edison, 1895), in which the executioner performs the execution and holds up a severed head to the camera; as well as the more elaborate and lengthy execution sequence staged for the Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (Porter/Edison, 1901), which shows Czolgosz being taken from his cell to an electric chair, where he sits, shuddering, as he is put to death. They also included actuality footage of the execution of Topsy the Elephant at Luna Park, Coney Island in Electrocuting an Elephant (Edison, 1903).15

Levy argues that because the distinctions between categories such as newsreel, documentary, drama and reproduction were quite fluid in the early American cinema, there was ‘a lot of two-way traffic across a weak ontological frontier’.16 Early film re-enactments could be accommodated in a wide range of categories, as Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection, 1894-1912 makes clear. Some of its ‘re-constituted newsreels’ are listed as ‘reproductions’,17 while others are grouped with standard newsreels, and others again, including Execution by Hanging, appear in both categories. Biograph’s Tenderloin Tragedy (1907), in which an elderly man spends a night out on the town, collapses, and dies,

14 Babel and Babylon, p. 31. 15 Ibid. 16 ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’, p. 249. 17 Levy, p. 258, n. 21.

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is the last film to be listed in the reproduction category and was also listed as ‘drama’. Edison’s Ambulance Call (1897), a ‘staged actuality’, in which a horse- drawn ambulance leaves its garage and turns towards the camera before exiting the frame, is the earliest title in the ‘reproduction’ list. Not only does it appear again as a ‘drama’, but also as a ‘documentary’, suggesting that it presented something of a taxonomic dilemma.18

It is important to highlight that this apparent difficulty in categorising films using re- enactment is not only evident in the diverse names given them at the time of their release, but also in the way in which historians have since referred to them. At the time of their release, apart from ‘re-enactments’, of course, early film re-enactments were variously advertised as ‘faithful duplications’, ‘reproductions’, ‘facsimile reproductions’ and ‘dramatic representations of current events’.19 The strategies of the re-enactments themselves also range from table-top miniaturisations and bathtub models to carefully staged events using lots of actors, props and extras.20

The various terms employed by subsequent historians are intended either to reflect the re-enactment’s specific function, or else to focus on particular sub-categories of the re-enactment. While ‘reconstituted newsreels’ and ‘fake newsreels’ (for re- enacted newsreel footage such as the elaborately staged events, table-top and bathtub miniaturisations), are the terms Levy usually uses, for the wider variety of re- enactments, including, for example, execution films, he also uses the terms ‘re- enactments and reproductions’, ‘fake actuality film footage’, ‘staged actualities’ and ‘topical re-constructions’.21 By contrast, when describing the American coverage of the 1898 Spanish-American War, Nowell-Smith puts the term ‘newsreels’ in inverted commas, noting that they contain ‘large components of invention’ and identifying instances where events were simulated and staged for the camera.22 The preferred term of both Doane and Hansen is ‘dramatic reenactment’, which they

18 Levy, p. 248. 19 Levy, p. 245; Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 155. 20 Levy, p. 249. 21 ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’, pp. 243, 245, 247. 22 ‘On history’, p. 161.

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consider a sub-genre of the early actuality. Doane describes them as a sub-genre of films that ‘modelled themselves on important current events’, while Hansen points out that many ‘actualities involved reconstructions’, arguing that, ‘as a subgenre, dramatic reenactments of current events were considered legitimate’.23

Terms such as ‘faithful duplication’, ‘facsimile reproduction’, ‘dramatic representation’, ‘topical reconstruction’, ‘reconstituted newsreel’ and ‘staged actuality’ point to the diversity of ways in which the re-enactment functions in relation to genres such as the newsreel and the actuality. However, it is this very nomenclature, and the nuances it implies, that has prevented the debate around re- enactment from being taken up more widely and vigorously. Nowell-Smith’s writing on the early film re-enactment exemplifies how the problem of nomenclature has prevented debate about the relationship between re-enactment and the shifting referential dimensions of the cinema from being taken up more widely. Using the term ‘newsreels’ (he puts it in inverted commas), Nowell-Smith has provided a rigorous critical analysis of the referential dimensions of the re-enactments of the Spanish-American War without ever referring to them as re-enactments. His argument is that there is still an ontological ambivalence in early cinema, still ‘no clear border at which cinematic representations pass unequivocally from the attested real to the avowedly fictional’.24 It is clear from a close reading of this argument that his campaign to reintroduce the ontological ambivalence of the early cinema into our contemporary conceptualisations of the referential dimensions of the film image relies on his discussion of re-enactment, but he never names the form explicitly and it is masked by a more polemical general discussion of the cinema. As a consequence, his broader polemical arguments have been taken up with little attention to the form through which he makes his claims.

Almost from its inception, according to Nowell-Smith, film was impacted by ‘the problematic of the historical record and re-marking the boundaries of fact and

23 Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 155; Babel and Babylon, pp. 30-1. 24 ‘On history’, p. 163.

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fiction, truth and falsehood, in history’.25 Vitagraph’s two-minute-long Battle of Santiago Bay (1898), for example, was created with cut-outs of photos of US and Spanish fleets that were pulled past the camera in front of a blue-tinted canvas background as cigarette and cigar smoke was blown into the scene.26 ‘It would be wrong’, insists Nowell-Smith, ‘to regard this material as, in a serious sense, forged, since the deception planned did not really amount to a falsification of the historical record, and in any case the ethic of authenticity of the filmed record was not yet in place.’27

Levy’s discussion of the taxonomic confusions of the early period also demonstrates that there was flexibility in this period about the kinds of film that could be considered to be records or documents of a real event—which is not to say that the status of such representations was never questioned. For example, according to Raymond Fielding, a Biograph film about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which was staged on a miniature cardboard set but did not advertise itself as a reconstruction, was taken by the mayor of San Francisco for footage of the actual event. Unfortunately, audiences who subsequently saw actual footage of the catastrophe refused to accept it as authentic!28 But it would be misleading to suggest that examples of such dubious reception were widespread. On the contrary, as Doane says, the debate about whether re-enactment films were fakes or not was ‘quite minimal and marginal in relation to the phenomenon itself’.29

In most instances, the wide variety of re-enactment films, whether they depicted execution films, robberies, natural disasters, police apprehension of criminals, or whatever—stressed their topicality rather than their actuality, and advertised themselves as re-enactments. Edison’s Capture of the Biddle Brothers (1902), for example, described in the 1902 Edison catalogue as a ‘dramatic reconstruction’, was

25 ‘On history’, p. 162. 26 See Michael Chanan, The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba (London: British Film Institute, 1985), pp. 25-6. 27 ‘On history’, p. 162. 28 The American Newsreel, 1911-1967 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 42, quoted in Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 155. 29 Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 155.

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promoted as an exciting ‘perfect reproduction’ of a well-known, recent series of events: The public throughout the world is acquainted with the sensational capture of the Biddle Brothers who, through the aid of Mrs. Stoffel, escaped from the Pittsburgh jail on January 30th 1902. Our picture, which is a perfect reproduction of the capture, is realistic and exciting.30

Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901) was described by the Edison Company as ‘a realistic imitation of the last scene in the electric chair’.31

Only when looked back on at a later date, when new cinematic conventions had taken over, were early cinema re-enactments accused of deception. But it is this that has contributed to their marginalisation as a form of historical representation that is unworthy of critical attention. As Hansen puts it, ‘The standard of authenticity by which all such films would be rejected as fake pictures evolved with the classical paradigm and became one of the war cries in the campaign against primitive modes.’32 Levy makes the same point, namely that the underestimation of the re- enactment film has been brought about, at least in part, by its retrospective association with ‘faking, duping and pirating’.33 These new conventions were brought about by shifts in the idea of film as historical record but also those of narrative cinema. Doane argues that the ‘ontological slipperiness’ of the early cinema, embodied in the early film re-enactments, has been masked by the now settled ontological distinctions established by the prevailing conventions of narrative cinema, the development of which appeared to tame ‘the instability of the cinematic image’, and displaced ‘unanswerable questions about the ontology of the image’. 34 Explicitly implicating the early-film re-enactment in this shift, she argues that ‘[w]hat came to be known eventually as “deception” in the re-enactment was made harmless as “illusion in the narrative film.”’35

30 Edison Catalogue, 1902, p. 93, quoted by Levy, p. 253. 31 Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 162- 7, quoted in Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 147. 32 Babel and Babylon, p. 31. 33 ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’, p. 243. 34 Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 156. 35 Emergence of Cinematic Time, pp. 158-9.

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Re-enactment and the Development of Film Language Charles Musser contends that the shift to ‘story films’ was taking place in the American cinema as early as 1903, an enthusiastic audience response encouraging producers to make the financial investments required to meet the emerging demand. The first company to make a ‘decisive shift’ to fiction films by mid-1904 was Biograph, followed more reluctantly by the Edison Manufacturing Company, and Vitagraph, which by the end of 1906 had became the leading American producer.36 In the opinion of Doane and Levy, the early film re-enactment constituted a major transition point between actuality film production and narrative fiction. Up until 1907, they argue, film techniques pioneered by the early film re-enactments played a vital role in the development of a film language that was central to the development of fiction filmmaking in the American cinema. While Doane draws attention to their role in the development of continuity editing, Levy focuses on the part they played in that of the staging techniques of narrative fiction. It is clear from Doane and Levy’s discussions that techniques developed for re-enactment films changed status and meaning as they developed and were incorporated into the conventions of narrative fiction. Both argue that these shifts in status represented shifts in understandings of the referential claims and dimensions of the film image.37 The tension the early film re-enactment staged between its investment in, on the one hand, staging and performance and, on the other, in literal repetition becomes undermined when its staging techniques are put to work in the production of a unified fictional world.

Doane discusses the way in which a ‘trick’ tactic employed in early execution films, the ‘dummy substitute stop motion effect’, became an integral technique of cinematic storytelling. In 1905, in Execution by Hanging, for example, as I have already described, the hanging death of a woman is represented as if it were a continuous action taking place in continuous time when in fact her death is produced in two shots, joined by an almost imperceptible cut. The same technique had been employed ten years earlier in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, which re-

36 Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen, pp. 337-416. 37 Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 159; Levy, p. 250.

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enacts Mary’s decapitation. As Doane says, ‘[C]amera stoppage is the condition of possibility of the representation of death’.38 The time and space of the production process are masked by the continuity of the cinematic world created through a continuity editing technique, a strategy that has become central to the production of cinematic illusion in classical narrative cinema.

It was the producers of the early film re-enactments who pioneered sophisticated staging techniques that were absorbed into the syntax of narrative fiction and became fundamental to what we now think of as the conventions of narrative cinema. They were extremely adept at staging the un-staged, turning accidents—an early newsreel cameraman wrestling with unwieldy equipment in difficult conditions, for example—to advantage, and producing re-enactment films that were aesthetically indistinguishable from actuality newsreels. Levy draws attention to these techniques in three examples from Edison’s Boer War films, registered in 1900. In Capture of Boer Battery by the British and Charge of Boer Battery, a horse and a man pass close to the camera, obscuring its view. In Charge of Boer Cavalry, horseback riders charge the camera, passing by close on either side. Levy shows how such techniques even guide Edison’s miniature table-top re-enactments: in Bombardment of Take Forts by the Allied Fleets, in order to simulate depth, tiny attacking craft were arranged to move on different planes. He argues that the careful staging of what in actuality was merely accidental was intended to ‘re-create what [he refers] to as the drama of the cameraman’s presence, i.e. the photographic subjectivity through which the event was captured on film’. This photographic subjectivity, as Levy calls it, became integrated into the language of narrative cinema.39

Levy argues that the chase format, commonly understood in film history as an important transitional early narrative form, also employed stylistic techniques developed by the early re-enactments that imitated ‘actuality composition’.40 These include action at the edges and corners of the frame and non-eye-level angles of view, ‘a conscious use of image depth’ and ‘the attempt at simulating the random

38 Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 159. 39 ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’, p. 250. 40 ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’, p. 244.

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movement of anonymous figures’.41 Drawing on Levy’s work, Musser argues that Edwin Porter developed his approach to filming ‘the robbery, chase and shoot-out’ in films such as Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison and Capture of the Biddle Brothers. He points out that Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (Edison, 1903) was advertised as a re-enactment film, described as a ‘faithful duplication of the genuine “hold-ups” made famous by the various outlaw bands in the far West’.42 Because most histories of the narrative film focus on the emergence of isolated techniques such as close-ups and camera movement, Levy argues, they have failed to notice just how widespread the phenomenon of staged actuality film production had become in the American cinema prior to 1907.43 Levy, Doane and Musser all believe that over time early film re-enactments have tended to become harder to recognise, the ways in which they signalled themselves as re-enactments were closely tied to the historical and cultural circumstances of their making.

So successfully has narrative cinema assimilated and integrated the staging and editing techniques developed in re-enactment production that it is hardly surprising that the presentational mode of these early films is now regarded as naïve and their staging techniques deceptive. Not only did the staging and editing techniques of the re-enactments change status, but so did the cinema’s ontological and referential dimensions. And in the process, the techniques of continuity editing and staging actuality, vital to the re-enactment, ceased to have anything to do with the representation of real events. The legacy of these shifts in the status of theatricality and referentiality continues to shape the cinema and the re-enactment today.

Dispersal: The Ongoing Marginalisation of the Re-enactment Following Levy, Doane and Musser, I argue that the re-enactment has shaped the cinema’s current formations in deeply significant but often unacknowledged ways.

41 Ibid. 42 Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, p. 259, following Levy, ‘The Fake Train Robbery’, Cinema 1900/1906: An Analytical Study, ed. by Roger Holman (Brussels: Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film, 1982), Clipper, 12 December 1903, p. 1016, quoted in Before the Nickelodeon, p. 257. 43 ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’, p. 423.

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For all three of these critics, however, the re-enactment has been conceived primarily as a transitional form. Musser also argues that between 1907 and 1909, ‘reliance on the spectator’s prior familiarity with a story was becoming rapidly outmoded’ as filmmakers became increasingly skilled at communicating narrative.44 And, as less and less reliance was placed on the dramatic re-enactment of topical events, the genre fell into a decline. Levy pinpoints 1907 as ‘the year in which fake actuality disappeared’, maintaining that, while it did not vanish entirely, it was no longer visible on the same scale and with the same self-consciousness that marked the earlier cinema. The narrative cinema had begun its rise, but no less significant for Levy is that fact that by this date camera equipment had become lightweight enough to enable its operator easier access to newsworthy events.45 Doane agrees, but since in her view the early re-enactments were a sub-genre of early actualities, she links their disappearance to the decline in the currency of the actuality, which the ascendancy of fictional narrative had also caused to be marginalised.46

The marginalisation of the re-enactment as an historical phenomenon is reflected in its marginalisation in film debates. Its adoption by narrative cinema—becoming ‘not’ re-enactment—and the concurrent decline in actuality films have contributed to a widespread critical myopia regarding the impact it continues to exert on cinema today. Apart from recent work in documentary studies on the shifts in its status and currency, only the film re-enactment’s early history, cinema’s first decade, has been well documented and theorised. Its subsequent history has yet to be written.

In Gunning’s view, [t]he challenge that early cinema offers to film history is a search for a method of understanding the transformations in narrative form in cinema’s first decades; a method that maintains an awareness of early film’s differences from later practices, without defining it simply as a relation of a divergence from a model of continuity (that, in fact, has not yet appeared).47

44 Before the Nickelodeon, p. 393. 45 ‘Re-constituted Newsreels’, pp. 249, 254. 46 Emergence of Cinematic Time, pp. 155, 161. 47 ‘Cinema of Attractions’, p. 56.

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The accounts of the early film re-enactment written by Doane, Levy, Musser, Nowell-Smith and Hansen can be employed to account for the continued functioning of the re-enactment in and for contemporary media forms. Like the cinema of attractions, the re-enactment did not sink without trace, but resurfaces frequently in forms that have been insufficiently acknowledged. It has continued ‘underground’, not as a genre in its own right, but in sequences in a range of other film and television genres. Like the cinema of attractions, the persistence of the re-enactment, particularly in narrative fiction, is characterised by a willingness ‘to rupture a self- enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator’.48

Since there is no longer simply a sub-genre of re-enactment films as there was in the early period, I propose to pursue the ways in which the re-enactment works as a representational form across genres and historical contexts. The forms in which it can be seen include not only the documentary, but also the docudrama, the biopic and the historical drama, not to mention a wide range of contemporary fiction films, television dramas and video installations.

The re-enactment’s dispersal across a range of narrative and non-narrative forms calls into question not only the idea of a clean shift from the early cinema to narrative cinema, but also the excessively neat distinction between documentary and fiction. It also maintains vestiges of the weak ontological frontier that Levy, Doane, Hansen and Nowell-Smith identify between similar categories in the early cinema. For this very reason, because it continues to trouble the now much more settled referential status between documentary and fiction, the re-enactment is a potent trans-generic form whose study enables us to rethink debates about the referential dimensions of the cinema.

Film and television re-enactment has played a key role in the development of hybrid narrative forms. Docudrama is the term most widely used to describe a wide variety of documentary and fictional hybrids from ‘bastard’ forms of documentary through to film and television dramas that dramatise actual events. It includes British

48 Gunning, p. 57.

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television docudrama tied to investigative journalism; America docudrama tending more towards entertainment biographies and scandals; and historical dramas, especially Schindler’s List (1993), JFK (1991) and In the Name of the Father (1993).49 Remarkably, the significance of re-enactment in forging this hybrid generic form, despite its extraordinary popularity, has escaped the close attention of film theorists.

Steven Lipkin believes that docudrama has suffered fragmented and piecemeal critical attention because it slips through the cracks between fiction and documentary film studies.50 Or, as Alan Rosenthal puts it, because it ‘floats uneasily between documentary and fiction’ and cannot be fully accounted for in either category.51 And Derek Paget relates the problem of docudrama to the fact that it makes a ‘both/and’ claim to drama and documentary that ruffles the underlying ‘either/or’ distinction that has been made between these modes, traditionally perceived as binary opposites.52 Lipkin’s definition of the genre is one that is based on true stories, told through a ‘melodramatic staging of documentary materials’ involving a ‘combination of fiction and non-fiction, narrative and actuality’ that ‘ride the fence between narrative and documentary, blending the strategies of both’.53 He sees docudrama primarily as a means of ‘get[ting] inside’ a true story.54 Rosenthal adds to these basic definitions by emphasising the docudrama’s social function of inciting public debate about current affairs.55

49 Steven Lipkin defines docudrama in relation to these three historical dramas in Real Emotional Logic: Film and TV Docudrama as Persuasive Practice (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002). Alan Rosenthal defines docudrama more explicitly in terms of its history on British television in Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). Derek Paget focuses explicitly on television in No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 50 ‘Preface: Based on a True Story’, Real Emotional Logic, pp. ix-xi; ‘Introduction’, Why Docudrama?, pp. xiv. 51 ‘Defining Docudrama: In the Name of the Father, Schindler’s List, and JFK’, in Why Docudrama?, p. 371. 52 No Other Way to Tell It, p. 1. 53 ‘Preface: Based on a True Story’, p. xiv. 54 Ibid. 55 ‘Defining Docudrama’, p. 371.

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Fundamental to all these attempts to define the docudrama is its basis in actuality, in lived historical events, and essential to its way of presenting itself is its use of re- enactment . Yet even those who have turned their attention to careful theorisation of docudrama, including Lipkin, Paget and Rosenthal, have failed to explicitly acknowledge the centrality of re-enactment in docudrama production. It is as though the term ‘docudrama’ itself has subsumed the practice of re-enactment and obscured the specific role it plays in this hybrid genre. Tom W. Hoffer and Richard Alan Nelson, for example, also argue that television and film ‘seldom have access to the “right moment” in events later deemed “newsworthy”’, and it is this that gives docudrama such currency in contemporary moving-image practice.56 Implicit in this is the suggestion that the re-enactment remains current and prevalent in cinema and television because it cannot be guaranteed that the camera will always be either able or available to capture significant events as they are unfolding.

Close attention to the various ways in which the re-enactment functions across the docudrama spectrum enables us to identify more clearly important distinctions between the genre’s diverse practices. The use of re-enactments in British investigative documentaries, for example, is often seen to undermine the truth claims of the investigation, whereas its use in a film such as In the Name of the Father lends an authenticity to many of its fictional dramatic techniques. Indeed, however marked the variations in the re-enactment’s modes of operation, it can be safely asserted that re-enactment is what lends documentary its drama and fiction its authenticity, taking on distinctly different referential associations across genres. These distinctions correspond to the different referential associations that staging, performance and theatricality have within documentary and fiction.

Persistence and Theatricality: Re-enactment and Fiction While recent work in documentary studies has begun to investigate the use of re- enactment, the same cannot be said its use in fiction film and television. As I argued in the Introduction, it is generally agreed that documentary re-enactments are

56 Tom W. Hoffer and Richard Allan Nelson, ‘Docudrama on American Television’, in Why Docudrama?, p. 73.

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acceptable as long as they are clearly signalled as such, even if this results in a mixed mode of address where some images demonstrate a direct link to a pro-filmic reality and others exhibit no indexical bond. The requirement that a re-enactment declare itself as the performance of a pre-existing event is essential to its acceptance in documentary filmmaking. By contrast, when fiction dramatises actual events, the treatment it gives them has not usually been referred to as re-enactment. In the two chapters that follow, by means of reference to specific examples, I want to trace the persistence of the re-enactment in the historical film, the genre to which it has been central. I also want to focus on the sub-genre of the biopic. If the historical film and the biopic have been regarded as docudrama, it is on those occasions when re- enactment has been required to perform an authenticating function in the dramatised, fictional world of a film.

In order to act as ‘authenticators’, re-enactments have to be recognised as re- enactments. At the beginning of this chapter I was eager to align the re-enactment with Gunning’s cinema of attractions precisely because the re-enactment is predicated on a self-conscious act of staging and, to be seen as a re-enactment, is required to always draw attention to itself as a performance. André Gaudreault argues that ‘narrative cinema is often riddled with attractions’.57 For Gunning, the cinema of attractions ‘rarely dominates the form of a feature film as a whole’, but is ‘an underground current flowing beneath narrative logic and diegetic realism’ that emerges at moments within a film.58 It might be said that, in a similar manner, the re-enactments in historical film and the biopic emerge at particular moments, in particular scenes of the narrative.

In 1915, in his epic feature film, The Birth of a Nation, a film of tremendous significance in the history of the cinematic representation of history, D.W Griffith demonstrates how, in the emerging conventions of narrative cinema, re-enactment

57 André Gaudreault, ‘From “Primitive Cinema” to “Kine-Attractology”’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, pp. 85-104 (p. 96). 58 Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. by Linda Williams (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1994), pp. 114-33 (p. 123).

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sequences were already calling attention themselves in the manner of an attraction in order to perform their authenticating function. Gunning, for whom Griffith’s films are exemplars of the early development of the American narrative cinema, argues that the major shifts in film practice that took place between 1907 and 1913 represent ‘the true narrativization of the cinema, culminating in the appearance of feature films which radically revised the variety format’. 59 By the end of 1913 feature films had begun to dominate the American film industry: The transformation of filmic discourse that D.W. Griffith typifies bound cinematic signifiers to the narration of stories and the creation of a self- enclosed diegetic universe. The look at the camera becomes taboo and the devices of cinema are transformed from playful ‘tricks’—cinematic attractions (Méliès gesturing at us to watch the lady vanish)—to elements of dramatic expression, entries into the psychology of character and the world of fiction.60

Griffith played a central role in what Gunning calls the ‘cinema of narrative integration’, in which all filmic elements are organised primarily for the purpose of storytelling.61 Yet Musser also suggests, in the wake of Gunning’s cinema of attractions argument, that while ‘a presentational style is broadly characteristic of the pre-Griffith cinema’, it ‘also continues in the post-1908 era’.62 Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, in his view, a key film in the developing classical model, marks an early and significant manifestation of the persistent tension between narrative integration and the presentational style of the attraction.63

The specific scenes in Abraham Lincoln’s presidency that are re-enacted in the first half of Birth of a Nation constitute key moments upon which discussion of the tension Musser identifies should focus. These re-enactments find room in a broadly fictional diegesis, albeit one based in historical events, not only to anchor the narrative in a believable past, but also to draw attention to themselves in the manner

59 Gunning, ‘Cinema of Attractions’, p. 60. 60 Ibid. 61 Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 290. 62 Charles Musser, ‘Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and Narrativity’ in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, pp. 389-416 (p. 409) [originally published, under the same title, in Yale Journal of Criticism, 7.2 (1994), 203-32]. 63 Ibid.

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of an attraction. Operating very differently from scenes in which a fictional character drives the action, even on the battlefront, these re-enactments in Birth of a Nation stand out as re-enactments. They do so because they are always signalled by intertitles that cite the source materials for the specific actions they contain. Not all dramatisations of historical events in Birth of a Nation are re-enactments because they do not all seek to replicate an actual event as closely as possible. Rather those sequences that depict specific, well-documented events in Lincoln’s presidency explicitly announce themselves as re-enactments. These sequences are nonetheless unambiguously woven into the film, entering into particular referential and narrative relationships with more generalised historical dramatisations in the film and with its fictional scenes.

The first moment Griffith depicts from Lincoln’s presidency is announced in an intertitle that reads ‘The First Call for 75, 000 Volunteers. President Lincoln signing the proclamation. An HISTORICAL FACSIMILE of the President’s Executive Office on that occasion, after Nicolay and Hay in Lincoln, a History.’ The intertitle cites the source for the signing of the proclamation on 15 April 1861 as a ten-volume biography authored by two of Lincoln’s secretaries, John Milton Hay and John George Nicolay, published in 1890. In the dramatised scene itself, Lincoln (Joseph Henaberry) listens as the document is read aloud to a small group of people in his room, puts on his glasses, leans over his desk and begins to sign, overseen by a group of onlookers, who then take the document away. Lincoln remains at his desk, thoughtfully wiping his brow with a handkerchief. This brief, simply played re- enactment serves to contextualise the fictional scene that follows, in which the Stoneman brothers, taking up the President’s call for volunteers, leave to join their regiment.

As the film progresses, what goes on in Lincoln’s office is constantly tied to the fictional narrative events and keeps them anchored in a believable, historical past. For example, Mrs Cameron later appeals to Lincoln to pardon her elder son, Ben, who, it is rumoured, is to be hanged as a guerrilla. Lincoln is framed sitting at his desk at the same angle as he appeared in the re-enactment of the signing of the call

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for volunteers earlier in the film. He puts on his glasses and leans over the same desk on which he signed the proclamation in order to write the pardon. The signing of the pardon is authenticated by the earlier re-enactment of the signing of the call for volunteers.

The film’s re-enactment of Lincoln’s assassination is announced by an intertitle that reads ‘An HISTORICAL FACSIMILE of Ford’s theatre as on that night, exact in size and detail, with the recorded incidents, after Nicolay and Hay in Lincoln, a History.’ This is the same ten-volume biography by Hay and Nicolay, cited earlier as the source for Lincoln’s proclamation signing. The assassination re-enactment is also framed by additional intertitles that anchor it within a specific historical time and place – a gala performance at Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865 – and with the specific historical time-stamp of the assassination: ‘Time 10:13. Act III, Scene 2’. Again, the details of the assassination itself are specific and replicate precisely what the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, did. Booth enters Lincoln’s box downstage left, shoots him in the head and jumps over the balustrade of the box onto the forestage. At this point another intertitle appears—‘Sic semper tyrannis!’—the line that some claim to have heard Booth shout as he crossed the stage and escaped via the stage right wings. Griffith contrives to include Phil and Elsie Stoneman in the audience, thus weaving the President’s murder into the lives of the film’s fictional characters. In the following scene news of Lincoln’s death is reported to their father, Congressman Austin Stoneman, a character based on the real-life Reconstruction-era Congressman Thaddeus Stevens.

As The Birth of a Nation demonstrates, re-enactments refused disappear completely after the first decade of the cinema, but persisted as an underground current in the emerging conventions of narrative cinema. The fact that the re-enactment draws attention to itself as an act of performance aligns it with cinema of attractions, but is also at the heart of the conflicting agendas it must negotiate between its attempt at self-conscious theatricality and its emphasis on literal repetition and historical authenticity. In this chapter, I have tried to show that the negotiation between theatricality and referentiality in the film re-enactment is not static. It is shaped by

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shifts in the conceptualisation of the referential dimensions of the technically reproducible image and by shifts in the status of theatricality in the cinema. In the following chapters, as I track the re-enactment across various genres, media and historical contexts, I shall examine the relationship between shifts in the conceptualisation of the referential dimensions of the technically reproducible image and this tension between theatricality, repetition and referentiality in the re- enactment. For example, in Chapter 3, I propose to investigate the way in which the re-enactment’s negotiation of this tension is shaped by the increasing capacities of technical media to circulate photographs, film, television and video footage, which has made the documentation of a whole range of events more accessible.

In Chapter 2, however, I shall concentrate on a single film sequence: the storming of the Winter Palace in Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927). Like the assassination of Lincoln, the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 is an event of enormous historical significance. However, Eisenstein’s historical epic was produced in a radically different cultural climate and cinematic context from that in which Griffith had produced Birth of a Nation. While it is well known that Eisenstein took inspiration from Griffith’s use of the close-up and his elaborate manipulation of tempo, drama and emotion through disjunctive montage techniques, especially parallel montage, he was less interested to achieve Griffith’s success in narrative integration or the creation of a unified diegetic universe. Instead, he strove to achieve an independent unity of ‘the montage image-episode, the montage image-event, the montage image-film in its entirety’.64 Accordingly, the re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace causes no disruption of the unity of a narratively integrated, diegetic fictional world.

I investigate how Eisenstein contrives to explicitly draw attention to this sequence as a re-enactment in the film, and how, at the same time, the sequence has circulated, independently of its role in the film, as documentary footage of the actual storming in 1917. In particular I shall consider an event that took place in 1920, seven years

64 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harvest Book, 1949), p. 254. (Italics in the original)

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before the release of October: The Storming of the Winter Palace, a theatrical event that staged the storming of 1917 and seek to demonstrate the way in which it influenced the negotiation of the tension between theatricality and referentiality in the storming of the Winter Palace sequence in Eisenstein’s film. My purpose is to raise questions about the fundamentally mediated nature of historical events and the role that re-enactments play in this mediation.

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Chapter 2

All of Russia was Acting October and The Storming of the Winter Palace

The famous storming of the Winter Palace sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927) was heavily influenced by The Storming of the Winter Palace, a mass spectacle staged by dramatist-director Nikolai Evreinov in the Winter Palace Square in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) on 7 November 1920 as a central event in the city’s celebrations for the third anniversary of the October Revolution.1 Both the film sequence and the theatrical event have played a central role in the construction of popular understandings of the Revolution. The theatrical reconstruction was played out in the very location where the actual storming had occurred three years earlier, the Palace Square and its surrounds becoming simultaneously ‘a stage and a real historical place’.2 A landmark event of 1920 in and of itself, Evreinov’s mass spectacle was instrumental in popularising the idea that the 1917 storming of the Winter Palace was a climatic historical moment of the October Revolution. It created

1 James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 2. The Storming of the Winter Palace was produced and directed by the theatre directors Nikolai Evreinov and Nikolai Petrov and theatre critic Alexander Kugel. It was designed by Yuri Annenkov and co-organised by Dmitrii Temkin. Hereafter Evreinov alone will stand for the team of director- producers. 2 Von Geldern, p. 201.

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what James von Geldern describes as ‘a dynamic centre for the Revolution, the moment of creation essential to any foundation myth’.3

Eisenstein’s cinematic storming sequence has shaped our understanding of revolution to such an extent that, for Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, it has ‘become history’: The most powerful single image of the Russian Revolution is probably that of the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917. But the image that has become history is not a documentary one: it is the one provided by Eisenstein in October, a fictional reconstruction made for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution in 1927.4

The sequence has frequently been misread—and, indeed, circulated—as documentary footage, lending it a new referential and historical status in its subsequent history. According to Grigori Alexandrov, many excerpts from it, and even still images, ‘have become textbook images, “quoted” as documents in other films and displayed in exhibitions devoted to the history of the Revolution’.5 And ‘countless documentaries’, says David Bordwell, have treated shots from it ‘as newsreel footage’.6 One such borrowing occurs in the opening of HBO’s Stalin (1993), where ‘unidentified footage from Eisenstein’s October is freely mixed with genuine archive material’.7

For twenty-first-century audiences of October, the storming is typically thought of in relation to the 1917 historical event. The dynamic myth, taken up in October and displaced back into the historical event is now understood without reference to The Storming of the Winter Palace. Yet the theatrical production served as a central

3 Bolshevik Festivals, p. 200. 4 ‘On history’, p. 162. 5 Quoted in Richard Taylor, October (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 76. Taylor argues that, ‘[t]he ambiguous status of those shots’ is actually ‘a reflection on the careless idleness of subsequent film-makers […] who have not taken the trouble to verify their sources properly’, October, pp. 76-7. 6 David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 96. He also identifies the July Days sequence as the other sequence regularly treated as newsreel footage in documentaries. 7 Rosenthal, ‘Introduction’, Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV, p. 11, n. 2.

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reference point for the production of the storming sequence in October, as it did for its reception in 1927.8 Despite this, the two re-enactments have almost invariably been analysed independently, only token reference made to the one in discussions of the other in the analyses that exist in English and English translation. To ignore the relationship between them is to lose sight of the fundamentally mediated nature of the historical event. If we insert the 1920 re-enactment back into debates about the film sequence of 1927, our understanding of the film’s relationship to the historical event will necessarily be changed.

In the Introduction, I questioned the tendency of historians to generalise conceptualisations of the re-enactment as it was developed from live performance to the cinema screen. In film debates about the October storming, however, while attention is often paid to its film-specific aspects, the significance of the theatrical mass-spectacle tradition out of which it was shaped has been overlooked. In this chapter, I want to take a close look at both the theatrical and film-specific dimensions of re-enactment, and also their intersections, investigating what they have in common, their translations and correspondences. A complex and nuanced relationship between theatrical and filmic re-enactment emerges, in which concepts and techniques travel and are re-mediated. I consider how theatrical techniques persist in the film re-enactment and how, in their turn, film techniques are brought to bear on the theatrical re-enactment. My central concern is to analyse the relationships between film and theatre, and the live event from which each of these derives.

Both re-enactments call into question a number of presuppositions about the event, its ontology and its mediation. Each is anchored by the external referent, the historical event on which they are based, and also by the performative, rhetorical frame it produces in order to depict that event. Each enacted something more abstract than specific historical actions: the idea of revolution. My investigations

8 Irina Bibikova, ‘The Design of Revolutionary Celebrations’, in Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebration in Russian, 1918-33, ed. by Vladimir Tolstoy, Irina Bibikova and Catherine Cooke, trans. by Frances Longman, Felicity O’Dell and Vladimir Vnukov (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), p. 21.

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revolve around a number of questions. How have the medium-specific dimensions of film and of theatre shaped the way in which the revolutionary energy conjured by each re-enactment is enacted and actualised? In what ways does this revolutionary energy stand in the place of the event it represents? How does each re-enactment produce an event with the capacity to make history? What is the relationship between the techniques employed in each re-enactment? How do they intersect? To what extent does October seek to translate The Storming of the Winter Palace? Furthermore, what are the consequences of these intersections and translations for both the spectator and the historical event? In order to address these questions, I investigate the different configurations and translations of the relationships between montage, attraction and spectatorial invigoration in each re-enactment.

By all accounts, Evreinov’s theatrical re-enactment of the storming was more ‘eventful’ than the historical event, which, in von Geldern’s words, was ‘something of a letdown’.9 The Palace Square was peaceful on the actual day of the Revolution, with the storming of the Winter Palace occurring the day after power had been seized. And minimal blood was shed, the Commanders having waited until the majority of troops defending it had surrendered, before entering the Palace.10 Evreinov, on the other hand, staged a storming that was much larger in scale and, as Irina Bibikova describes, ‘far more dramatic (and more damaging to the building) than the original event’.11 In doing so, the director staged a re-enactment that was full of historical inaccuracies.

A collective statement written by Evreinov and his colleagues makes clear that fidelity to the historical events of 1917 was not their prime concern: The directors of the current spectacle did not give any consideration to a precise reproduction of the events that took place in the square in front of the Winter Palace three years ago. They did not, and indeed could not, because theatre was never meant to serve as the minute-taker of history.12

9 Von Geldern, p. 1. 10 Von Geldern, pp. 1-2. 11 Bibikova, p. 122. 12 Quoted in Taylor, October, p. 11.

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This unwillingness to see themselves as ‘secretaries’ of history gave the directors licence to make, and not merely record, history. By making a large-scale theatrical celebration of the actual events of 25 October 1917, the actors and creatives enacted a revolutionary energy that was not present in the historical storming: they shaped the Revolution ‘as they celebrated it’.13

October was no more an exercise in historical accuracy than The Storming of the Winter Palace had been.14 Rather, it re-enacted the revolutionary energy first enacted by The Storming of the Winter Palace and not present in the historical event to produce its own more dramatic and damaging storming. The thousands of extras in both the mass spectacle and the film sequence out-numbered the actual attackers who seized the Palace in 1917. Pudovkin describes how during the shooting of the storming sequence, ‘an elderly porter at the Winter Palace, who was sweeping up the glass from the 200 windows broken during the filming, remarked dryly, “Your people were much more careful the first time they took the Palace.”’15

David Bordwell is one of the few film scholars to suggest that The Storming of the Winter Palace influenced the storming sequence in October. He argues that Eisenstein synthesises the ‘revolutionary myth’ of a massive crowd of revolutionaries that Evreinov had been so responsible for creating, and that he puts the myth ‘permanently on film’, thereby turning ‘the small detachment that invaded the Winter Palace’ into ‘for all time – a crowd of thousands’.16 Although he was an eyewitness to the July demonstration and based his staging and shooting of this re- enactment in October on his own experience, Eisenstein was not in Petrograd in

13 Von Geldern, p. 45. 14 See, for example, Taylor, October, p. 79, who says that ‘[t]he “formal experimentation” in October that Eisenstein later judged to be an “over-refinement” was of greater concern to him as a filmmaker than was any distortion of a historian’s ideal of truth of authenticity’. 15 Quoted in Yon Barna, Eisenstein, trans. by Lise Hunter (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), pp. 119-20. 16 The Cinema of Eisenstein, pp. 80-2.

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October 1917 to see for himself the actual storming of the Winter Palace, nor in November 1920 for Evreinov’s mass spectacle.17

Unlike the historical events, The Storming of the Winter Palace was filmed in its entirety and captured in numerous photographs. Richard Taylor argues that Eisenstein encountered the documentation of The Storming of the Winter Palace, including design sketches by Yuri Annenkov and artists impressions of the production, while undertaking extensive archival research in preparation for October. As part of his research Eisenstein also examined documentary records of the mass spectacle.18 Taylor’s comparison of the two re-enactments, though brief, contends that The Storming of the Winter Palace provided a ‘model’ in ‘practical as well as artistic terms’ for Eisenstein. He argues that they both ‘offered a distillation of the same historical event’, ‘improved upon the original event’, with re-enactments more dramatic and more spectacular that the historical storming, and both ‘contributed to the development of the foundational myth of the Soviet state’.19

I agree with Taylor: the October storming not so much a re-enactment of the historical event as a re-enactment of Evreinov’s re-enactment. What is enacted in The Storming of the Winter Palace and, subsequently, in October is not an actual revolution, but the idea of a revolution, attempts to stage in the flesh and fix on celluloid what a revolution might have looked and sounded like, and how it might have felt to be part of a revolutionary mob. Both the staged event and the film seek to summon, perform and unleash the revolutionary energy of the mass. Collectively, these two re-enactments have re-mediated the historical event into a properly ‘revolutionary’ event. By re-mediating the historical event into a revolutionary event, these two re-enactments have blurred the boundaries between the historical event and its representation—and in doing so changed both the way in which we understand particular events, but also the events themselves. In short, October and The Storming of the Winter Palace do not only re-enact the historical storming, they effectively enact it.

17 Taylor, October, p. 11. 18 Ibid. See also Barna, p. 117. 19 October, pp. 9, 15. Italics in the original.

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Since the historical storming was peaceful, occurred after the seizing of power, involved waiting, surrender, minimal bloodshed and minimal damage, one may ask whether it was ‘eventful’ enough in itself to constitute a properly ‘revolutionary’ event. For Jacques Derrida, an event’s ‘eventfulness’ is characterised by its capacity to surprise and its capacity to drive us to try to grasp what has happened: ‘The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension: the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend. Better the event is first of all that I do not comprehend.’20 Paul Patton provides a commentary on Derrida’s conceptualisation: For there to be an event, we must be able to recognize, identify, interpret or describe a given occurrence as a certain kind of event. At the same time, however, to the extent that an event is a new occurrence at a given moment in time, it must also be endowed with the potential to resist this kind of incorporation within our existing systems of recognition, interpretation, and description. In this sense, [Derrida] argues, every event, in so far as it is an event, carries the potential to break with the past and to inaugurate a new kind of event.21

The Storming of the Winter Palace and the storming sequence in October both function as interpretations of the 1917 storming, enabling the historical event to be recognised as a ‘revolutionary event’. The Storming of the Winter Palace first created the idea of the 1917 storming of the Winter Palace as a climatic, historical and revolutionary ‘moment of creation’.22 Building on this idea, October also made the 1917 storming recognisable as a climactic, revolutionary event and, along with The Storming of the Winter Palace, inaugurated this new kind of event for a new Russian society.

But what constitutes a properly revolutionary event? For Gilles Deleuze, Patton argues, the revolutionary event marks a ‘historical transition’ from one mode of

20 Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. by Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), pp. 85-172 (p. 90), quoted in Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 90. 21 Deleuzian Concepts, p. 90. 22 Von Geldern, p. 200.

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production to another through a ‘revolutionary moment’ that condenses ‘the singular points of a given structure’ into a ‘sublime occasion’.23 As accounts of the historical storming indicate, it did not constitute a condensed, sublime moment. It was The Storming of the Winter Palace that turned the 1917 storming into a transitional revolutionary event for the new, post-Revolutionary Russia at a time when a new Russian society was still being created and stabilised and was therefore in need of this kind of confirmation and condensation of historical transition. At the same time, The Storming of the Winter Palace itself became that sublime occasion, not only remediating an historical event as a revolutionary event, but constituting itself as that revolutionary event.

Deleuze defines ‘pure events’ as ‘real but non-actual entities, expressed in the successive configurations of material bodies but irreducible to any particular set of such configurations’.24 A battle, for example, ‘is made up of the movements of certain bodies and pieces of equipment at a particular place and a particular time’, while the ‘pure event’ of battle can never be ‘confined to these elements’ because it can ‘recur on other occasions when it would be expressed in entirely different elements’.25 For Deleuze, the revolutionary event is unique, however, in that it is simultaneously a pure event and its actualisation, a unique moment in which ‘the pure event of society breaks through into history’.26 The Storming of the Winter Palace theatricalised and performed the ‘pure’ revolutionary event – the condensed, sublime revolutionary moment – and through that performance, enacted a ‘real’ revolutionary energy. The performance became the ‘pure event’.

According to Susan Buck-Morss, for whom the revolutionary energy produced in the performance of revolution is all too real, that induced by The Storming of the Winter Palace produced a power dynamic that did not solidify the legitimacy of the state, but threatened its very foundations. This concurs with the idea that the performance became Deleuze’s pure event of revolution. Anatoli Lunacharski, People’s

23 Deleuzian Concepts, p. 84. 24 Patton, p. 86. 25 Patton, p. 102. 26 Patton, p. 84.

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Commissar for Enlightenment, Buck-Morss writes, ‘stated his approval of mass festivals in the tradition of the French Revolution, but he echoed Lenin’s concerns for limiting the spontaneity of these celebrations’. This was because,

[w]hen the audience-as-mass was drawn mimetically into the performance in a lived repetition of the ‘act’ of revolution, the spontaneity of this street euphoria threatened a breakdown of control that understandably made the authorities nervous. This mass theatre staged not only the revolution, but the staging of revolution, with all the ambiguous relations to power that such political theatre implies.27

Buck-Morss goes on the argue that in the act of commemoration, The Storming of the Winter Palace enacted a revolutionary energy in and for the present, rather than relegating it to the past, opening up questions about the representability of the temporality and rhythm of revolution. This analysis of The Storming of the Winter Palace emphasises the event’s powers of re-enactment, even though the act of re- enactment is not named explicitly. Slavoj Zizek also argues that performances such as The Storming of the Winter Palace are ‘evidence that the October Revolution was not a simple coup d’état carried out by a small group of Bolsheviks, but an event that unleashed a tremendous emancipatory potential’.28

Eisenstein’s October also enacts the idea of the ‘pure event’ of revolution by giving us, as Buck-Morss describes, ‘an experience of the mass that became the reference point for future meaning’.29 Buck-Morss argues that ‘Soviet collective identity, like the revolutionary mass, was a phenomenon that needed the cinema world to be

27 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), p. 144. 28 Slavoj Zizek, ‘Heiner Mueller out of Joint’, 25 September 2003, available at http://www.lacan.com/mueller.htm (accessed 18 February 2011). 29 Dreamworld, p. 147; Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception: A Historical Account’, in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. by C. Nadia Seremetakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 45-62 (p. 51).

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perceived’.30 Cinematic montage, she says, has been uniquely able to produce the experience of the revolutionary mass for audiences: It has been argued that ‘the mass’ as a coherent visual phenomenon can only inhabit the simulated, indefinite space of the cinema screen. Cinema creates an imagined space where a mass body exists that can exist nowhere else.31

In her argument, it is as if the ‘pure event’ of the revolutionary mass can only exist in and through its cinematic representation and is actualised as a coherent and ‘pure’ idea in the cinema, rather than as a historical or even as a theatrical event.

Nonetheless, many commentators on The Storming of the Winter Palace have analysed closely how it created a potent experience of the revolutionary mass for its performers and spectators. Setting performers and spectators in close proximity enabled both groups to participate in and identify with the masses, and it was the facilitation of this participation and identification that enacted a revolutionary energy. Some 100,000 spectators, about a quarter of the entire population of Petrograd in 1920, are reported to have turned up to watch the 2,000-plus performers (who included actors, dancers and circus performers).32 Spectators were placed in the middle of the action and as the Palace was stormed, they joined in the attack, ‘melting’ as Richard Stites describes it, ‘into the performance’.33 By taking history into their own hands, the performers and spectators of The Storming of the Winter Palace participated in creating the storming of the Winter Palace as a dynamic centre for the Revolution.

October’s ability to re-enact the emotional intensity and mass revolutionary energy generated by The Storming of the Winter Palace is based in film-specific means: the visual rhythms of Eisenstein’s montage principles, rather than the theatrical

30 Dreamworld, p. 147. 31 Ibid.; ‘Cinema Screen as Prosthesis’, p. 51. 32 Blackson, p. 36. 33 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 96. Buck- Morss, Dreamworld, p. 141, also reports that spectators joined in the action. Von Geldern, p. 203, connects The Storming of the Winter Palace with Evreinov’s previous theatre work, noting that spectators ‘were placed right in the middle of the action (as they had been in Evreinov’s Ancient Theatre)’.

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activation of city streets, montage being a key technique of the ‘formal experimentation’ that was of greater interest to the filmmaker than historical authenticity.34 Since I argue that the production of the revolutionary mass in October is an act of re-enactment, this cinematic capacity is produced through an act of translation. The storming sequence in October sets out to translate cinematically, by means of rhythmic montage, the revolutionary energy of the mass enacted by The Storming of the Winter Palace.

I want to turn now to the way in which the medium-specific dimensions of theatre and film shaped the way that revolutionary energy is enacted and actualised in each re-enactment, and to look at the relationships between the techniques employed in each re-enactment. Unlike Buck-Morss, who regards the historical storming as ultimately perceivable only through Einstein’s use of montage, I argue that both re- enactments inhabit complex intersections between the theatrical and the film-specific dimensions of re-enactment and that the historical event itself was ultimately enacted at these intersections.

Revolutionary Energy and Medium Specificity Eisenstein, who pioneered the use of montage in both film and theatre, took up a theatrical event that was already inspired by the cinema. The creators of The Storming of the Winter Palace pioneered theatrical techniques in the mass spectacle that were inspired by the basic principles of film montage. The Storming of the Winter Palace was the first mass spectacle filmed in full and its technical innovations were designed to facilitate the filming of the whole event by reducing the need for lengthy set changes. Unlike earlier mass spectacles, some of which had lasted for as long as five hours, The Storming of the Winter Palace was only ninety minutes long.35

34 See n. 14 above. 35 Von Geldern, p. 205. The Storming of the Winter Palace built on innovations pioneered by the four mass spectacles staged in Petrograd earlier in 1920. The first was The Mystery of Liberated Labour, staged on May Day 1920 in front of the Stock Exchange by Yuri Annenkov, Alexander Kugel and S.D. Maslovskaia. Its 4, 000 participants (including professional actors, circus artists and members of the Red

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Evreinov made extensive use of searchlights, 150 of them, as a way of segmenting time and space, and shifting the audience’s attention to new fictive location as the unfolding drama required it. In the words of K. N. Derzhavin, an assistant to Evreinov, ‘The searchlights installed on the roofs of the buildings surrounding the square lit up the areas of action, and one after another, like the episodes in a film, the scenes began to unfold on the Red and White platforms.’36 As the scenes were lit up by these searchlights, other parts of the city were left in darkness, their power supply cut off, encouraging full attention to the events in the Palace Square.37 The directors were building on techniques pioneered by Konstantin Mardzhanov, who had staged another mass spectacle, In Favour of a World Commune, only a matter of months earlier, on 19 July 1920.38 In Favour of a World Commune was the first mass spectacle to juxtapose in rapid succession discrete scenes and moments of an event, creating for spectators a sense of witnessing and participating in history as it happened. The spectacle’s several directors achieved this by positioning themselves outside the performance in locations from which they could give signals to start each of the production’s 110 episodes.39 The Storming of the Winter Palace took up this innovation: its nine directors and five assistant directors were placed on top of a large platform, which, to enable them to coordinate the action, was fitted with a

Army divisions) played out the drama of class struggle for an audience of 35,000 spectators. This event is credited with inspiring public demand for mass spectacles, prompting Petrograd leaders, in particular Maria Andreeva, a Board member of the Commissariat of Enlightenment’s Theatre Department (TEO), to commission a series of mass spectacles. See Bibikova, ‘Design of Revolutionary Celebrations’, p. 25; Stites, pp. 94-5; von Geldern, p. 162; Robert Leach, Revolutionary Theatre (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 43-4. The Blockade of Russia (20 June 1920), followed directed by Sergei Radlov and designed by Valentina Khodasevich and Ivan Formin, staged Russia’s war with Poland on a massive amphitheatre created on Stone Island, which symbolised Russia. The audience was separated from the stage by a stretch of water on which a fleet of boats enforced the blockade, as performers, acting as the invaders from Poland, tried to reach the island, departing from the audience over an arched bridge. See Stites, p. 95; von Geldern, p. 172; Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, p. 43. 36 Quoted in Viktor Shklovsky, Art and Literature Under the Bolsheviks. Volume One: The Crisis of Renewal, 1917-1924 (London: Pluto Press, 1991), p. 74. 37 Taylor, October, pp. 9, 15, points out that the extensive lighting for the 10-day shoot of the storming of the Winter Palace in October also required that the electricity supply to parts of the Petrograd be switched off. 38 Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, pp. 43-4. 39 Von Geldern, p. 188.

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complex network of electric light signals, field telephones and access to motorbike couriers. Signals were issued by telephone, using numbered codes for each episode.40

It goes without saying that the basic montage techniques on which Evreinov drew lacked the sophistication of those developed for the cinema by Eisenstein. Yet their purpose did extend beyond an organisation of time and space to an emphasis on rhythmic activation. The fifty windows of the first floor of the Winter Palace were also lit up in a rhythmic display that depicted moments of the battle that took place inside its walls, again inspired by the ability of film to cut rapidly from one scene to another. As Buck-Morss sees it, the inspiration for this use of the windows had a cinematic origin: With cinema in mind, the directors of the 1920 street theatre version of Storming of the Winter Palace treated the palace as a ‘gigantic actor’, producing ingeniously from its architectural form the rhythmic effect of montage. The idea was to present the scenes as sequential ‘shots’ in the palace window frames.41

Evreinov’s intention was to ‘make the stones speak, so that the spectator feels what is going on inside, behind those cold red walls’.42

This connection between the rhythmic aspects of montage and emotional engagement of the spectator also shaped Eisenstein’s translation of the ‘montage of attractions’ from theatre to film.43 Eisenstein’s translation of the concept of the attraction from live performance to cinema, for example, was developed through his investigation of the relationship between attraction, montage and rhythm. The rhythmic aspect of montage, he asserts, can itself have a direct impact on the spectator:

40 See von Geldern, p. 203; Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, pp. 46-8; Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, p. 143. 41 Dreamworld, pp. 146-7. 42 Interview with Evreinov in Life of Art, no. 596-97 (September 1920), pp. 30-1, quoted in Street Art of the Revolution, p. 138. 43 See Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage of Film Attractions’, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. by Richard Taylor, trans. by Richard Taylor and William Powell (London: BFI, 1998), pp. 35-52 (p. 37).

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It is clear that the centre of gravity of cinema effects, in contrast to those of theatre, lies not in directly physiological effects, although a purely physical infectiousness can sometimes be attained. […] It seems that there has been absolutely no study or evaluation of the purely physiological effect of montage irregularity and rhythm. 44

The storming sequence in October is clearly driven by the principles of rhythmic montage, a concept usually associated with the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (1925), in which the soldiers’ descent never falls into a fixed, regular meter, but instead incorporates a range of more unsettling tempos, accents and rhythms.45

In October, once the cannons of the Aurora have fired, a series of shots captures the movement of people repeatedly standing up, one after another, at different speeds and rhythms before revolutionary soldiers stream cross the Palace square at ‘kaleidoscopic speed’.46 This crossing is kaleidoscoped not only through a multitude of camera angles, all cut together, but also by the different speeds and rhythms of running bodies that are accented in each of these shots. Bodies surge away from, across and even towards the camera, building up momentum by means of the alternating rhythms both within and between shots. As the gate blasts open, the crowd surges into the Palace, their raised guns rhythmically to mark the dynamic forward movement of the soldiers who carry them across the screen. Eisenstein’s rhythmic montage of the mass on the move provokes excitement in the spectators through the dynamics it conjures. Rhythmic montage works on the spectator in the manner of an attraction, shaping the spectators’ emotions through the juxtaposition of cinematic fragments.

Both re-enactments succeed as enactments of revolutionary energy, primarily because of their approach the relationship between montage, attraction and engagement with the spectator. Eisenstein took up a theatrical event not only already inspired by film montage, but also already working with attractions. Critical

44 ‘Montage of Film Attractions’, pp. 36 -7. 45 See Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, pp. 185-6. 46 James Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema, and History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 89.

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attention to Eisenstein’s innovations in spectatorship as well as his evolving conceptualisation of the concept of the attraction has tended to focus on influences such as the circus, the music hall and vaudeville. What has been overlooked is the legacy of the new approaches to spectatorship championed by The Storming of the Winter Palace. In Chapter 1, I aligned the re-enactment with Gunning’s cinema of attractions, a term inspired by Eisenstein’s use of the concept of the attraction.47 Gunning, for whom Eisenstein’s concept ‘captured the potential energy of cinema’s address to the spectator’,48 argues that Eisenstein wanted to ‘borrow’ the ‘mixture of pleasure and anxiety which the purveyors of popular art had labelled sensations and thrills’ with the intention of ‘organising popular energy for radical purpose’.49

The task of ‘organising popular energy’ was also central to the success of the mass spectacles. The Storming of the Winter Palace created mass revolutionary energy through mass participation, its ability to invigorate and involve its spectators setting a benchmark for audience engagement in Russia in the 1920s. The innovations pioneered in the mass spectacles included a strong emphasis on mass participation, as well as fluid borders between performers and audiences, the incorporation of the surrounding environment, and the intoxicating scale of the productions.

Jacques Aumont links Eisenstein’s concept of attraction as ‘an effort to attract the spectator’s attention’ to wider, overlapping trends in the Revolutionary culture of the 1920s in Russia, insisting that emphasis on the agitation of the spectator, ‘far from being specific to Eisenstein’, belongs to ‘all the intellectual trends which, […] called for the shaping of a “new spectator”’ and was ‘one of the great dominant ideas of the whole immediate post-revolutionary period’.50 Brandon Taylor argues that the organisation of mass spectacles, as well as street festivals, agitational ships and

47 Gunning, p. 59. 48 Tom Gunning, ‘Attractions: How They Came into the World’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, p. 32. 49 Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. by Linda Williams (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1994), pp. 114-33 (p. 122); Gunning, p. 60. 50 Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, trans. by Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987 [1979]), pp. 44-5.

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trains, parades, processions, monuments and the decoration of public buildings, marked a new phase in the ‘theatricalisation of life’ in the early Revolutionary years.51 In his view, [t]he concept of ‘theatricalisation’ had traditionally been important in Russian life. Now, in the wake of the October Revolution, it offered the idea that by involving the public on a vast scale the individual might lose his sense of isolation and experience a real identification with the events and aspirations of the new society.52

Viktor Shklovsky puts it more directly: ‘All of Russia is acting’, he says, noting the festivals, mass spectacles, processions and amateur theatre groups of Russia’s early Revolutionary culture. ‘Some kind of elemental process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical.’53

The origins of the correspondences between montage, attraction and spectatorial invigoration in October and The Storming of the Winter Palace are tied to Proletkult, the loose-knit literary, cultural and artistic organization devoted to working-class culture that was founded by Platon Mikhailovich Kerzhentsev, Valerian Pletnev and Alexander Bogdanov in October 1917. One of the key ideas both re-enactments share through their connection to Proletkult is the activation of both the creative instincts and the ideological participation of the spectator. Its amateur theatre clubs constituting a major force in Revolutionary theatre in Russia, Proletkult took shape before, and developed during, the era of mass spectacles, peaking in popularity in 1920 with a membership of almost half a million.54 Proletkult actors performed regularly in the Petrograd mass spectacles, together with soldiers, sailors, students and professional actors, in the years immediately after the Revolution.55

The philosophy of the Proletkult and its founders constitutes an important site for the intersection of attitudes towards spectatorial engagement that were pioneered by both The Storming of the Winter Palace and Eisenstein. Kerzhentsev was a key

51 Art and Literature, p. 64. 52 Ibid. 53 Quoted in Slavoj Zizek, ‘Seize the Day: Lenin’s Legacy’, London Review of Books, 23 July 2002, par. 21. 54 Von Geldern, pp. 212-3. 55 Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, p. 38.

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figure in the post-Revolutionary push for the activation of a new spectator. Having seen community pageants in England and the United States, he championed them as a model for theatre in the new post-Revolutionary Russian society, a style of theatre, he believed, that could answer the call made in 1903 by French dramatist Romain Rolland (published as Le Théâtre du people / The People’s Theatre, 1918) for theatre that would emotionally re-invigorate the spectator. In 1918, inspired by Rolland, Kerzhentsev argued in his book Creative Theatre (Tvorcheskii teatr) that all Revolutionary theatre should possess characteristics of mass participation, whereby spectators became actors and their creative instincts were inspired.56 The emotional identification observed in the mass spectacles, especially The Storming of the Winter Palace, was widely seen to be exactly what Rolland and Kerzhentsev were asking for.57

In 1920, Lunacharski called for precisely this kind of engagement with Russian audiences. He argued that in order for the masses to be able to identify with the ideals the Russian Revolution had set out to create, the people had to be activated through participation in mass spectacle: In order to acquire a sense of self the masses must outwardly manifest themselves and this is possible only when, in Robespierre’s words, they become ‘a spectacle unto themselves’.

If the organised masses march to music, sing in unison or perform extensive gymnastic manoeuvres or dances, in other words, organising a kind of parade – not a military parade but one that is saturated with the ideological essence, the hopes, curses and all the other emotions of the people – then the others, unorganised masses lining all the streets and squares where the festival is taking place, will merge with the organised masses so that one can say: the whole people is manifesting itself.58

This is exactly what Evreinov’s Storming of the Winter Palace had demonstrated: simultaneously participants in and witnesses to the storming of the Winter Palace,

56 Brandon Taylor, p. 75. 57 Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, p. 23; Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian & Soviet Theatre: Tradition & the Avant-Garde, ed. by Leslie Milne, trans. by Roxane Permar (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 45. 58 Anatoli Lunacharski quoted in Richard Taylor, October, p. 9.

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and placed in the middle of the action, its spectators joined in the attack as the palace was stormed, becoming ‘a spectacle unto themselves’.

Konstantin Rudnitsky argues that because ‘to a significant degree’ there was ‘no division between spectators and actors’ in ‘mass pageants’ such as The Storming of the Winter Palace, these mass spectacles ‘realised Vyacheslav Ivanov’s dream of the “collective action”’.59 The simultaneous activation of the mass invoked an experience, not only of collective action, but also what Richard Taylor, referring to The Storming of the Winter Palace, calls an ‘act of collective memory that it both embodied and provoked’.60 The spectators’ collective memory was not only activated by their participation in The Storming of the Winter Palace, but their experience of the historical events was created for them by their active involvement in their re-enactment.

It is out of these commentaries on the theatricalisation of life in The Storming of the Winter Palace that the idea of performance as revolution emerges. As the spectator- participants in The Storming of the Winter Palace became a ‘spectacle unto themselves’, they performed the idea of the revolutionary moment, which helped them to identify with the new society it inaugurated. The emphasis in these commentaries on the idea that the certification of the Russian Revolution occurs by means of the invigoration of spectators that was enacted by The Storming of the Winter Palace suggests that it is the re-enactment of revolution that makes the historical event real for the participants.

Nonetheless, the emphasis on activating the creative instincts of the spectator was also central to Kerzhentsev’s agenda for the theatre produced by Proletkult. In 1921, Eisenstein became part of the Proletkult Workers’ Theatre in Moscow, where, as a set designer and then theatre director, he began his artistic experiments with juxtaposition and attraction. He re-organised the theatrical space of the Second Central Theatre Studio and its spectators for the adaptation of Jack London’s The

59 Rudnitsky, p. 44. 60 October, p. 11.

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Mexican which he designed and co-directed with Valeri Smishlayev. Eisenstein’s first major experiment with sets, costumes and staging techniques —which premiered at the Moscow Proletkult Workers’ Theatre, on 10 March 1921— produced a version of the active, participatory spectatorship advocated by Kerzhentsev. As Leach describes, in the play’s finale, which famously involved a boxing match, ‘the audience was no longer fulfilling the traditional role of passive watchers, they had become part of the action, not just because Rivera [the boxer] came up from among them to the ring itself, but because the ring was thrust out into the stalls area’.61 And since Eisenstein directed the fight in a style markedly different from that of the rest of the action, exaggerated melodrama giving way to violent realism, he had blurred the distinction between life and art. The audience for The Mexican became the audience for the boxing match, participating in the performance as an audience and in so doing the distinction between spectator and performer became blurred. The spectators play themselves, becoming part of the action and at the same time become aware of themselves as spectators. As Evreinov had contrived to do with The Storming of the Winter Palace, the dividing-line between theatre and life had been obliterated.

The Storming of the Winter Palace and Eisenstein’s experiments in theatre were both shaped by the desire to open up theatrical space in order to activate spectators as participants. What activated them was ‘attractions’, which Eisenstein defined in ‘The Montage of Attractions’ (1923) to explain the approach he developed for both The Mexican and Wise Man, Sergei Tretyakov’s adaptation of Ostrovsky’s Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man staged in April 1923, at the Moscow Proletkult Theatre: Attraction (in our diagnosis of theatre) is any aggressive moment in theatre, i.e. any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole. These shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological aspect of what is being shown, the final ideological conclusion.62

61 Revolutionary Theatre, p. 73. 62 Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’, p. 30.

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This definition could as readily be applied to the performance of The Storming of the Winter Palace. For example, referring to a particularly high moment in the production, Derzhavin, one of its many directors, writes: The moment when the signal rocket sped up from the Square and exploded in the night sky the spectators and the participants too witnessed one of the most astonishing sights imaginable, a sight which burst the narrow confines of the traditional stage, and rose above those earthbound blanks, boldly mixing recent reality with a vivid, audacious, theatricalised interpretation of that reality on a scale hitherto undreamed of.63

Derzhavin’s account suggests that revolutionary energy was also unleashed precisely at the very moment when the mass spectacle broke out of traditional theatrical norms to set a bold, new, awe-inspiring standard for the reinvigoration of the tradition of theatricalisation, surpassing spectators’ expectations in an astounding display that opened up new ideological and imaginative possibilities for its audience. For Eisenstein, the ability to convey to spectators the ideological aspect of the attraction was at the heart of its significance as both a concept and a technique.

As I have suggested, Eisenstein’s successful translation of the concept of attraction (and its relationship to spectatorial invigoration) from live performance to cinema hinges on the argument that attractions in the cinema need to be created through montage, that they need to be put to work in combination with one another in order to shape the emotions of the cinema spectator. He writes: Whereas in theatre an effect is achieved primarily through the physiological perception of an actually occurring fact (e.g. a murder), in cinema it is made up of the juxtaposition and accumulation, in the audience’s psyche, of associations that the film’s purpose requires, associations that are aroused by the separate elements of the stated (in practical terms, in ‘montage fragments’) fact, associations that produce, albeit tangentially, a similar (and often stronger) effect only when taken as a whole.64

It is Eisenstein’s analysis of the relationship between attraction, montage and spectatorial invigoration that enables him translate cinematically the revolutionary energy performed by and through the theatricalisation of life in The Storming of the Winter Palace. His emphasis on rhythmic montage not only enables him to create

63 Quoted in Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, p. 143. 64 ‘Montage of Film Attractions’, pp. 36-7.

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out of the storming of the Winter Palace sequence in October a dynamic representation of the revolutionary mass, but also enables cinema spectators to both acknowledge and experience for themselves the dynamics and energy of the revolutionary mass, just as Evreinov’s techniques of theatricalisation in The Storming of the Winter Palace had enabled his spectator-participants to feel for themselves the dynamics and energy of the revolutionary mass.

A Phenomenon that Needed the Cinema to be Perceived? As the pre-eminent medium to enable collective identification with the revolutionary energy of the revolutionary mass, says Buck-Morss, cinema took over from festivals and street theatre: Eisenstein created ‘an experience of the mass that became the reference point for future meaning’, his development of rhythmic cinematic montage making him ‘the great director of the crowd and the great controller of its rhythms through montage’.65 ‘The revolution-as-spectacle was superseded by the virtual reality of revolution filmed,’ she writes and points to three of Eisenstein’s finest films, Strike (1923), Battleship Potemkin (1925), and October (1927) as the best illustration of her argument.66

The mass spectacle declined in popularity after 1920, leaving the field to cinema. The Storming of the Winter Palace was very much the climax to a year of intense theatrical activity in the city streets, engaging directly with the energies of a society in the thrall of change, transformation and new possibilities. Its performance of revolution necessarily coincided with the energy and excitement of the new society emerging in the early post-Revolutionary years in Russia. As von Geldern says, ‘The intensified, often euphoric days of the Civil War had spawned the genre.’67 As the ‘flush of the revolution’ faded, the currency of the mass spectacle declined.68 And

65 Ibid. 66 Dreamworld, p. 147 and ‘The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis’, p. 51. 67 Bolshevik Festivals, p. 213. 68 Ibid. Interest in mass spectacles waned to such a degree that parodies of the mass spectacles even began to appear after 1920. According to von Geldern, The Storming of the Winter Palace was the most tempting target and its chief director, Evreinov, even participated in these parodies.

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after 1920, von Geldern argues, ‘the unbroken solemnity and zeal needed for mass drama was gone’.69 In Irina Bibikova’s view The theme of enthusiasm for the struggle with the old and for the victory over it, always at the heart of these dramas, fully accorded with the mood of the masses during the stormy epoch of the Civil War. However, it did not relate so closely to the tasks of the production propaganda in the reconstruction period.70

As these accounts imply, the new emergent post-revolutionary society had a revolutionary zeal that the mass spectacle had cultivated, curated and unleashed. The performance of revolution made history by enabling members of a society already fuelled by revolutionary energy to manifest as a revolutionary mass.

Once Buck-Morss has made the argument that Eisenstein’s cinematic montage supersedes street theatre in the representation of the revolutionary mass, she makes no further comparisons between the two re-enactments. At no point does she make reference to any direct relationship between October and The Storming of the Winter Palace, let alone suggest that one re-enacts the other. The logic of succession contained in her argument, however, leaves open the possibility that Eisenstein’s films do draw on the staging of revolutionary energy pioneered in the spectacular street theatre of the mass spectacles.

Slavoj Zizek, on the other hand, goes so far as to argue that the authenticity of the storming sequence in October is actually underscored by the fact that many of the performers in the film were enthusiastically re-enacting the theatricalisation of life they first participated in during The Storming of the Winter Palace.71 In short, he says, the re-enactment in October in 1927 was a performance by people who in 1920 had taken the history of 1917 into their own hands and performed it as The Storming of the Winter Palace. And, indeed, he is literally correct: many who played in October had played in The Storming of the Winter Palace, and many who played in The Storming of the Winter Palace had stormed the Winter Palace in 1917. What is

69 Bolshevik Festivals, p. 213. 70 ‘Design of Revolutionary Celebrations’, p. 27. 71 ‘Heiner Mueller out of Joint’, par. 14-5.

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more, as Buck-Morss has pointed out, many of the performers in The Storming of the Winter Palace were still fighting in the Civil War in 1920: Although this was acting, not reality, and although the rifles were not loaded, the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves. Drawn from the dramatic studios of the Red Army, they were simultaneously involved in the real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from shortages of food and material goods. It was all the more remarkable, therefore, that they participated in this mock battle with such gusto.72

These soldiers and sailors played themselves as soldiers and sailors in The Storming of the Winter Palace and the cruiser Aurora, as von Geldern describes, ‘which three years before had fired the (blank) “shot heard round the world” repeated the signal for the performance’.73

The best-known figure to have played in every version of the storming was Nikolai Podvoisky. He had been one of the people in charge of the occupation of the Winter Palace in 1917; became involved in commissioning and participating in the mass spectacles of 1920; was a historical consultant and performer in The Storming of the Winter Palace; was chair of the Anniversary Commission for the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution that commissioned October; and was employed by Eisenstein as a historical consultant and as a performer.74 Along with many others, and despite being an ‘authentic’ historical participant in the 1917 storming, Podvoisky willingly participated in performing in the massive historical inaccuracies staged by both re-enactments. This willing collusion began with The Storming of the Winter Palace in which, as Rudnitsky argues, enthusiasm for the tradition of the theatricalisation overshadowed any desire for historical authenticity: Lack of correspondence with reality did not disturb them in the least, for the need to elevate and embellish reality, to impart to it visual grandeur, over- powered everyone. The enthusiasm displayed by both participants and spectators in the mass celebration was genuine, living.75

72 Dreamworld, p. 144. 73 Bolshevik Festivals, p. 201. 74 Taylor, October, p. 11. He also notes, p. 13: ‘Just as Evreinov had involved the population of the city in the 1920 re-enactment, so Eisenstein advertised in the Leningrad papers for the 50-60,000 extras he was seeking for his mass scenes.’ 75 Rudnitsky, p. 45.

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For Zizek, the enthusiasm participants expressed for performing their own theatricalised, living, embellished reality marks the ‘documentary’ quality of both re- enactments: The very fact that, in historical documentaries, movie shots from this reconstruction (as well as from Eisenstein’s 1927 October) of the storming of the Winter Palace are often presented as documentary shots is to be taken as an indication of this deeper identity of people playing themselves.76

The Storming of the Winter Palace was not only central to the celebrations for the third anniversary of the October Revolution in Petrograd. Edited excerpts from its documentation also travelled across the country on newsreels, reaching a larger audience in its subsequent circulation on film than it did as a live performance.77 It has even been the case that the Storming of the Winter Palace documentation has subsequently taken on the referential ambivalence of historical documentation we have tended to associate with October.

Discussing the relationship between the documentation of the re-enactment event and the status of October’s version of the storming of the Winter Palace as both re- enactment and document, Zizek suggests that while the mass spectacles (and the revolutionary energy they conjured) lost currency after 1920, the approach to the theatricalisation of life pioneered in The Storming of the Winter Palace retained some of its potency in its film documentation and in its translation into Eisenstein’s October. At the same time, he continues, October’s investment in, and reconfiguration and translation of, the theatricalisation of life pioneered by The Storming of the Winter Palace may well have contributed to the referential ambivalence of the film sequence and its capacity to ‘become history’.78 Zizek argues that the two re-enactments are equivalent in terms of their performative capacities and that this enables both re-enactments to enact revolutionary energy authentically.

76 ‘Heiner Mueller out of Joint’, par. 14-5. 77 Von Geldern, p. 212. 78 Nowell-Smith, p. 162.

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Buck-Morss focuses more specifically on spectatorship, arguing that the representational capacities of Einstein’s montage techniques (and of the cinema more generally) supersede the representational capacities of live performance. By means of his rhythmic montage techniques, she claims, Eisenstein is able to enact on the spectatorial body the experience of participation in live performance. One of the central reasons why Buck-Morss champions Eisenstein’s cinematic rendering of the revolutionary mass as its exemplary manifestation is that, like Valery Podoroga, she believes that ‘[n]o reality could stand the intensity of the mass shown in cinema’.79 The cinema’s ability to heighten and intensify the senses enables cinema audiences to ‘perform certain cognitive operations that would otherwise be humanly intolerable’.80 The physical and emotional intensity produced by the cinema is available to the cinema spectator without risk of real physical harm: the cinema spectator can be ‘bombarded by physical and psychic shock, but feel no pain’.81 Both Zizek’s and Buck-Morss’ arguments engage directly with the question of the relationship between spectatorship and participation in the re-enactment, but with very different outcomes. These outcomes relate to the arguments each of them raises about what it is to re-enact and to enact. For Zizek, it the act of performing that enacts revolutionary energy in live and filmed performance, while for Buck-Morss, rhythmic montage activates the creative instincts and the ideological participation of the cinema spectator. Each commentator, therefore, gives a different answer to the question of how the medium-specific dimensions of film and of theatre shaped the way that this revolutionary energy is enacted and actualised in each re-enactment. Moreover, each gives a different account of the relationships between the techniques employed in each re-enactment as well as their consequences for the activation of both the spectator and the historical event. Nevertheless, I’m interested in juxtaposing their arguments here, precisely because both raise interesting and complex questions about the fundamentally mediated nature of events, especially revolutionary events.

79 Podogora, ‘Sergei Eisenstein’, quoted in Buck-Morss, ‘Cinema Screen as Prosthesis’, p. 51. 80 Buck-Morss, ‘Cinema Screen as Prosthesis’, p. 56. 81 Ibid.

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The pleasure offered by both re-enactments, theatrical and filmic, is connected to their ability to enact the intensity of revolutionary energy. This is what enabled the spectators and participants of each to experience and realise the ‘pure’ revolutionary event, the revolutionary mass, revolutionary energy and ideals of the new post- Revolutionary society. Both re-enactments gave the mass form and organised popular energy to facilitate spectators and performers to become enthusiastic post- Revolutionary citizens who understood, embraced and cultivated the dynamic energy required to grow and maintain the ideology of their emerging reality. It was in doing so that both re-enactments not only changed how we understand the historical storming of the Winter Palace, but effectively changed the event itself. October and The Storming of the Winter Palace were able to be more intense than the historical event and this heightened intensity in both facilitated performer’s and spectator’s identification with the historical event.

What does it mean that already in 1927 we have a cinematic re-enactment based on the documentation of a theatrical re-enactment? That already in 1920 we have a theatrical re-enactment inspired by cinema? That the historical event was ultimately enacted at these intersections? As Bill Schwarz argues, our experience and understanding of historical events have become unquestionably and fundamentally mediated.82 The revolutionary event under examination in this chapter has provided a particularly heightened example through which to explore this phenomenon. Furthermore, the authorisation of a re-enactment always takes place not only in relation to the performative and rhetorical devices it deploys to depict an event, but also in relation to the cross-referencing of other texts and discourses. October re- enacted not only a historical event, but also a well-documented theatrical re- enactment. Just as historical events are fundamentally mediated, so are their re- enactments. This applies to theatrical as much as filmic re-enactments and has only continued to intensify since the release of October in 1927. The study of re- enactments offers us a way of pursuing the nature of this fundamental mediation of events through a form that itself participates in their remediation.

82 See ‘Media times/ historical times’, pp. 93-105.

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Chapter 3

Re-enactment and Researched Detail in the Biopic

The imprint of a moment, a person, an object, a movement could now be detached and circulated, repeated without perceptible difference far from its original time and place. Both the intimacy of that relation to a unique and contingent reality, and the detachability and circulation of its representation, have had enormous cultural consequences.

Mary Ann Doane1

In Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, Philip Rosen argues that the use of researched detail across a wide range of film genres has been a feature of cinema since its beginnings: ‘[C]laims to accurate knowledge and authenticity of the filmed detail have traversed cinema history at least since Méliès.’2 Researched details – which emerge out of the research undertaken in preparation for a film and are based in securing the referential claims of fictional narrative – constitutes one of two main forms of referentiality associated with cinema. The other is based on documenting reality and cultivated from the idea that a trace of the pro-filmic field is inscribed into the photochemical image. It is built on the idea that photochemical celluloid

1 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction’, differences 18.2 (2007), 1-6 (p. 2). 2 Change Mummified, p. 149.

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enters into physical contact with a moment in time and that its imprint on the film image remains as a form of testimony to that past interaction. As I argued in the Introduction, it is this latter view of referentiality that has primarily occupied film theory debates.

Researched detail represents an under-investigated aspect of referentiality in film that is secured by the labour of research, rather than by the evidential status of the image. Emphasising the tension between these two main forms of referentiality, Rosen asks two, related questions: What is implied when a mass medium whose dominant product is fictional narrative makes this element of referentiality [researched detail] a necessary component of its production processes? On the other hand, what is implied when a medium that is supposedly indexical requires such labour to secure its referentiality?3

Focussing on the tensions and contradictions between these two forms of referentiality, he suggests that the labour required to secure the referentiality of the researched detail calls into question, even contradicts the ‘supposedly indexical’ status of the film medium.

The historical film and its sub-genres have been heavily invested in the labour of research. Explicit emphasis on the labour of producing pro-filmic detail became pre- eminent in the historical films of the Hollywood studio era between 1920 and 1960. According to Rosen, research departments became integrated into the Hollywood studios’ division of labour during the 1920s, servicing a broad range of film genres and production roles.4 For the studio-era historical films, [r]esearch departments and researchers were consulted throughout the filmmaking process by almost every ‘creative’ specialisation in the studio division of labour, including screenwriters and art directors, about what kinds of objects and details could be included in the film.5

Rosen therefore defines the historical film precisely in terms of its relationship to researched detail, constituted by the combination of

3 Change Mummified, p. 154. 4 Change Mummified, p. 111. 5 Change Mummified, p. 149.

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a ‘true story’ (or elements of a ‘true story’) plus enough profilmic detail to designate a period recognisable as significantly ‘historical’, that is, as signifying a generally accepted minimum of referential pastness.6

Like Rosen, Vivian Sobchack and George Custen also draw attention to the way in which, at the height of the Hollywood studio era, the press materials for the studios’ historical films, including biopics, emphasised the lengths to which research departments would go. A Warner Brothers promotion for The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) quantifies the astonishing amount of research undertaken: ‘[T]he department perused over 1,750 books, assembled 2,345 photographs, and interviewed 448 individuals’.7 And the press book for the historical epic How the West Was Won (1962) emphasises the extravagant investment in the labour of location experts, the number of photographs taken, the use of ‘homespun yarn’, as well as information about the detailed research that preceded decisions about the number of animals and extras that should be employed. All this effort was undertaken in the name of ‘authenticity’.8 Custen argues that during the Hollywood studio era, promoting a biopic ‘as an epic of research was key in differentiating the biopic genre from other studio fare’.9 Authenticity was no less vital to the success of the biopic: ‘Extravagant research efforts became, for the biopic, a way of reassuring consumers that every effort had been expended to bring them true history in the guise of spectacle.’10

Traditionally it has also been explicit investment in the theatrical dimensions of the pro-filmic field, namely mise-en-scène, that has secured the re-enactment’s claims to historical accuracy, claims that are usually made by putting the researched detail (furniture, tools, weaponry, clothing etc.) in front of the camera. In this, researched detail in the re-enactment and in the historical film has a longstanding relationship to a kind of indexical trace not based on the medium-specific qualities of

6 Change Mummified, p. 178. 7 Quoted in Change Mummified, p. 157. 8 Vivian Sobchack, ‘“Surge and Splendor”: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic’, Representations, 29 (Winter 1990), 24-49 (p. 29). 9 George Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 41. 10 Custen, Bio/Pics, p. 35.

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photochemical celluloid. For Rosen, primary sources, which became institutionalised into the discipline of history in the nineteenth century, are ‘critically authenticated survivals from the past’ that are also ‘produced by the actuality of the past’ and therefore constitute a ‘species’ of the indexical trace.11

Neither the indexical trace nor the researched detail is static. Their manifestations, associations and conceptualisations are historically specific and have been shaped by frequent changes in the media landscape. Researched details have played a different role at different stages of film’s development, heavily influenced by film’s relationship to the development of other media forms. As Doane says in the epigraph to this chapter, Peirce’s original conceptualisation of the indexical trace has been transformed not only by the recording capacities of the photochemical process, but also by the circulatory capacities of technical media.12 She argues that it was the dominance of photography and cinema during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that first facilitated this detachability and circulatability of an imprint. Since then, of course, television, DVD and the internet have accelerated and diversified this circulation. Each of these two main forms of referentiality has also been shaped by transformations in the other. With the increasing detachability of the indexical trace, the re-enactment of traces of persons and events that have been widely circulated far from their original time and place has become a means of making referential claims.

My focus in this chapter is on relationships between re-enactment and researched detail in the biopic, one of the most popular sub-genres of the historical film and distinguished by its explicit emphasis on depicting the life of a historical person, past or present, whose real name is used.13 Because of its investment in researching and performing the details and material traces of a life, the biopic summons the re- enactment. The authenticity of the biopic’s fictional world depends upon a convincing re-enactment of events that are well-known to its audiences. Acts of referencing across different media and genres have therefore always been central to

11 Change Mummified, pp. 109, 112. 12 ‘Indexicality: Trace and Sign’, p. 2. 13 Custen, pp. 5-6.

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the ways in which the biopic makes its referential claims. The referencing of historical documents that are already in moving-image form has intensified in the biopic, shaped by the capacities of media technologies, from DVD to online streaming to internet downloads, to readily circulate moving-imagery.

The cross-referencing of extra-textual research materials is instrumental in shaping viewing relations to re-enactments. Re-enactments reference pre-existing accounts of the events they depict: news reports, police reports, coroner’s reports, court transcripts, testimony, interviews, biographies, paintings, drawings, photographs and video, film and television footage. Details drawn from these different accounts are put to work as authenticating devices for re-enactments, signalling their investment in, and claims to, historical accuracy. That the documentation of a whole range of events, both public and private, is becoming ever more accessible in the current media environment impacts directly on the relationships between researched details and the re-enactment. As our capacity to both document and circulate photographs, film, television and video footage (as well as reports, transcripts, artworks and other materials) grows, re-enactments are increasingly tied to acts of referencing across media. In the current media environment, what certifies a re-enactment as historically accurate is not so much the events it re-enacts, but their media representations, making the most frequently re-enacted events those that have already been well documented or widely circulated in the public domain as film and media events. This is because the re-enactment of a well-known or accessible media representation helps a re-enactment to declare itself as the performance of a pre- existing event, the veracity of which can be easily measured.

With a primary focus on incorporating replicas of details uncovered in the research process, the referentiality of the re-enactment and the biopic typically emerges from an emphasis on verisimilitude – on the skill with which the filmmakers have manufactured a pro-filmic field that resembles verifiable details of a known event or historical period – but the different formations that researched details take in the re- enactments employed in the biopic also conjure more complex relationships between re-enactments and their research materials. In the biopic, the actor portraying the

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main ‘subject’ is a central site for the accumulation of researched details: not only the settings, props and costumes that s/he inhabits, or even the details of their resemblance, manufactured or actual, to the real person s/he is portraying, but also the actions that s/he undertakes. All are part of the pro-filmic field and its mise-en- scène that must embody and exhibit vital researched details of the life being represented, if the biopic is to be deemed authentic. It is this explicit emphasis and reliance on performance and action that make biopics especially rich in alliances between re-enactment and researched detail.

Researched details in contemporary biopics are the product of two researching traditions that were institutionalised by the Hollywood research department in the studio era. One is the tradition of drawing on details brought to light in research interviews conducted especially for the film, interviews with historical experts, eyewitnesses to particular historical events and periods, and also family, friends and associates of the ‘subject’. The other is also the tradition drawing on materials discovered in archives, material provided by historical experts, eyewitnesses, friends, colleagues and family members or else in media reports, police reports, coroner’s reports and other bureaucratic documentation. In relation to this second category, a further distinction can be made between two kinds of researched details: those that are based on unique access to documents, experts and eye-witnesses that are otherwise unavailable to general audiences, and those based on cross-referencing readily accessible documents already in circulation. Both date back to the pre-studio era and were employed during the studio era. Today, of course, much documentation previously difficult to access is available at the researcher’s fingertips and also available to the wider public. The increasing availability of archive materials and audio-visual documentation has meant that the re-enactments employed in the biopic manage an increasingly complex set of referential, textual, temporal and spectatorial relations between document and diegesis.

Even with the wide circulation of audio-visual materials in the current media environment, the authenticity of a researched detail is not always self-evident to an audience and can often only be ‘seen’ thanks to promotional materials that draw

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particular attention to it. Though in many cases audiences can now identify the researched detail, and access the researchers’ sources, for themselves, it remains one of the functions of promotional materials, including press kits, advertising, media interviews and film reviews to do it for them. Nowadays the discourse of research and researching detail in the marketing of biopics occurs not only prior to and during a film’s initial theatrical release (as was the case with the classical Hollywood cinema), but also subsequently through the work of the DVD extras, where directors’ commentaries, documentaries and additional interviews with filmmakers, cast, crew, friends, family and historical consultants can explain and alert audiences to research and research material.

Four Contemporary Biopics To illustrate these issues in detail I want to investigate the relationship between researched detail and re-enactment in four contemporary biopics. Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008) depicts the life of activist Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), California’s first openly gay elected official, who was assassinated in 1978 during his first term in office. Photographer Anton Corbijn’s directorial debut, Control (2007), portrays the personal and professional life of Ian Curtis (Sam Riley), from his decision to become the lead singer of Joy Division to his suicide in 1980, at the age of 23. Patty Jenkins’s Monster (2003) dramatises the life of Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron), a prostitute in Daytona Beach, Florida, who, after a series of high-profile trials, was convicted of killing six of her clients and executed by lethal injection in 2002. Finally, Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999) depicts the life of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank), who in 1993 left home for Falls City, Nebraska, found new friends and fell in love before his transgender identity was uncovered and he was murdered.

These four films not only re-enact, but also interrogate media representations of the lives they depict, investigating the ways in which their subjects’ fame circulated and what it represented. In the case of Aileen Wuornos and Brandon Teena, it was the media that first brought their lives to public attention. By contrast to Harvey Milk and Ian Curtis, whose careers required it, public attention was not sought by

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Wuornos and Teena. It was Wuornos’s arrest on the charge of multiple murders that led to her becoming a public figure. And only after he had been murdered did Teena achieve celebrity status, quickly becoming the focus of public debate about transgender-hate crimes. ‘Certain careers and types of people become the prime focus of public curiosity in each generation’, asserts Custen, ‘and the biopic reflects these shifts in the ‘public notion of fame’.14 Custen argues that fame is not created through a standard or stable set of practices but a shifting set of relationships tied to communication technologies that have continued to broaden and transform the category of fame itself.15

In the same critic’s view it was made-for-TV biopics, broadcast from 1971 onwards, that first drew inspiration from tabloid news and created a different kind of famous person, ‘everyday people to whom unusual things had happened’.16 Not that Wuornos and Teena could readily be described in this way. A lesbian prostitute and a transgender male, these people existed ‘on the margins’, both of them outcasts from their homes and victims of violence. Monster and Boys Don’t Cry are used as a means of ‘getting inside’ the lives of people who were vilified and abused for failing to adhere to the stereotypes and expectations prescribed to their gender. Patty Jenkins made Monster in part out of a desire to challenge way in which the mainstream media sensationalised Wuornos’s life, especially their labelling of her as ‘the first female serial killer’. The title of the biopic refers to the image the media made of her.17

14 Bio/Pics, pp. 6-7. 15 George Custen, ‘The Mechanical Life in the Age of Human Reproduction: American Biopics, 1916-1980’, Biography, 23.1 (Winter 2000), 127-59 (p.137). 16 Bio/Pics, p. 215. 17 See Patty Jenkins, ‘Interview with Patty Jenkins and BT’ and ‘The Making of Monster Featurette’, Monster, DVD commentary (Dej Productions, 2003). In this respect, Jenkins approach is similar to that of Walter Wanger and Robert Wise who made I Want to Live! (1958) about the life, crimes and execution of Barbara Graham and were critical of her vilification and exploitation by the law and by the media. Dennis Bingham describes this film as emphasising ‘the complex humanity of a woman whom the press caricatured in her own time’ in ‘“I Do Want to Live!”: Female Voices, Male Discourse, and Hollywood Biopics Author(s)’, Cinema Journal, 38.3 (Spring 1999), 3-26 (p. 6).

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Control and Milk also reveal the ‘private person’ behind the ‘public figure’, though are less anxious to ask why Curtis and Milk refused to obey gender stereotypes. Control instead uses the biopic to explore the mythology of Joy Division, a band who, Corbijn says, were ‘documented in black-and-white by every single photographer apart from a few people who shot them live in colour’. Corbijn argues that ‘[t]he whole collective memory of Joy Division is in black-and-white,’18 and he claims never to have been able to find a colour photograph of the band.19 Accordingly, he shot his Control in black-and-white to reference this visual iconography and the circulation of the band’s image in the media. Milk deals with its subject as a public figure, focussing on the values and ideals he stood for, primarily in order to ‘revive’ and restore to popularity a significant figure of the 1970s. It incorporates many re-enactments of television appearances Milk made during his campaigns in the 1970s that highlight his courage, conviction and vision.

The four lives depicted in these biopics had already been widely circulated at different times in books, photographs, television coverage and news reports. When each of the films was released, feature documentaries about the four lives in question were also either currently in circulation or had recently been produced and screened. More than twenty years before the release of Milk, Rob Epstein won the 1985 Academy Award for Best Documentary for The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). Telling Pictures also released a new ‘collectors’ edition’ DVD of Epstein’s film to mark the twentieth anniversary of the documentary in 2004. Grant Gee’s documentary, Joy Division (2007), was released in the same year as Corbijn’s Control. Nick Broomfield’s first documentary about the exploitation of Wuornos, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, was released in 1992 and his second documentary, about her life on death row, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), was released in the United States just a few months before Monster appeared on the nations’ cinema screens. Lastly, the Teddy Award-winning documentary The Brandon Teena Story, directed by Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdóttir was released in 1998, while Boys Don’t Cry was in production.

18 Anton Corbjin, ‘Director’s Commentary’, Control, DVD commentary (Madman Entertainment, 2007). 19 Ibid.

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Each of these documentaries combine archive materials that were or had been in wide circulation with other documents that were less widely circulated and otherwise unavailable to general audiences. And their commercial circulation on DVD has served to increase the availability of the documentation they incorporate. Furthermore, for each documentary each filmmaker recorded their own footage, especially research interviews conducted with friends, family and colleagues or with eyewitnesses to particular events in the subject’s life. Of course, these documentaries have a very different relationship to research and researching detail from that of their biopic counterparts because they can incorporate research materials including interviews, widely circulated and less well known audio-visual documentation directly into their narrative structure. When the biopics want to incorporate this same material into their dramatic worlds, they tend to re-enact it. The ways in which documentaries and biopics evaluate and cross-reference their documentation therefore establish very different kinds of referential and temporal relationships.

Each of the four documentaries serves as a reference point for the re-enactments performed in their associated biopics, but each biopic refers to and draws on its respective documentary in a different way. The differences are attributable to a variety of factors. These include the degree of popularity and level of critical attention the documentaries and the biopics received; the degree to which the materials used in the documentary were already in wide circulation; the significance of the new materials researched by, or created for, the documentary; the length of time that had elapsed between the subject’s life and its representation in documentary and dramatic form; whether the documentary was released before – or concurrently with – the biopic; whether or not either film had been circulated or promoted in relation to the other; and whether or not either film explicitly acknowledges the other. All of these factors shape the kinds of referential and temporal relationships that researched details take on in the re-enactments performed in each of the biopics.

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Acknowledgement, Ambivalence and Cross-Promotion The closing credits for Milk begin: ‘Special thanks to the Academy Award-winning film The Times of Harvey Milk for its enormous contribution to the making of this movie. And to Rob Epstein’, thereby not only making clear and unequivocal acknowledgement of its debt to, but also inviting dialogue with, The Times of Harvey Milk. The statement also implies that the makers of the biopic had a working relationship with the documentary’s director, Rob Epstein, who made a personal contribution to the biopic independently of his film. Such acknowledgement is only proper, given Milk’s heavy reliance on the research materials uncovered and collected by The Times of Harvey Milk and given that Milk re-enacts many of the events in it.

Epstein and his team began making their documentary while Milk was still alive. It was released just six years after his assassination, a mixture of their own video and audio recordings of events in his life and television archive material; interviews conducted with colleagues and friends after Milk’s death; photographs they found or were given; and even the will that Milk had recorded, a tape of which was only entrusted to them by one of his friends as the documentary was nearing completion.20 Milk includes re-enactments based on all these different kinds of documentation. It includes re-enactments based on Epstein’s own video and audio recordings of Milk’s public debates and speeches, his participation in the 1978 Gay Freedom Parade in San Francisco and the candlelight march that followed his assassination. It also re-enacts verbatim some of Milk’s tape-recorded will and many of the speeches, debates and interviews contained in the television footage uncovered by and incorporated into The Times of Harvey Milk.

Neither in the promotion of, nor in the credit sequence for, Boys Don’t Cry is there any explicit reference to the film’s relationship with the documentary The Brandon Teena Story. The DVD commentary for the film emphasises Kimberly Peirce’s independent research efforts, reporting that she ‘set off on a five-year journey

20 Rob Epstein, ‘Director’s Commentary’, The Times of Harvey Milk, DVD commentary for 20th anniversary collector’s edition (Telling Pictures, 2004).

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researching the life of Brandon Teena’.21 Boys Don’t Cry and The Brandon Teena Story were being made at the same time, and draw on much of the same research materials and subjects, but each is the result of separate research. Boys Don’t Cry re- enacts the tape-recorded police interview in which Teena reports his rape, for example, the audio of which is also included in The Brandon Teena Story.

Control was released in the same year as the documentary Joy Division. Both screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, the Weinstein Company having acquired Control for distribution before the festival program was announced. After Joy Division screened at Toronto, it too was sold to the Weinstein Company. This coincidence did not go unnoticed by the press, with coverage of the two films often appearing together in the mainstream media.22 Control re-enacts a combination of television appearances, film footage and photography from the band’s live performances as well as referencing the photographic iconography of Joy Division. The documentary weaves many segments from this extensive collection of television and film footage of Joy Division’s performances, as well as all the iconic photographs of the band that first circulated in music magazines, with interviews conducted for the documentary with remaining band members, friends, family, colleagues, photographers, filmmakers and music commentators. Control’s principal literary source is Deborah Curtis’s 1995 biography Touching from a Distance, about her life with Ian Curtis.23 Joy Division also incorporates quotes from Touching from a Distance, but the documentary is based primarily on the interviews its makers conducted specially for this purpose. Credited as both a photographer of the band and the director of Control , Corbijn appears as one of the interviewees. He discusses, as do other photographers interviewed for the documentary, his experience of photographing Joy Division and the nature of his personal relationship to the band.

21 Kimberly Peirce, ‘Featurette’, Boys Don’t Cry, DVD commentary (Twentieth Century Fox, 1999). 22 See, for example, Dennis Lim, ‘The Cult of the Lads from Manchester’, New York Times, 7 October 2007, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/movies/07lim.html (accessed 18 February 2011). 23 Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).

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Monster has an ambivalent relationship to Broomfield’s two documentaries about Aileen Wuornos, one of which preceded, while the other followed fast upon, the film’s release. In the DVD commentary on Monster, Jenkins describes herself as unique in her ability to create a sympathetic portrait of a ‘monster’, one that delves deeply into her story.24 She makes no acknowledgement of Broomfield’s earlier, 1992 documentary, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, which represented Wuornos as the victim of media frenzy and deals head-on with the grotesque manner in which Wuornos was exploited by those whose object was merely financial, desperate to sell the woman’s story to the media. Eleven years later Broomfield’s second documentary, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, released in the same year as Monster, painted a nuanced and sympathetic portrait, having added to its research materials interviews with the woman’s friends and supporters, focussing on the struggles Wuornos had faced in her childhood. Broomfield also argued vehemently against the execution of Wuornos on the grounds that she could not meet the necessary mental health requirements.

Despite Jenkins’s lack of acknowledgement of Broomfield’s work, both Monster and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer were regularly cross-promoted and discussed together. One of the ways to access Monster is now as a DVD box set with the 2003 documentary. Also, unlike her director, actress Charlize Theron has acknowledged her debt to Broomfield’s documentary in some of the interviews she conducted with the press to promote Monster. In an interview with Carlo Cavagna, for example, she explains: Fortunately enough I had met Nick Broomfield, or ironically enough, maybe six months prior to this movie coming to me. He was telling me he was making a documentary, and then I found out it was about Aileen, and he was still in the editing room. And I called him and I said, ‘I know you're still cutting and you're not ready to show your movie, but I'd love to see any footage you have.’ He sent an early cut of his film.25

24 Patty Jenkins, ‘The Making of Monster Featurette’, Monster, DVD commentary (Dej Productions, 2003). 25 Carlo Cavagna, ‘Interviews: Charlize Theron’, available at, http://www.aboutfilm.com/features/monster/interviews.htm (accessed 18 February 2011).

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Both of Broomfield’s documentaries, especially Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, also became very important for anchoring Theron’s performance as Wuornos in the critical reception of Monster.

Tanya Horeck argues that two freeze-frame shots of Wuornos, her head tilted back and her handcuffs framing her face, which were extensively used in the promotion of Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, are central to the visual iconography on which Monster draws. Many scenes in the documentary, she goes on, of ‘Wuornos raging against the world, shouting to reporters as she is bundled into cars’ also played ‘a pivotal role in the reception of Monster’.26 In particular, Horeck points to a review of the film by Roger Ebert, in which he claims that [t]here were times, indeed, when I perceived no significant difference between the woman in the documentary and the one in the feature film. Theron has internalised and empathised with Wuornos so successfully that to experience the real woman is only to understand more completely how remarkable Theron’s performance is.27

The critical reception of both Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer and Monster became ‘reliant not only on how they relate to actuality but also how they relate to each other.’28 Not only is the ‘“real” Wuornos found on Broomfield’s documentary scrutinised to see how the performance of the stunning actress in Monster matches up’ but also, vice versa, ‘Wuornos is found to be as good or less good and either more or less real than Theron.’29

This interplay between absence and presence in the game between subject and performer is common in the historical film, but especially so in the biopic, which has constantly to manage the tension that is generated by a performing body whose

26 Tanya Horeck, ‘From Documentary to Drama: Capturing Aileen Wuornos’, Screen 48.2 (Summer 2007), 141-59 (p. 147). Horeck also points out that on 30 April 2005, Channel 4 in the UK screened Monster and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer as a double bill, explicitly foregrounding their relationship to each other. 27 ‘Monster: Theron makes ordinary movie extraordinary’, quoted in ‘From Documentary to Drama’, p. 151. 28 Horeck, ‘From Documentary to Drama’, p. 142. 29 Horeck, ‘From Documentary to Drama’, pp. 150, 153-4.

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presence cannot help but signal the absence of the historical body it represents.30 It is a tension that in the current media environment is bound to make itself felt increasingly strongly, as the circulation and documentation of our public and personal lives multiples—and will continue to exist in accessible form long after we die.

Indeed, for Epstein, The Times of Harvey Milk is precisely that, a documentary that gives Harvey Milk and his message an afterlife, enabling him and it to circulate and touch new audiences: ‘Harvey Milk lives in the film now.’31 Or, as Mary Ann Doane has written of the technically reproducible image more generally: ‘The imprint of a moment, a person, an object, a movement could now be detached and circulated, repeated without perceptible difference far from its original time and place.’32 This is certainly how Epstein’s documentary worked for Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the screenplay for Milk: In one speech in [The Times of Harvey Milk] he [Milk] says ‘Somewhere out there there’s a kid from San Antonio, Texas—which is where I’m from— who’s going to hear that a gay man was elected to public office and it’s going to give him hope.’ And I remember just losing it. I broke down crying because, you know, I was very much that kid. That’s probably the moment that I thought, ‘We’ve got to get this story back out there.’33

In this interaction with The Times of Harvey Milk, Black felt personally hailed by Milk’s speech many years after it was delivered. It is this connection with Milk through the documentary that prompted Black’s desire to ‘revive’ Milk in a biopic that would itself facilitate a new circulation of Milk’s presence and message.

The Biopic and the Performing Body As I indicated earlier, the biopic’s focus on the life of a particular historical figure makes the actor portraying that figure the key site for the accumulation of the pro- filmic researched details that lend authenticity to the film. Ivone Margulies suggests

30 See Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much’, Screen, 19.2 (1978), 41-53. 31 Epstein, ‘Director’s Commentary’, The Times of Harvey Milk. 32 Doane, ‘Indexicality: Trace and Sign’, p. 2. 33 Dustin Lance Black, ‘Hollywood Comes to San Francisco’, Milk, DVD commentary (Universal, 2009).

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that the re-enactment’s relationship to indexicality is activated by retracing an event or series of actions: The corroborating value of reenactment does depend on our knowledge that these particular feet walked these particular steps. But it is the intentional and fictional retracing that enacted lends to these faces and places an authenticating aura. This aura, the indexical value of reenactment, is present but at a remove. It is activated but only through a doubling, a replaying that foregrounds the events’ most ‘evident’ particulars.34

This analysis of the re-enactment’s relationship to the indexical trace applies especially to the re-enactments employed in the biopic. Here it is the actor’s job to re-perform the life of a real person, resurrecting their absent body and its traces by retracing the actions that person undertook.

Inevitably, actors in the biopic will perform re-enactments of well-documented actions, but also, more broadly, they will re-perform the ‘bodily events’ and behaviours that characterise the historical persons they depict. The wide circulation of the documentation of each of the subjects represented in the four biopics discussed here enabled the actors not only to rehearse, but also to certify the authenticity of their performances. Audiences and critics can easily test and verify the veracity of their re-enactments of the unique individual bodily gestures that characterise the historical figure they are depicting.

Significantly, Milk, Curtis and Wuornos all had very distinctive physical gestures, mannerisms and intonations that were extensively and very well documented. The television, video and film footage of them enabled Sean Penn, Sam Riley and Charlize Theron respectively to research, rehearse and also demonstrate their successful embodiment of the unique actions, behaviours and gestures of their ‘real’, deceased counterparts in virtuoso displays of pro-filmic researched detail.

The ability to measure these actors’ performances against the behaviour of their subjects of course contributed to the authenticity of each biopic. And there can be little doubt that that authenticity in their performance of the unique actions and

34 ‘Exemplary Bodies’, p. 220.

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gestures of their subjects contributed significantly to the critical reception given to the actors’ work. Theron’s portrayal of Aileen Wuornos won her the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Monster in 2004. Three years later, Riley’s Curtis in Control won him the British Independent Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer. And in 2008 Penn’s recreation of Harvey Milk earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. And incidentally, adding to the film’s conviction, Chloë Sevigny’s portrayal of Lana Tisdel, Brandon Teena’s girlfriend, in Boys Don’t Cry earned the actress an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 2000. Tisdel is a central figure in the documentary The Brandon Teena Story, in which she appears frequently in interviews. Sevigny successfully re-enacts the unique mannerisms, actions, behaviour, gestures and intonations of Tisdel (as well as in her brief appearances on the television news coverage of Brandon Teena’s murder, some of which is also incorporated into The Brandon Teena Story). Sevigny’s skill matches Theron’s performance of Wuornos in her successful embodiment of researched details that make the material traces of Tisdel perform for the biopic. In this respect the critical reception of Sevigny’s performance was tied to the recent release of The Brandon Teena Story.

Although there was considerably less footage of Teena than of Wuornos, Milk, Curtis and Tisdel, Hilary Swank also won an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in Boys Don’t Cry in 2000. In the absence of video and television footage, the sources upon which Swank was obliged to rely for her re-enactment of Teena were still photographs made available by friends and family members and subsequently circulated widely in the media reports about his murder. Julianne Pidduck notes that the close-up in the opening scene of Boys Don’t Cry, in which Brandon looks at himself in the mirror, both positions the audience in a traditional relationship of identification and simultaneously ‘rubs up against the residue of photographs widely reproduced in news reports, on the internet, or in the documentary The Brandon Teena Story’, because it mimics the framing of another

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photo of Brandon Teena frequently used in media reports.35 And one of the photographs that Brandon carries in his duffle bag in the film is actually of Hilary Swank dressed as a gangster in imitation of a photograph of the ‘real’ Brandon Teena that appeared frequently in media reports after his death. This demonstrates the high level of attention paid to the incorporation and re-enactment of specific researched details in the mise-en-scène of Boys Don’t Cry.

The success of Swank’s performance hinges primarily on her ability, in her cultivation of Teena’s mannerism and gestures, to pass as male, a feat that marked Teena himself as a successful performer. This is a double disappearance because Teena himself first ‘performed’ that radical disappearance of his female body into a male identity. While the revelation of his ‘performance’ was followed by his rape and murder, Swank’s successful transformation through performance earned her accolades. Likewise, in the case of Monster, the remarkable transformation of Theron into Wuornos—in which the actress’s skill was assisted by conscientious weight gain, prosthetics, sculpted teeth, elaborate liquid latex make up and airbrushing—was reinforced by Theron’s reappearance as the glamorous Hollywood star on the award circuit after the film was released. This tension between presence and absence at work on the bodies of these two actresses drew attention to and helped to promote the authenticity and accuracy of both biopics.

At the same time, the promotion of Monster emphasised not only the contrast in the physical appearance of Theron and Wuornos, but the similarities in their personal lives. Theron saw her mother shoot dead her physically abusive alcoholic father in self-defence.36 Hilary Swank’s ‘trailer trash’ origins, growing up poor in a mobile home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, have featured prominently in the promotion of Boys Don’t Cry,37 Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), which

35 Julianne Pidduck, ‘Risk and Queer Spectatorship’, Screen, 41.1 (Spring 2001), 97- 103 (p. 98). 36 For example, see ‘Charlize Theron profile’, available at www.hellomagazine.com/profiles/charlizetheron, (accessed 18 February 2011) and quoted in ‘From Documentary to Drama’, p. 149. 37 For example, see Marsha Lederman, ‘The Power of the Trailer Park’, The Globe and Mail, 27 October 2007, available at

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is based on the life of Maggie Fitzgerald, a working-class woman who tried to turn her life around through her boxing career, and more recently, Conviction (Tony Goldwyn, 2010), in which Swank plays Betty Anne Waters, a high-school dropout and single mother who put herself through law school to try to overturn her brother’s unjust murder conviction.38

‘Star images are always extensive, multimedia, intertextual’, writes Richard Dyer, and particular elements of a star’s image will predominate at particular moments in that star’s career.39 Emphasising the close proximity of Theron’s and Swank’s experiences to those of the women they were portraying, the publicity of Monster and Boys Don’t Cry sought to imply that the actresses had the capacity to be touched emotionally by the lives of their subjects and a strong empathetic connection to their experiences. These suggestions were designed to promote the idea that Theron and Swank could re-enact the struggles of their subjects authentically, contributing to the veracity of each biopic.40

The tension between presence and absence so strongly embodied by Theron and Swank is less central to Milk, where Sean Penn remains much more himself, despite his ability to take on Milk’s distinctive mannerisms. Penn still ‘revives’ Milk, but does not, in the process, disappear and reappear in the ways that Theron and Swank do. By contrast to Theron, Swank and Penn, Sam Riley was chosen to resurrect Curtis primarily because of the uncanny physical resemblance he bore to his subject

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/article792138.ece (accessed18 February 2011). 38 For example, see Martyn Palmer, ‘“I Know What it’s Like to be the Outsider”: Hilary Swank on her Journey from Trailer Park to Tinseltown’, The Daily Mail, 7 January 2011, available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article- 1341187/Hilary-Swank-journey-trailer-park-Tinseltown-I-know-like-outsider.html (accessed 18 February 2011). 39 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: BFI, 1986), p. 3. 40 Suggestions of a close proximity between the experiences of star performers and the experiences of their subjects have a history stretching back to the studio era. As Dennis Bingham identifies in his analysis of I Want to Live!, Susan Hayworth’s star persona also emphasised her strong-willed, working class, non-nonsense ‘girl-from- Brooklyn’ background in the promotion her roles including as Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! See ‘I Do Want to Live!’, pp. 12-6.

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and precisely because he was not a star. ‘When I met him I realised that there was this non-actor-like quality to Sam’, director Corbijn explains. ‘And I felt that if he could bring some of his own personality into the role it would be a more believable way of playing Ian Curtis’.41 Riley’s lesser experience as an actor was understood as an asset that would enable him to bring an authenticity to his performance as Curtis and that he could disappear into the role in a way that these more well-known and celebrated actors could not.

The performance of Christina Ricci, who plays Wuornos’s girlfriend in Monster, was not recognised in the way that that of Theron or Sevigny were. Ricci plays a character called Selby, who looks nothing like Wuornos’s actual girlfriend, Tyria Moore. Unlike Tisdel, who co-operated with both the documentary and the biopic about Teena, Moore did not want to participate or be depicted in either: in order to dissociate herself from Wuornos and avoid incrimination, she had collaborated with the police. Accordingly, she is hardly visible in any of Broomfield’s documentary footage or the television footage of Wuornos. The main television footage that exists of her shows her as a witness against Wuornos in court. Ricci’s performance as Selby was therefore not substantiated or measured by the documentation, participation or association of Moore. Her performance did not require the same kinds of research and rehearsal as Theron because her performance was not required to cultivate authenticating and measurable pro-filmic researched details of her character within the film.

Television Events, Audio Events The one specific re-enactment of a well-documented event in the Wuornos-Moore relationship in which Ricci does participate is the tape-recorded telephone call that Moore made, in collaboration with the police, to try to get Wuornos to confess. The resultant conversation was played in the courtroom at Wuornos’ trial, and television footage of this is included in both Broomfield’s documentaries. The events related to the phone conversation are re-enacted on two occasions in Monster. The actual conversation (for which there is only audio documentation) is re-performed, with

41 ‘Director’s Commentary’, Control, DVD Commentary.

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Selby in a hotel room, surrounded by police, and Wuornos on a prison pay phone in police custody. Later, Wuornos’s emotional breakdown in the courtroom is also re- performed. In Ricci’s performance as Selby, she repeats a number of the words and phrases spoken, as well as the emotions and sentiment expressed, by Moore in the actual phone call, saying, ‘They’ve been up to see my parents asking all kinds of questions’ and ‘You’re going to let me go down for something you did’. The re- enactment of this exchange on the phone, however, is central to signalling the veracity of Monster rather than Ricci’s performance as Selby. At the same time, this scene does conjure some tension between Moore’s absence from the film and Ricci’s presence as Selby, because it suggests that Selby does stand in for Moore, even if the differences between them are significant.

While listening to the recorded conversation as it replayed in the courtroom, the ‘real’ Wuornos broke down and wept in front of the cameras, an incident that is included in both Broomfield’s documentaries and was also on television in the United States at the time of her trial. What is more, Jenkins has described how watching Wuornos weep during the playing of this tape was the television event that first touched her emotionally and inspired her to make Monster.42 Jenkins writes a re-enactment of this event into the film to validate her own empathetic response to Wuornos and to encourage the audience of the biopic to recognise precisely what this television footage made her feel in the first place – that there is a different, more sympathetic ‘monster’. While Jenkins experienced this breakdown as a television event, Broomfield’s documentaries, available now on DVD, provide an easily available way of accessing the television footage of this event, giving it extra circulation and longevity.

In Monster, Wuornos’s breakdown is more closely connected to Selby visibly identifying Wuornos in the courtroom (in a brief reference to Moore’s own courtroom appearance), than to the playing of the phone conversation. This breakdown is also linked to another set of events: Wuornos’s courtroom outbursts when she receives her death sentences. Her breakdown leads directly into a sequence

42 Patty Jenkins, ‘Interview with Patty Jenkins and BT’, Monster, DVD commentary.

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in which the judge announces her death sentence. The outburst this sentencing provokes in the closing sequences of the film is actually a combination of two such outbursts from Wuornos that were documented by television cameras. The film contrives to treat as one Wuornos’s retorts after receiving her first death sentence about the judge and the members of the court being ‘scumbags’, with the brief statement ‘and may you rot in hell for sending a raped woman to death’, which comes from a much lengthier outburst at a later trial in which she received additional death sentences.

The television footage of both outbursts is played at length in both of Broomfield’s documentaries. In Life and Death of a Serial Killer, which reflects on these events twelve years after they occurred, and as Wuornos waits on death row, they are shown close together as a recap or overview. In the earlier documentary, The Selling of a Serial Killer, they appear further apart. Brought together in Monster, they constitute a final re-enactment that plays an especially important authenticating role in the biopic precisely because the majority of the film depicts Wuornos’s life prior to her arrest. By closing with the courtroom outbursts, Monster links its more fictionalised dramatic world (focused on Wuornos’ romantic relationship with her lover) to the well-documented and well-circulated events in Wuornos’s life. This helps to position Monster as an in-depth insight into Wuornos’s personal life before the media frenzy surrounding her began.

Only one specific re-enactment is incorporated early on in Monster, that of Richard Mallory’s rape of Wuornos. Mallory was her first victim, and the scene is based on the television footage of Wuornos’s courtroom testimony, which is included in both Broomfield’s documentaries. In Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, this footage is only about a year old and presented during the lead up to Broomfield successfully obtaining an interview with Wuornos for this documentary. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer was made eleven years later, so considerably more time had elapsed between this testimony and Broomfield’s interviews. The footage of the testimony is inserted almost like a flashback immediately following an interview

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with a much-aged, wearied and more cynical Wuornos who has since spent twelve years on death row.

The connection to this courtroom testimony in Monster is not self-evident because the giving of the testimony is not re-enacted. In Boys Don’t Cry, Teena’s similarly charged testimony is itself re-enacted and frames the re-enactment of the rape as a flashback. Horeck argues that this emphasis on flashback in Boys Don’t Cry is designed to ‘echo the trauma of the rape itself’.43 It foregrounds the trauma of testifying to police and being obliged to name his female genitalia in violation of his own gender identity, and it connects this with Nissen’s and Lotter’s desire to violate Teena’s gender identity as a motivation for the rape itself. Yet Horeck contends that the rape scene in Monster ‘derives its dramatic charge from its close association with Wuornos’ powerful testimony’.44 Drawing attention to the ways in which the scene emphasises specific details from Wuornos’ testimony, she writes: ‘The testimony is rendered here in visual detail and offered up to us as a truthful spectacle of the real.’45

The re-enactment of the tape-recorded testimony Teena gave to police about his rape is one of the most significant re-enactments in Boys Don’t Cry. The incorporation of this tape-recorded testimony in The Brandon Teena Story provides an accessible source through which to compare Teena’s testimony with Swank’s performance of it. Swank speaks the testimony word-for-word and re-enacts very closely Teena’s delivery in the audio recording. Sheriff Laux, the officer who interviewed Teena at the police station and the other voice on the audio tape, is interviewed in The Brandon Teena Story, commenting on his thoughts, feelings and responses to the events described in the recording. These comments provide us with further material by which to corroborate the authenticity of both Lou Perryman’s performance as the sheriff in Boys Don’t Cry and the re-enactment of the report of the rape. The testimony spoken by Swank also becomes a narrational device for the re-enactment

43 Tanya Horeck, Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 112. 44 ‘From Documentary to Drama’, p. 157. 45 Ibid.

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of the rape which, as I have outlined, is presented as a flashback. The interaction between these two re-enactments, based on the same document, successfully incorporates the audio recording into the dramatic world of Boys Don’t Cry and frames the rape from the point of view of Teena.

Rosen argues that researched details in the historical film are ‘always hybridised with some degree of narrativized diegesis’.46 A researched detail embodies a hybridised temporality because it both ‘claims to have its own previously documentable “reality”, that of researchable historiography’, but is also organised according to the ‘virtual time’ created by the narrative hierarchies of the fictional world. As a result, the researched detail manifests a complex referential and temporal tension by being able to ‘simultaneously propose some extra supplement of referential truth, but one that can only be signified as diegesis’.47 This is especially apparent in the ways that the re-enactments of rape are constructed and incorporated in Monster and Boys Don’t Cry.

The tension between documented reality and narrative diegesis is also played out in the strategies that Milk and Control employ to re-enact television appearances by the ‘real’ Milk and Curtis. Both films prioritise such researched details that can be easily accommodated into the narrative events they create. Milk re-enacts many of the television news reports that were sourced by and incorporated into The Times of Harvey Milk. The primary value of these reports for both Milk and The Times of Harvey Milk is as media events. The documentary filmmakers chose to incorporate an array of archived television news reports into The Times of Harvey Milk because they wanted to give their audience an impression of the public reception of the events of Milk’s life and death at the time that these events were occurring. The emphasis on television news reports in The Times of Harvey Milk also draws attention to the idea that, as Milk’s speeches, participation in debates and press conferences became more regularly recorded and widely circulated, many of the

46 Change Mummified, p. 183. 47 Rosen, Change Mummified, p. 179.

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events that were central to his life in public office, after his election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, were media events.

In order to place it in a narrative context that suits the film, the makers of Milk, repeatedly arrange for the verbatim re-enactment of a piece of television news footage from The Times of Harvey Milk to take place in a location other than that in which the documentary shows it to have happened. The fact that an audio recording of Milk speaking on television is frequently treated as a more important source for re-enactment than the location in which he is speaking it suggests that these television interviews, debates and speeches were more important as media events than as events that took place in a particular time and place. It is the literal repetition of the words that were spoken, and the actions that accompanied them, rather than any more explicit investment in the pro-filmic details of mise-en-scène, that gives the re-enactment its authenticity.

Like Monster, Milk telescopes multiple, quite independent, media events. For example, a public debate between Milk and State Senator Briggs on the subject of gay teachers in schools, which was actually held in Fullerton, Orange County, is combined with a television debate, on the same issue, that took place on KQED/9 and which had included other participants, such as Sally M. Gearhart and Belva Davis, who disappear from the re-enactment. The key moments of the two debates are presented as if they were all in the Briggs-Milk confrontation in Orange County. From the KQED debate, Milk re-enacts Milk’s challenge to Briggs that his statistics on child molestation are a farce, but combines this with a verbatim re-enactment of the speech Milk gave in the Orange County debate challenging Briggs’s assertion that gay teachers are a bad influence on children and would try to convert them to their lifestyle.

Likewise, Control does not strictly re-enact one specific Joy Division television appearance. Instead, the only re-enactment of a television appearance in the film is, according to Corbijn, of ‘a song they played for the BBC and it’s the show that looks

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like the Granada TV show, it’s Tony Wilson’s show’.48 The television footage from both appearances is also used in the Joy Division documentary. Television stations made the footage of both performances available to the actors in Control who scrutinised them both to produce their single re-enactment. It is in the re-enactment of these television appearances that Curtis’s distinctive performance style and dance moves become a test and measure for Riley’s ability to re-enact the gestural movements and energy of Curtis. Careful attention to pro-filmic researched detail is also very important for the sets and props in this re-enactment, despite the mixing of two television appearances, because the re-enactment is specifically designed to look like Tony Wilson’s show.

The current media environment is characterised by moving images circulating more and more frequently across media platforms. Re-enactments work to anchor these circulating images with research that evaluates them and cross-references them with other media representations. The re-enactments in the biopics discussed in this chapter cross-reference audio recordings, television footage, film footage, photographs and documentary films. They do so to validate each biopic’s claims to accuracy and authenticity. But in the process, they also increase the authority of the representation and documentation that they reference. The investigation and evaluation of other media representations is also central to the biopic’s general investment in and claims to historical accuracy. Images are likewise evaluated, cross-referenced and distinguished throughout the research processes undertaken for biopics. In the current media environment, the labour of research and evaluation in the biopic also serves more broadly to position it as a privileged genre for securing the cinema’s referential authority in the face of a transmedia environment that creates intense image flux. As I pointed out at the beginning of the chapter, Rosen suggests that the labour required to fix the referentiality of researched detail casts doubt on the more take-for-granted referentiality of the film medium associated with its status as indexical trace.49

48 ‘Director’s Commentary’, Control, DVD Commentary. 49 Change Mummified, p. 154.

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I have identified how the re-enactment’s relationship to historical remnants, documentation, primary sources and the image as indexical trace is always shifting in relation to developments in film and cinema and in relation to developments in other media forms. Nonetheless, across different historical periods in cinema, it has been is through the performance and theatricalisation of researched details uncovered in the research process that the re-enactment and the biopic claim their authority. The re-enactment and the biopic have consistently performed, staged and placed researched details in front of the camera in the mise-en-scène. While these practices are the legacy of the authenticating techniques employed in live theatrical re-enactment performances that predated the cinema, they have become resolutely tied to institutionalised practices undeniably characteristic of cinema and television. It is by understanding these practices as deeply connected to, and fundamentally shaped by, technical media that I have been able to investigate how the changes in the relationship between the re-enactment and researched details relate to frequent transformations in the media landscape.

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Chapter 4

Deixis, Trace and Cinematic Metaphor in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word is getting out that microbes are the greatest actors in the world. Next year we will ask them for autographs. André Bazin1

The index asserts nothing; it only says ‘There!’ Charles Sanders Peirce2

A major shift in the status of the pro-filmic field is currently underway in film and television production as digital technologies begin to co-exist with, and increasingly replace, analogue processes across a range of media platforms. Digital production processes are becoming more and more adept at producing images without staging or capturing a scene in front of a camera. Consequently, the pro-filmic field is

1 ‘Science Film: Accidental Beauty (1947)’, in Science is Fiction. The Films of Jean Painleve, ed. by Andy Masaki Bellows, Marina McDougall, Brigitte Berg (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 2001), p. 145. 2 The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, 2 vols (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), I.226.

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becoming less and less necessary for image production.3 The imminent disappearance of photochemical celluloid has prompted a well-documented crisis for those film debates that have located the referential dimensions of the film image in the forms of inscription that underlie the analogue photograph. This conceptualisation of the photographic image as indexical trace primarily builds on Charles Sanders Peirce’s account of the photograph as ‘having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature’; André Bazin’s death mask in ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’; and Roland Barthes account of the relationship between the photograph, indexicality and the punctum in Camera Lucida.4 The idea of a trace of the pro-filmic field burnt into the photochemical image has traditionally established the referential claims of the film image.

Debates about the shifting status of the indexical trace in image production have as yet paid little attention to the question of how film and television re-enactments have been impacted by the declining necessity of the pro-filmic field. Indeed, as I argued in Chapter 3, the re-enactment and the indexical image are generally regarded as standing in opposition to each other, and working with different understandings of reference. Bill Nichols, for example, contends that ‘the reenactment forfeits its indexical bond to the original event. It draws its fantasmatic power from this very fact.’5 Rather than being invested in the idea of the photochemically produced trace, the re-enactment has placed traces of history, or replicas of both historical artefacts and traces from images, in front of the camera to make its referential claims. An explicit investment in the theatrical dimensions of the pro-filmic field—especially sets, props, costumes and performances (rather than the medium-specific qualities of the film and television image)—has enabled the re-enactment to make its referential claims.

3 On the ‘indexical trace’, see Braxton Soderman, ‘The Index and the Algorithm’, differences, 18.1 (2007), 153-86. 4 Essential Peirce, II.5-6; André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) I.9-22; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, Random House, 2000 [1981]). 5 ‘Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject’, p. 74.

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In this, the re-enactment has typically been associated with theatricality and performance and with historical research. By contrast, the historical trace, whether in the image or as another kind of historical vestige or artefact, is associated with the inscription of a moment in time. The re-enactment has generally been associated with theatricality, while the indexical sign has been associated with the trace. These oppositions, between re-enactment and trace, theatricality and the indexical image, have served to define the re-enactment throughout much of the history of its deployment in film and in television. While it can employ an indexical trace as an authenticating device, the re-enactment is not aligned with the idea of the image as indexical trace. The indexical image is generally associated with capturing the un- staged, un-rehearsed, pro-filmic event, and the re-enactment with researching, rehearsing, staging and performing a pre-existing event. As I indicated in the Introduction, the referential relationship the re-enactment sets up between itself and a pre-existing event has typically been understood not as an indexical link, but rather one of verisimilitude, in which, through its investment in theatricality, the re- enactment manufactures a representation that resembles a pre-existing scenario or event.

The pro-filmic field has traditionally been the terrain in which the re-enactment declares and by which it authenticates itself. As I indicated in Chapter 3, it has been central both to the incorporation of historical details and to the re-enactment’s ability to stage an event. As digital image production becomes less and less dependent on recording physical spaces and performances, the significance of the pro-filmic field to moving-image production is correspondingly reduced. Even though the pro-filmic field has been fundamental to the ways in which film and television re-enactments make their referential claims and declare themselves as re-enactments, it is now possible to produce computer-generated re-enactments that were never staged in front of the camera. How does a re-enactment signal and authenticate itself in the digital era? What will give the re-enactment its authenticity in contemporary screen production, if the pro-filmic field – the terrain in which the traces (or props) of history have been made to perform for the camera – no longer remains?

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Using the forensic-inflected police-procedural television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000- ) as a case study, I propose to examine the ways in which the shifts that are currently taking place in the status of the pro-filmic field have impacted on the re-enactment, most notably in terms of how it signals its investment in both theatricality and the idea of the trace.6 Focusing on the computer-generated re-enactments performed in the series’ trademark ‘CSI-shot’, I want to investigate a radical shift in the relationship between re-enactment and indexical trace.7 Rather than historically authenticated traces being made to perform an authenticating function for the re-enactment, I argue that we are now entering a moment in which investment in the theatricality of the re-enactment can in fact authorise the trace. This shift is connected to the shifts each has undergone in response to a hybrid, increasingly digitised media environment.

To understand this shift in the relationship between re-enactment (theatricality) and trace (evidence), it is necessary to look at the relationship of each of them to the indexical sign. Peirce’s approach to the conceptualisation of the indexical sign can be divided into two primary sub-categories. There is the indexical trace, which, as I outlined in Chapter 3, is defined by a physical, material contact with a referent at a time in the past that remains as a form of testimony to a past interaction. But there are also deictic indices that direct and focus attention, setting up a co-present existential relationship between themselves and that to which they point, either literally or figuratively.8 Peirce’s examples of the indexical trace include the bullet- hole, the photograph, the footprint, and the fingerprint.9 He describes the bullet-hole, for example, as ‘a sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no

6 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation first aired on CBS in America on 6 October 2000 and is now in its eleventh season. 7 See ‘The CSI Shot: Making it Real’, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 3:13-3:23, DVD commentary (Momentum Pictures, 2004). 8 Rosen identifies the indexical trace as a subcategory in Change Mummified, p. 20. On deixis, see, for example, Tom Gunning, ‘Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality’, differences 18.1 (2007), pp. 29-52; Mary Ann Doane, ‘The Indexical Sign and the Concept of Medium Specificity’. 9 Doane identifies some of these examples as of ‘the order of the trace’ in ‘Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction’, p. 2.

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hole’.10 Examples of deictic indices include shifters in language, demonstrative, relative and personal pronouns and the pointing finger.

Among Peirce’s diverse examples of indices, it is actually the gesture of the pointing finger, rather than the fingerprint, that exemplifies his conceptualisation of indexicality. In Peirce’s conceptualisation, the pointing finger, which he identifies as ‘the type of the class’,11 works in a similar way to the ‘hailing’12 function of deixis in language including shifters such as ‘here’, ‘there’ and the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’, which he argues are ‘nearly pure indices, because they denote things without describing them’.13 According to David Green and Joanna Lowry, Peirce ‘demonstrated that the indexical sign was less to do with its causal origins and more to do with the way in which it pointed to the event of its own inscription’.14 The deictic form of the indexical sign characteristically ‘takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object’.15

The theatricality of deixis is embodied in performative and demonstrative acts of showing: drawing, directing and focusing attention. In my view, in the digital era, deictic indexicality becomes crucial both to the recognition of a re-enactment as a re- enactment and the activation of the indexical trace for re-enactment. We have been too ready to see both the re-enactment and the digital image as remaining outside the domain of the index. Now that the re-enactment and digital imagery – both considered problematic to the idea of the indexical trace – have begun to work together, it becomes apparent that neither has been problematic to the idea of the

10 Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991), pp. 239-40. 11 Essential Peirce, I.226. See also Doane, ‘The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, pp. 133-6. 12 Gunning, ‘Moving Away from the Index’, p. 30. 13 Essential Peirce, I. 226. Roman Jakobson was the first to draw attention to Peirce’s emphasis on shifters in language. See ‘Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb’, Russian and Slavic Grammar: Studies, 1931-1981, ed. by Linda R. Waugh and Morris Halle (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1984), pp. 131-3. 14 David Green and Joanna Lowry, ‘From Presence to the Performative: Rethinking Photographic Indexicality’, in Where is the Photograph?, ed. by David Green (Brighton, UK: Photoworks/Photoforum, 2003), 47-60 (p. 48). 15 Essential Peirce, I.226.

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index, only to that of the image as indexical trace. Deictic indexicality comes to the forefront, showing us the capacity for indexicality that has always been present in the re-enactment and is readily available to digital media.

The re-enactment’s primary investment in theatricality lies in the fact that, in order to be recognised as a re-enactment, it must foreground that it stages and performs a pre-existing event. Its openly presentational mode of address and undisguised emphasis on staging, performance and spectacle have always been its defining characteristics, essential to its ability to signal itself. In Chapter 1, I aligned the re- enactment with Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’, emphasising the importance of direct address, spectacle and exhibitionism.16 I argued that the re-enactment embodies what Thomas Elsaesser describes as the ‘reflexivity and self-reference, display and performativity that we have come to associate with the “cinema of attractions”’.17 Here I want to suggest that, in an increasingly digital media environment, the theatricality of deixis takes on a crucial role for the re-enactment.

To conceptualise theatricality in the re-enactment without recourse to the theatrical dimensions of the pro-filmic field requires that we consider its presentational mode as based on showing rather than on staging. Deictic indexicality can enable a re- enactment to draw attention to itself as a performance, a spectacle and an act of demonstration without the theatrical dimensions of the pro-filmic field. This suggests that the theatricality of deixis is more crucial to the re-enactment than that of the pro-filmic field. But what is the relationship between deixis, re-enactment and trace in an increasingly digital media environment? Green and Lowry maintain that a relationship between deixis and trace is already at work in the photographic image. They conceptualise photography as a ‘performative gesture which points to an event in the world’, arguing that the photograph contains ‘two forms of indexicality, the one existing as a physical trace of an event, the other as performative gesture that points to it’.18

16 ‘Cinema of Attractions’, p. 57. 17 ‘Discipline through Diegesis’, p. 211. 18 ‘From Presence to the Performative’, p. 48.

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Thinking through the relationship between these two forms of indexicality – the deictic index and the indexical trace – is particularly important in the current media environment. With the passing of the centrality of the pro-filmic field to image production, the impending loss of the idea of the image as indexical trace has drawn attention to how narrow the conceptualisation of indexicality has been in film theory. Mary Ann Doane argues that film debates have been so caught up in the ‘drive to ground the photochemical image as trace’ that there has been a misplaced emphasis on the trace, which she describes as ‘only one genre of index, and not necessarily the most crucial or decisive’.19 There is an increasing recognition among film theorists that what Tom Gunning calls the ‘diminished concept of the index’ as trace ‘may have reached the limits of its usefulness in the theory of photography, film and new media’.20 Both Gunning and Doane propose that if we think about the index as more than just a trace or impression, and pursue the performative and demonstrative dimensions of indexicality, we can acknowledge that the photographic process is not the only aspect of the film image that can be considered indexical.

The critical re-thinking of the forms and the parameters of indexicality in film has generated some important work that has been especially enabling for rethinking the concept of medium specificity, the relationship between photography and film, cinematic realism, as well as digital capture and remediation. It has also been deployed in the cultivation of new approaches to the close-up and to theorising computer algorithms.21 Here I argue that looking closely at the changing ways in which reference and authenticity are performed in contemporary popular television can give us considerable insight into shifts in the relationship between the index and the re-enactment. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (hereafter simply CSI), now in its eleventh season, is one of the most ubiquitous, commercially driven series on television. It had reached 24 million American viewers by 2002 and has become a

19 ‘The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, p. 136. 20 ‘Moving Away from the Index’, pp. 30-31. 21 See articles contained in the special issue of differences, 18.1 (2007), on the indexical sign, edited by Mary Ann Doane.

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truly ‘worldwide television phenomenon’.22 While it may seem somewhat inappropriate to use a television series to investigate what have primarily been film theory debates about indexicality, one of the key features of this highly formulaic series is the way in which it repeatedly proposes the relationship between re- enactment, trace and deixis in response to complex shifts in media production. As a police-procedural television drama driven by the principles of forensic investigation, CSI is inspired by a form of scientific investigation that focuses on the analysis of indexical traces. Furthermore, as has been widely discussed in analyses of the series, CSI’s production values are conceptualised from the ‘look’ of cinema, which for both Rodowick and Rosen is a defining feature of the legacy of cinema in and for the current media environment.23

CSI’s production values are broadly ‘imagined from a cinematic metaphor’.24 Danny Cannon, a key director/producer of the series, explains, ‘The look of the show came about from the first conversation I had with Jerry Bruckheimer [Executive Producer] where he said to me, “I need that cinematic look in television. How do we do that?”’25 Giving Bruckheimer the glossy, expensive, high-end production values he wanted meant that the series was produced at blockbuster prices. According to Kim Akass, the double-episode season finale ‘Grave Danger’ (5:25), directed by Quentin Tarantino and screened by the British Film Institute at the National Film Theatre (NFT) in London in 2005, was ‘as filmic as anything previously screened at the NFT’.26 Sue Turnbull argues that emphasis on cinematic production values is not usual, even within the television crime genre, citing the distinctive aesthetic of Dragnet (1949-59) – the genre’s earliest example – which she describes as being characterised by a ‘cinematic self-consciousness’ marked by ‘elaborate and carefully

22 Michael Allen, ‘Introduction: This Much We Know…’, in Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope, ed. by Michael Allen (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 3-14 (p. 3). 23 Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, p. 97; Rosen, Change Mummified, p. 309. 24 Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, p. 97. 25 ‘The CSI Shot: Making it Real’ CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 3:13-3:23, DVD commentary (Momentum Pictures, 2004). Quoted in Turnbull ‘The Hook and the Look: CSI and the Aesthetics of the Television Crime Series’ in Reading CSI, 15-32, (p. 27). 26 Kim Akass, ‘CSI at the bfi…’, in Reading CSI, 73-8 (p. 74).

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lit shots’ that echoed ‘the style of film noir in its artful lighting and placement of characters’.27

CSI’s invocation of a cinematic look has nothing to do with wanting to mimic the ‘perceptual realism’28 of the photographic image, nor is it even simply about invoking lighting contrasts or the warm, deep or resonant qualities associated with photochemical celluloid. The cinematic ‘look’ of CSI is realised through a combination of expensive Super 35mm film stock, cinematic lighting techniques, expensive digital post-production colour manipulation and spectacular computer- generated special effects.29 This contradictory conceptualisation of CSI as cinematic because of its use of techniques associated with both the analogue and the digital is indicative of the complex transitions underway in image production, transitions that have undone medium-specific delineations and the conceptualisations attached to them. This hybrid investment in cinematic metaphor makes CSI especially useful for thinking through the status of indexicality in the current media environment.

At first view, it may also seem odd to focus on a fictional television drama like CSI in a thesis on re-enactment. As I stated in the Introduction, the fiction film and television genres in which re-enactments most commonly appear (such as those discussed in Chapters 1-3) incorporate the re-enactment of pre-existing, real events within a fictional narrative. By contrast, CSI, the detective genre and police- procedural television are unusual in that they incorporate re-enactments of fictional events within a fictional narrative. In every episode of CSI, material traces found at crime scenes participate in computer-generated re-enactment sequences that draw attention to their status as trace evidence of that crime. These CSI-shots always imagine the formation of traces and events that belong only to the diegetic world of the series and do not have any basis in an external, pro-filmic reality. Typically, they follow the path of a fragment or bullet into an orifice or wound and re-enact the formation of the trace of a crime or accident inside the body, as it is being proposed by a pathologist, coroner or forensic investigator. If they do not enter the body

27 ‘The Hook and the Look’, pp. 18-21. 28 Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, p. 99. 29 See Turnbull, pp. 27-9.

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through a wound or orifice, they always spectacularly simulate the proposed impact of violence, illness or disease on the internal workings of the body. All CSI-shots are re-enactments of an unseen event that took place at a point in the past of that diegetic world and are not based on any ‘real-world’ original. They are re-enactments only in the context of the diegetic world in which they exist.30

The CSI-shot is one of the most frequently discussed aspects of the series. CSI-shots have often been seen as a form of re-enactment, but the term has rarely been used to describe them. Deborah Jermyn describes them as ‘reconstructing a privileged point of view’ in which a victim’s ‘death is reconstructed’, but also describes reconstructions of the events of the crime as ‘stylised flashbacks which take us back to the moment of physical impact’.31 I am particularly wary of regarding the CSI- shot as a ‘flashback’. It would be wrong to call them flashbacks just because they occur within a fictional narrative. While the re-enactment is generally associated with non-fiction genres, and the flashback with fiction, neither is necessarily tied to these categories. As well, flashbacks are more speculative than CSI-shots, which are attached to the science of forensic investigation. CSI employs both flashbacks and CSI-shots, and each is clearly distinguishable from the other. Occasionally, a CSI- shot is actually even employed within a flashback. In the episode ‘Chaos Theory’ (2:2), for example, scrutinising some of the victim’s hairs found in the suspect’s car, forensics investigators note that it carries skin tags: it has been torn out. This discovery produces a flashback showing the victim’s face in close-up as she struggles with the suspect, followed by a CSI-shot re-enactment of her hair being ripped out in extreme close-up, as if the hairs on her head are under the microscope.

30 Occasionally, the scenarios explored in CSI are based on real-life events provided to the writing team by the forensic investigators who advise the series, or sometimes the writers take inspiration from crimes that have been reported in the media, but if a case is based on a ‘true story’, this is rarely signalled to the audience. See Carol Mendelsohn, ‘The Writers Room’, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 3:13-3:23, DVD commentary (Momentum Pictures, 2004). 31 Deborah Jermyn, ‘Body Matters: Realism, Spectacle and the Corpse in CSI’, in Reading CSI, 79-89 (pp. 80-1).

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More typically, however, in the critical discussion, various synonyms for re- enactment have been used to describe CSI-shots. Like others who write about the re- enactment in film and television, Jermyn refers to a death being ‘reconstructed’.32 One of the few exceptions is Karen Lury, who describes CSI-shots as a ‘visceral re- enactment of the crime’.33 For others, these sequences are ‘reconstructions’ or ‘simulations’. Michael Allen, for example, describes them as ‘virtual reconstructions’, ‘visualisations of hypotheses’ and ‘hypothetical “reconstructions” of what happened’.34 Martha Gever describes the computer-generated re-enactment sequences as ‘simulating the damage inflicted by the fatal weapon’.35 Sue Tait describes them as ‘digitally produced shots which simulate bodily interiors and the effects of violence upon them’.36 Elke Weissmann and Karen Boyle describe them as standing ‘as an authentic recreation’ and ‘providing a visual model of the scientist’s spoken explanation’.37

These descriptions are understandable given that terms like ‘simulation’ and ‘reconstruction’ are often used in connection with the kinds of imaging technologies employed in forensic and scientific investigation. However, I prefer ‘re-enactment’ to synonyms such as ‘simulation’, ‘reconstruction’, ‘recreation’ or ‘visual model’, because I want to address directly the question of how film and television re- enactments have been impacted by the shift currently taking place in the status of the pro-filmic field. The use of forensic and scientific terms such as ‘simulation’ and ‘virtual reconstruction’ suggests that the emphasis on re-enactment is a new development in police-procedural television. The fact is, narrative emphasis on re- enactment in CSI has always been part of police-procedural television (and of

32 ‘Body Matters’, pp. 80-1. 33 ‘CSI and Sound’, in Reading CSI, 107-21, (p. 112). 34 ‘So Many Different Ways to Tell It: Multi-Platform Storytelling in CSI’, in Reading CSI, 57-72 (pp. 66-8). 35 Martha Gever, ‘The Spectacle of Crime Digitised: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Social Anatomy,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8.4 (2005), 445-63 (p. 457). 36 Sue Tait, ‘Autopic Vision and the Necrophilic Imaginary in CSI’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9.1 (2006), 45-61 (p. 50). 37 Elke Weissmann and Karen Boyle, ‘Evidence of Things Unseen: the Pornographic Aesthetic and the Search for Truth in CSI’, in Reading CSI, 90-102, (pp. 93-4).

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criminal investigation itself), and the CSI-shot marks an innovation in an existing convention.

The creators of the series have themselves claimed their explicit emphasis on forensic crime solving in CSI as a new intervention in the genre. It is a claim based in part on the fact that before CSI the most popular police-procedural dramas on television since the 1970s had tended to focus on character-based narratives driven by psychological motivation, testimony and confession. Turnbull argues that the shift to character-driven narratives began in the mid-1970s with Police Story (1973- 1977), and was followed by Hill Street Blues (1981-1987), then Miami Vice (1984- 1990).38 In fact, CSI marks the genre’s return to forensic investigation. Jermyn believes that CSI owes a debt to the British Prime Suspect (1993-2003), while Silke Panse points to forensic detectives such as Jack Klugman in Quincy, ME (1976- 1983) and Dick Van Dyke’s physician in Diagnosis Murder (1992-2001). Turnbull goes back as far as the pioneering Dragnet, which was also ‘tightly structured around a half-hour format in which a single case was proposed and solved through the pursuit of evidence’.39

Gunning argues that the forensic investigation techniques introduced into criminology in the nineteenth century made an impact on detective fiction as early as the last decades of that century, and points to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, whose methods were characterised by his eye for detail: The nineteenth century witnessed a rearrangement of the hierarchy of judicial proof, as the value previously accorded to witness testimony was replaced by the scientific reputation of the analysis of indices. […] This new concept of evidence transformed both the narrative logic of signs of guilt and the methods of recognition. […] Detection was approached as a science, employing careful measurement and observation.40

38 ‘The Hook and the Look’, pp. 21-6. 39 Jermyn, ‘Body Matters’, p. 79; Panse, ‘“The Bullet Confirms the Story Told by the Potato”: Materials Without Motives in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation’, 153-66, (p. 160); Turnbull, ‘The Hook and the Look’, p. 21. 40 Tom Gunning, ‘Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema’, in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwarz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 15-45, (p. 22).

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This narrative emphasis on deciphering the events of a crime from its traces is absolutely central to CSI, in which the narrative is invariably driven by forensic puzzles, and ‘bullets and potatoes are deemed more reliable than witnesses’.41 The narrative structure of every episode is built on the founding principle of forensic science: the idea that ‘every contact leaves a trace’.42 This principle, established by the founder of forensic science Edmond Locard, is distilled from his proposition that ‘a criminal always takes something to the scene of a crime and always leaves something there’.43 Locard conceptualises trace evidence as indexical trace, defined by a physical, material contact with a referent at a time in the past and remaining as a form of testimony to a past interaction.

The idea of the indexical trace is essential to the diegetic world of the CSI investigators, who collect and analyse material traces left at crime scenes – specks of skin, hair follicles, toenail cuttings, or the residue from bodily fluids – and successfully identify victims and perpetrators often from the tiniest of traces. That the emergence of an indexical trace always depends upon ‘certain unique contingencies’44 makes such traces particularly valuable for forensic investigation, since it assures their direct relationship to the specific events under investigation. Many of the kinds of trace evidence commonly favoured in CSI narratives actually correspond closely to Peirce’s own examples of the indexical trace, especially the fingerprint, the footprint, the stain, and the bullet-hole.

The series’ highly formulaic narrative structure relies on the status of the indexical trace as a form of testimony to a past event, foregrounding not only the physicality and the truth claims of the indexical trace, but also the temporality of the indexical trace, which is of crucial narrative significance. The narrative emphasis on indexical traces as residues of past interactions serves to emphasise that the events of the crime under investigation took place in a narrative past and, combined with narrative

41 Panse, p. 154. 42 Edmond Locard in Gardner Conklin et al. Encyclopaedia of Forensic Investigation (Westport: Oryx Press, 2002) p. 278. Quoted in Panse, p. 157. 43 Ibid. 44 Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 92.

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ellipsis, this emphasis creates the conditions for the possibility of re-enactment in the series. Typically, a CSI episode will open with a glimpse of the events of one of the crimes to be investigated during the episode. This is followed by a narrative ellipsis, so that by the very next scene the crime has taken place and a crime scene already been established. The investigators have also usually arrived and begun to make preliminary assessments of what happened. This narrative ellipsis typically occurs before the opening credits, so that by the time the credits roll, the longest period of time devoted to narrative in the episode has already elapsed and the investigation has already begun.

CSI is obsessed, at the level of narrative, with producing the truth claims of the indexical trace, which, as testimony to and a remnant of a past event, is unable to speak for itself, but must be deciphered in order that the events of that crime be understood. Each trace must be analysed, its causes ‘replayed’ and interpreted by investigators in order to establish its relationship to its referent. This is a defining characteristic of the indexical sign, which, in all its formations, both as trace and deixis, is understood by Peirce as having no meaning in itself, but simply attesting to the existence of something else. It is the forensic investigators who construct the truth claims of the indexical traces they analyse and reproduce. The certification by the forensic investigators of material traces as indexical traces is central to the resolution of every crime investigated in CSI. The series’ narrative structure is consistent with the conventions of detective fiction and forensic-inspired police- procedural television. Not until the investigators are able to verify the story told by all the bits and pieces of trace evidence as the true story of the events in question can the episode be given narrative resolution.

The central relationship between trace evidence and reconstruction in the narrative and investigative logic of the police-procedural is emphasised in CSI by the use not only of advanced forensic technologies and spectacular visual effects, but also of more traditional investigative techniques. As investigators try to establish what traces reveal about a crime, they are also often depicted staging and performing prosaic, physical investigative re-enactments in order to establish reasons why a

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particular trace might have been left at a crime scene. These re-enactments are typically designed to try to produce a replica of a trace that has been discovered. In the episode entitled ‘Burked’ (2:1), for example, Gilbert Grissom (William Petersen) has a hunch that a victim has been suffocated. He positions a dummy on the floor and he and his colleague Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger), put the victim’s shirt on it. Willows presses down with her knee on the dummy’s chest, acting out her and Grissom’s hypothesis about how he was suffocated. She opens the shirt and finds three mysterious round marks on the dummy’s chest similar to those found on the body of the victim. Willows agrees with Grissom, ‘He was burked.’ It is this agreement, confirmed by the fact that their re-enactment produced traces similar to those found on the corpse, which establishes the meaning of the original trace.

Both these physical re-enactments and the CSI-shots are tightly bound up in what Roland Barthes has defined as the hermeneutic code of narrative, the function of which ‘is to articulate in various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events which can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even constitute an enigma and lead to its solution’.45 Both perform significant formal functions pivotal to the narrative structure of each episode. Both are employed as highly self-conscious narrative mechanisms that pose questions about the nature of a crime under investigation as well as providing delayed answers to those questions. Both are narrative events that help to establish the meaning of the indexical traces under investigation. It is the CSI-shot, rather than the physical re-enactment experiments by the investigators, however, that marks the series as an innovation in forensic investigation on television. CSI places a new emphasis on forensic procedure within the police-procedural, with its explicit celebration of computer- generated special effects, as well as the technologies of forensic investigation, elaborately displayed in the series for their remarkable visual effects. CSI not only restores the emphasis on forensic investigation, but also combines it with an explicit emphasis on the spectacle of forensic procedure, its technologies and visual effects

45 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. by Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 [1972]), p. 17.

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at key moments in the investigation. CSI is a series that makes spectacular ‘the procedures of processing’.46

What is of special significance in CSI’s intervention in the police-procedural television genre is its timing. CSI re-invests in the idea of the indexical trace, in both its narrative structure and its computer-generated CSI-shots, in the era when the idea of the indexical trace is in decline in image production. As the digital image becomes ‘less and less anchored to the prior existence of things and people’, says Rodowick, not only the truth claims, but also the temporality bound up in the image as indexical trace becomes an experience that is ‘already historical’.47 With its narrative structure built around constructing and emphasising the physicality and temporality of indexical trace, every CSI episode plays out and resolves anxieties about the truth claims of the indexical trace.

Silke Panse points out that the narrative emphasis on the referential and temporal powers of the indexical trace in CSI takes place in a digital production environment: The indexical tracing by the CSIs within the diegesis is detached from the indexical images of its televisual representation and even further removed from the non-indexical images processed by the computer. [...] It is as though the CSIs are emphasising what the absent trace is in computer-generated television – the older medium of the indexical trace, celluloid. The excessive references to trace and traces in the image might compensate for the absence of trace of the image: the content of the programme for the lack of its medium. […] The dead bodies with indexical traces on digitally processed sites might be those of celluloid.48

Panse argues that we could read the obsessive emphasis on the truth claims of the indexical trace in CSI – especially in their frequent depiction in the series using computer-generated imitations of forensic technologies – as a compensatory acknowledgement of the waning truth claims of the image as indexical trace in the era of the photochemical image’s decline.

46 Panse, pp. 153-4. 47 Virtual Life of Film, pp. 86, 74. 48 ‘The Bullet Confirms the Story’, pp. 162, 158-9. Italics in the original.

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This sophisticated reading of CSI is reinforced by the correspondences that have already been drawn in film theory between the photograph and other examples of the indexical trace provided by Peirce. Peter Wollen was the first to draw attention to the fact not only that one of Peirce’s own examples of an indexical sign is a photograph, but also that Bazin’s analogies for the photograph’s ontological relation to reality matched a number of Peirce’s other examples of indexical traces, including the fingerprint, the mould, and the death mask, defined by both thinkers in terms of an existential bond between signifier and referent.49 The association between the fingerprint and the photograph, in particular, has a long history in film theory. As Bazin has observed, ‘The photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint.’50 Indeed, in police filing systems from the nineteenth century until very recently, fingerprints have been ‘recorded and archived as photographs’.51 Gunning argues that the conceptualisation of the photographic image as indexical underpinned its centrality to nineteenth- and twentieth-century criminal identification systems, which archived not only fingerprints, but also other unique individual bodily features.52

At the same time, however, it is clear that the CSI production team are certainly not in mourning for the heyday of the photochemical image. Their emphasis on computer-generated spectacle in the CSI-shot also suggests that they have embraced the possibilities currently being opened up in the complex transitions in image production. Created by special-effects production company Stargate Digital, and produced by combining prosthetics, slow-motion capture photography, periscope cameras, layered CGI effects, 3D animation, and 3D modelling, CSI-shots maximise and celebrate the unprecedented manipulability available to digital image production, as the pro-filmic yields before the computer-generated simulation. Panse’s astute analysis of the ways in which CSI’s obsession with indexical traces can be understood as a compensatory gesture in the face of the indexical trace in

49 Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: BFI, 1998 [1969]), pp. 125-6; See also Gunning ‘Moving Away from the Index’, pp. 31-3. 50 ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, p. 15. 51 Gever, p. 451. 52 ‘Tracing the Individual Body’, p. 34.

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decline is very much to the point. Nevertheless, it is my contention that CSI also responds to the anxiety that in the digital age the idea of the image as indexical trace has lost its potency by invoking deictic indexicality.

Yvonne Tasker regrets that scholarship on crime television rarely takes account of spectacle as a significant feature of the genre. She argues that scholarship has neglected analysis of action and spectacle and instead focussed on procedural crime drama as ‘intensely narrative-driven’, emphasising ‘deductive processes’ and the ‘reconstruction of events’.53 CSI responds to the anxieties circulating around the idea of the loss of the image as indexical trace both by making ideas of the indexical trace a key thematic concern and performing the idea of the indexical trace through what I would describe as ‘spectacular digital deixis’. The CSI-shot explicitly re-invests in the idea of the indexical trace, even in its absence from the image, by deploying the series’ distinctive computer-generated special effects. Digital deixis in the CSI-shot celebrates a computer-generated indexical trace on the computer-generated interior of a human body.

The CSI-shot, which typically begins with an accelerated, digitally produced ‘snap- zoom’54 inside a corpse, is an act of deixis that draws our attention to the indexical trace and to the re-enactment. Preceded by a flash of bright white light,55 these high- speed snap-zooms illustrate what Peirce means by a deictic index. The snap-zoom ‘takes hold of our eyes’ and ‘forcibly directs them to a particular object’.56 Deictic indices set up relationships between themselves and their referent by pointing. For Doane, who conceives of the close-up as a performative act that ‘points to what is there’,57 this ability to force our gaze and our attention is the most potent power of

53 Yvonne Tasker, ‘Action Television/Crime Television: Sensation and Attraction’, Flow, 13.2 (2010) available at Flowtv.org/2010/10/action-television-crime- television (accessed 18 February 2011). 54 Karen Lury, Interpreting Television, (London: Hodder Education, 2005), p. 45. 55 Weissmann and Boyle, ‘Evidence of Things Unseen’, p. 96, point out that the ‘quick dissolve to white that marks the beginning and end of the “CSI-shot” was first introduced in the first series of CSI, in the episode ‘Anonymous’ (1:8). 56 Essential Peirce, I. 226. 57 ‘Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction’, p. 4.

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the index.58 And in a discussion of the relationship between the close-up and deictic indexicality, she quotes Christian Metz’s articulation of the close-up as deixis: A close-up of a revolver does not mean ‘revolver’ (a purely virtual lexical unity), but at the very least, and without speaking of the connotations, it signifies ‘Here is a revolver!’ It carries with it a kind of here (a word which André Martinet rightly considers to be a pure index of actualisation).59

Snap zooms also appear in CSI as stand-alone, attention-grabbing extreme close-ups that work as acts of digital hailing, repeatedly and dramatically directing the viewer’s attention to trace evidence at a crime scene, on a dead or living body, or in the possession of investigators. Translated into sentence form, says Peirce, an index ‘would be in the imperative or exclamatory mood, as in Look over there! Or Watch out!’60 The snap-zoom close-up is the visual equivalent of the ‘There!’, but instead of showing us the crime, these acts of deixis say, ‘Here is an indexical trace of the crime!’ Snap-zooms make the indexical trace perform narratively as evidence, explicitly alerting the viewer that the trace being pointed to will be essential to solving the case. In ‘Overload’ (2:3), for example, as investigator Nick Stokes (George Eads) takes a look at a suspect’s jacket, there is a sudden snap-zoom into an extreme close-up of some variously coloured fibres on it, before his colleague Catherine Willows uses tape to lift the fibres off.

The CSI-shot goes further than the snap-zoom close-up, making the trace legible by showing us not only what is ‘there’, but how it got there. We can compare these two acts of deixis in CSI – the stand-alone snap-zoom and the CSI-shot re-enactment – in ‘Ellie’ (2:8), an episode in which both acts of deixis take place in quick succession. As a dead body lies before Dr Al Robbins (Robert David Hall) on an examination table, a stand-alone snap-zoom into a close-up of the corpse’s bloodied ear accompanies Robbins’ identification of it as the site of the cause of death, alerting the viewer to its significance. But a few moments later, as ‘Doc Robbins’ explains in

58 ‘The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, p. 133. 59 Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema trans. by Michael Taylor. (New York: OUP, 1974), p. 67. Quoted in Doane, ‘The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, p. 138. 60 Peirce, The Collected Papers, III.361.

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more detail how a bullet entered the ear (and with what consequences), another snap- zoom triggers a CSI-shot deep into the ear canal, re-enacting the path and the impact of the bullet.

While the snap-zoom remains on the surface, pointing out the bloodied ear as indexical trace, the CSI-shot snap-zoom plunges the viewer inside the corpse at high speed, in a computer-generated re-enactment of the formation of the indexical trace, returning the trace to the moment of contact, hailing traces of the wound inside the body the formation of which it has just re-enacted. The CSI-shot not only points to, but also actually makes the indexical trace re-enact the event of its own inscription. By performing a re-enactment of the impact of disease on the internal workings of a computer-fabricated bodily interior, computer-generated microbes can become, as Bazin put it, ‘the greatest actors’.61 This is precisely the case with the CSI-shot. The spectacular and highly performative investment in the idea of the indexical trace in the CSI-shot makes the indexical trace perform, dramatising the idea of the indexical trace by foregrounding the deictic. It is important to note that this act of hailing is not purely a visual act, but also activated by visceral, computer-generated sound effects that are in effect highly performative pointing gestures, directing and drawing our attention. These sound effects are integral to the ability of the CSI-shot to make the trace perform, re-enacting the sounds of the movement, impact and inscription of the trace.

The contingency and the temporality of the indexical trace are foregrounded by the CSI-shot by means of a computer-generated image. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Doane draws attention to the ‘temporal tension’ between these two forms of the index, one defined in terms of its relationship to the past, the other characterised by directness and immediacy: On the one hand, the indexical trace – the footprint, the fossil, the photograph – carries a historicity, makes the past present. At the other extreme, the deictic index – the signifiers ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘that’ – are inextricable from the idea of presence.62

61 ‘Science Film: Accidental Beauty (1947)’, p. 145. 62 Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 219.

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By bringing the indexical trace to life, the CSI-shot sets up a direct interaction between the temporality of the trace (which endures through time as testimony to its physical, material contact with a referent at a time in the narrative past) and the temporality of digital deixis, where an existential bond is defined by co-presence. The deixis of the CSI-shot points to the indexical trace, establishing an existential relationship through co-presence, but also makes it – the residue of a past interaction – perform a re-enactment. By re-enacting its own inscription, the indexical trace also participates in the temporality of re-enactment by re-performing what has been positioned narratively as a pre-existing event.

Indexical traces can even be made to perform multiple versions of their inscription. In the episode ‘Pilot’ (1:1), for example, Grissom, his latest recruit, Holly Gribbs (Chandra West), and the coroner discuss the bullet wound in a corpse being examined on the autopsy table. Grissom tells Gribbs that if the victim shot himself, the bullet hole ‘would look like this’— at which point a CSI-shot follows the bullet’s trajectory into the body, then pulls back to reveal a bullet wound in the chest. Doc Robbins, the coroner, responds by saying that the wound is too big for suicide and that it looks to him as though someone shot the victim as they stood over him. Again a CSI-shot follows the bullet into the body on the examination table, pulling back to show the corpse with a larger bullet-hole than before. These multiple performances of the impact of the bullet demonstrate how, by exceeding those of the pro-filmic field, the CSI-shot offers the possibility that the trace can perform again. CSI celebrates the manipulability available to digital-image production to showcase the spectacle of the digitally produced and performing trace. The CSI-shot hails the digitally rendered indexical trace with an extravagant act of digital deixis that points not to any external reality, but only to its digitally produced ‘indexical traces’.

The CSI-shot is always a spectacular demonstration of a hypothesis, in Mark Wolf’s words, of ‘what could be, would be, or might have been’.63 These shots present provisional versions of past events from the perspective of multiple characters during

63 Mark Wolf, ‘Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and Simulation’, in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 274-91 (p. 274). Italics in the original.

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the course of the narrative, until what actually happened can be properly established. Simply thought-experiments, CSI-shots leave no traces on the bodies they penetrate, a point that the makers of the series are anxious to make from the outset, in the series’ inaugural episode, ‘Pilot’: despite the multiple routes the bullet might have taken through the body that Grissom, Gribbs and Doc Robbins are examining, traces of only one, the actual one, remain. Although given the point of view of the on- screen investigators, these shots exist solely for the benefit of the viewer, thereby creating an unusual hierarchy of perception where the viewer is shown ‘possibilities’ that the characters are not. Yet the CSI-shots create a scenario where, in giving the audience these hypothetical scenarios, the forensic investigators themselves also acquire the knowledge they articulate in the CSI-shot scenarios.

CSI-shots create computer-generated re-enactments of unstageable ‘events’ in the human body, events that no camera, even if it were ‘on-the-scene’ as the events were occurring, could easily hope to capture. At the same time, of course, it is the movement of the endoscopic camera, designed to augment and extend the surgeon’s ability to see inside the human body, that the ‘wound-cam’ of the CSI-shot seeks to mimic.64 As it re-enacts the inscription of a trace, the CSI-shot invokes the endoscopic camera metaphorically. The initial production stages of a CSI-shot sometimes even utilises a periscope camera that moves in and out of a custom-built prosthetic body in a manner that, in part, simulates the way an endoscopic camera might move through a real body.

Computers have been in use for some time in the medical-imaging industry, of course, to produce virtual endoscopies that simulate what the endoscopic camera can do and create an experience of the pro-filmic built out of computer algorithms. In Rodowick’s view, in the ‘emerging ontology of the digital’, the point of reference for the representation of events ‘will be to mental events – not physical reality moulded to the imaginary, but the free reign of the imaginary in the creation of images ex nihilo that can simulate effects of the physical world (gravity, friction, causation)

64 Jermyn describes the CSI-shot as CSI’s ‘signature evocation of penetrative “wound-cam” technology’ in ‘Body Matters’, p. 80.

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while also overcoming them’.65 This could be said of the reanimations of virtual endoscopies and the spectacular re-enactments of the CSI-shot. By producing computer-generated re-enactments of fictional events taking place inside the body, the CSI-shot makes a spectacle not only of traces, but also of events that can only be represented digitally, taking re-enactment to a new level of display by making spectacular internal events of the body, previously with no event-status at all.66

José van Dijck describes the extent to which virtual endoscopies are able to produce images of the internal workings of the body that far exceed the possibilities of the endoscopic camera and those of the pro-filmic field itself: Virtual endoscopy offers viewing possibilities that exceed the potential of real endoscopy, so the surgeon’s eye and the public eye can travel to places where the material camera cannot. […] Unlike video endoscopy, virtual reanimations can make our eyes fly through walls of organs and take on any plane or perspective. We can never verify these digital reconstructions within an experiential frame of reference because no physical or electronic eye can actually travel through organs.67

The CSI-shot puts the style and approach of the reanimations produced by computer- generated virtual endoscopy to work in its fictional television narrative. It mimics, not so much a ‘virtual camera’,68 as the computer algorithms of virtual endoscopy in order to illustrate a particular hypothesis proposed by the investigators about how a victim came to end up a corpse on their autopsy table. The simulations of the virtual endoscopy provide a visual language that helps the CSI-shot to embrace computer- generated re-enactments from the point of view of a bullet, a knife, or some other object as it penetrates a victim’s corpse.

As provisional or hypothetical versions of the events of a crime, the CSI-shots themselves cannot fully resolve the anxiety about the truth claims of the indexical traces that they foreground. Instead, the existential bond between deixis and trace set

65 Virtual Life of Film, p. 104. 66 Weissmann and Boyle, ‘Evidence of Things Unseen’, p. 90; Tait, ‘Autopic Vision’, p. 50. 67 José van Dijck, ‘Bodies Without Borders: The Endoscopic Gaze’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 4.2 (2001), 220-36 (pp. 229-31). 68 Rosen, Change Mummified, p. 313.

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up in the CSI-shot produces a scenario in which the authenticity of its digital deixis (which successfully embodies the definition of the deictic index as a denotative performance) works to disguise the inauthenticity of the digitally produced indexical trace (which has no real physical connection to an external reality) validating the indexical trace at the level of performance. The existential bond between the CSI- shot and the bullet-holes in the episode ‘Pilot’, for example, produces a scenario in which the explanations provided by the investigators make the bullet-holes (which have no real physical connection to an external reality) perform in CSI-shots that demonstrate multiple accounts of their inscription.

The association between deixis and trace in the CSI-shot tells us that we are now entering a point in digital image production at which the theatricality of the re- enactment can authorise the trace, rather than vice-versa. This is a radical shift from the referential claims of the technically produced image in the photochemical era, when the authenticity of the trace that was incorporated into the pro-filmic dimensions of a re-enactment authorised the theatricality of the re-enactment. In the CSI-shot, re-enactments produce and celebrate the drama of the indexical trace, making the ‘phony’ digital indexical trace perform an authenticating function through deixis. Investment in the deictic theatricality of the digital re-enactment authenticates the digitally produced indexical trace as good drama.

This reversal marks a shift not only in the authenticating roles of trace and re- enactment, but also in the status of theatricality in the re-enactment. In the computer- generated CSI-shot, the re-enactment’s theatricality has become the theatricality of deixis, characterised by highly presentational acts of showing – acts of drawing, directing and focusing attention – without recourse to an emphasis on the theatrical dimensions of the pro-filmic field. Traditionally understood as outside, even opposed to the index, the re-enactment has actually always been aligned with the indexical sign’s more marginalised sub-category of the deictic index.

Interestingly, it is precisely because of its presentational value that Danny Cannon regards the computer-generated CSI-shot as a significant intervention in the

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television crime genre. While scenes in other crime series about the sifting of evidence might be ‘all talk’, he says, in CSI they are ‘all about show’: What’s the best way to tell that story? If you’re in an autopsy room, is the best way to just stand there and point or get some pictures out and do that or actually use the camera like they did in Fantastic Voyage and dive inside that body and that will tell the story for us.69

Visual-Effects Supervisor for Stargate Digital, Larry Detwiler, makes the same point when he explains that in the autopsy scene in the episode ‘A Little Murder’ (3:4), the writers put in a CSI-shot of an operation the victim had undergone to get his bones stretched ‘because they wanted to show this event’.70

Digital Deixis and Cinematic Metaphor Investment in spectacular digital deixis in the CSI-shot also summons a ‘cinematic metaphor’ associated with the computer-generated effects-driven Hollywood blockbuster. Jerry Bruckheimer, CSI’s executive producer, has been responsible for many such blockbusters of the last thirty years, including Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986), Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, 1998), Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998), Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001), the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (Gore Verbinski, 2003-2011) and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Mike Newell, 2010).71 As I have suggested, cinematic metaphor is invoked in CSI as much by the flaunting and foregrounding of spectacular computer-generated special effects – synonymous with Bruckheimer’s Hollywood movies – as by the use of 35mm shooting stock and cinematic lighting techniques. What is particularly ‘cinematic’ about CSI – and Bruckheimer is surely instrumental in this – is its deployment of spectacular digital effects.

As I signalled earlier in this chapter, Rodowick argues that in the transitional, hybrid media climate we currently inhabit, ‘an idea of cinema persists or subsists within the new media as their predominant cultural and aesthetic model for engaging the vision

69 ‘The CSI Shot: Making it Real’ CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 3:13-3:23, DVD commentary (Momentum Pictures 2004). 70 Ibid. 71 See Allen, pp. 4, 6. Turnbull, p. 27; Jermyn, p. 81.

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and imagination of viewers’ and that ‘the qualities of the “photographic” and the “cinematic” remain resolutely the touchstones for creative achievement in digital imaging entertainment’.72 Rodowick is by no means the only film theorist to ventilate ideas about the persistence of film and cinema in other media. Others, however, have tended to focus on the persistence of the idea of perceptual realism associated with the photochemical image as indexical trace. For example, Rodowick points to Lev Manovich’s account of the efforts to enable digital-imaging technology to achieve ‘perfect photographic credibility’.73 Laura Mulvey, too, has drawn attention to the ways in which digital media are able to simulate the composition of images produced by their photochemical predecessors to achieve ‘the perfect imitation of the indexical image by digital technology’, but without the unique relation of the photochemical indexical trace to time.74 Philip Rosen refers to this phenomenon as ‘digital mimicry’, a term he applies to the imitation of the indexical image, but also to the digital’s more general capacity to ‘imitate’ any ‘pre-existing compositional forms.75

CSI’s active compensation for the loss of the image as indexical trace is by no means a straightforward digital mimicry of the indexical image. Ironically, as I have argued, the series signals itself as cinematic—rather than ‘photographic’—through the deployment of computer-generated special effects. Furthermore, the digital spectacles of the CSI-shot create more than simply the ‘look’ of a Hollywood blockbuster. By invoking digital spectacle, CSI does not pretend to look like cinema, but draws on Hollywood cinema’s theatrical aspects as cinematic metaphor. CSI invests in the indexical trace at a narrative level but at the level of cinematic metaphor it invokes spectacular digital effects as deixis. At the same time, the attention-grabbing deictic performance of the CSI-shot explicitly invests in the idea of the indexical trace, which is rendered digitally and performed by digital deixis. The spectacular investment in theatrical aspects of Hollywood spectacle as cinematic metaphor sets up a relationship between deixis and trace as one of pointing. The

72 Virtual Life of Film, pp. 97, 101. 73 Quoted in Virtual Life of Film, p. 101. 74 Death 24x a Second, p. 31. 75 Change Mummified, p. 309. Italics in the original.

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theatricality of deictic indexicality establishes an existential relationship between these two forms of indexicality and, in the process, makes the indexical trace spectacular too.

This highly formulaic, commercially driven police-procedural television drama, potentially an odd inclusion in a thesis on re-enactment and reference, has proved very productive in helping to define the re-enactment and the indexical sign in an increasingly digital media environment. In CSI, and especially its trademark CSI- shot, contemporary shifts in the status of theatricality, the trace, the index, the event and the idea of performance in moving-image production manifest themselves in spectacular fashion. I have examined the relationships between sets of terms that have been crucial to the critical discussion of the re-enactment—and also the way in these relationships needs to be rethought. As re-enactments, the CSI-shots radically reconfigure those relationships, and oppositions between re-enactment and trace, index and theatricality, long associated with the re-enactment. As celebrations of computer-generated effects, they show us how thinking about the re-enactment has been unleashed from these oppositions with the unprecedented manipulability available to the digital image.

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Chapter 5

Re-staging the Cinema Psycho and the Redundant New Remake

I have argued from the outset that the re-enactment, a form predicated on repetition, has become tied to forms of technical repetition that are changing status, taking on different functions, meanings and referential relationships. In this chapter, I propose to make a case study of Gus Van Sant’s controversial shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic, Psycho. I have chosen Van Sant’s film both because it marks an attempt to rethink the question of what a remake is and because its emphasis on remaking Psycho shot-for-shot serves to foreground repetition in the remake. It is a remake that draws attention to itself as both repetition and performance, invoking the tension between the two agendas that I have identified as central to the re-enactment. Its self-conscious emphasis on staging, performance and literal repetition brings out the self-reflexivity of the re-enactment in the remake.

Van Sant attempted to replicate almost exactly, with a few minor variations, the narrative, framing, blocking and editing of the original Psycho, right down to the length of the shots and the timing of the actors’ performances. At the same time, he also decided to update the setting of his film to the 1990s, the era in which it was released. This required some minor updates to the script, for example, to take account of changes in social mores and incomes, as well as choosing furnishings,

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costumes and sets contemporary to the 1990s. Obviously, the remake employs new actors in all of the roles and Van Sant also decided to shoot his remake in colour even though Hitchcock’s Psycho was in black-and-white. I will analyse the significance of the use of an updated setting combined with the emphasis on shot- for-shot in this chapter. Of primary importance to my analysis is the self-reflexive emphasis of the remake as a repetition. For me, the emphasis on shot-for-shot repetition provides the frame through which to understand Van Sant’s other creative decisions about how to remake Psycho.

The self-reflexivity of Van Sant’s Psycho highlights ways in which the remake can help to think about the shifting status of technical repetition in a complex and changing media environment. The film raises questions about the remake and the functions of repetition that have for too long lain dormant. The emphasis that Van Sant places on shot-for-shot repetition in a rapidly changing media environment raises the question of the relationship between repetition and redundancy. Can a remake be relevant to the times in which it is made if it replicates a film whose conventions have, over time, inevitably become outmoded? Is a shot-for-shot remake necessarily redundant—indeed, why bother to remake an original—when that original is readily available and reasonably priced on DVD?

Throughout the thesis I have investigated the ways in which shifts in the status and meaning of technical reproducibility relate to the operation of the re-enactment in particular genres, focussing thus far on the newsreel, the historical epic, the biographical film, and police-procedural television. In my discussion of their relationships with the re-enactment, my emphasis has been on the question of transformation. The film remake has a unique relationship to the idea of genre, since it can be conceptualised as a genre in its own right and at the same can ‘jump from

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genre to genre’.1 As John Frow suggests, ‘Every remake simultaneously refers to and remakes the genre to which that intertext belongs.’2

Rather than focussing explicitly on its relationship to repetition, academic conceptualisations of the remake have been driven by considerations of its relationship to intertextuality. For example, Andrew Horton and Stuart McDougal conceive of the remake as a specific aspect of intertextuality, distinguishing it from a more general conceptualisation of ‘citation, plagiarism and allusion’ by defining it as a form of ‘hypertextuality’ in which ‘a new text (the hypertext) transforms a hypotext’.3 Of course, intertextuality is aligned with repetition. Constantine Verevis acknowledges this when he defines the remake as ‘a particular case of repetition’, one that is ‘stabilised, or limited, through the naming and (usually) legally sanctioned (or copyrighted) use of a particular literary and/or cinematic source which serves as a retrospectively designated point of origin and semantic fixity’.4 Verevis positions the remaking of films as a ‘specific (institutionalised) aspect of the broader and more open-ended intertextuality’ associated with ‘other types of repetition such as quotation, allusion and adaptation’.5 As Horton and McDougal rightly say, a film that advertises itself ‘as a reworking of an earlier film’ always ‘forces us to read in a different way, by considering its relationship to the earlier film’.6 In this chapter I want to look at the ways in which Van Sant’s remake both announces and performs its intertextual relationship to Hitchcock’s Psycho as an act of repetition, and to

1 Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, ‘Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction’, Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed by. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 6. 2 John Frow, ‘Review of Horton and McDougal, eds, Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes’, Screening the Past, 1 July 1999, available at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/shorts/reviews/rev0799/jfbr7a.html (accessed 18 February 2011). 3 Andrew Horton and Stuart McDougal, ‘Introduction’, Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, ed. by Andrew Horton and Stuart McDougal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 3. Italics in the original. 4 Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. xii, 21. Italics in the original. 5 Film Remakes, pp. 1, 21. 6 ‘Introduction’, Play It Again, p. 2.

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consider the consequences of this approach for understanding the relationship of the remake to both the re-enactment and technical repetition.

Various taxonomies have been developed in an effort to categorise the different degrees to which remakes announce their intertextuality.7 Whatever the taxonomy, one of the principal distinctions to be drawn is that between the uncredited or disguised remake and the acknowledged or direct remake. James Limbacher defines the ‘disguised or uncredited remake’ as one in which the productions have failed to acknowledge significant plot similarities.8 This kind of film, says Michael Druxman, in which an old script is given a new title, the plot a new setting and a few new incidents, and the characters some new dimensions, was particularly popular in Hollywood during the thirties and forties. The ‘direct remake’, on the other hand, according to Druxman is one that ‘doesn’t try to hide the fact that it is based on an earlier production’: it may make minor changes to dialogue, to narrative, and even perhaps to the title, but is essentially ‘the same film as its predecessor – with publicity campaigns not hiding that fact’.9 Harvey Greenberg divides the direct remake, into two categories: the acknowledged, transformed remake, which acknowledges the original, but makes substantial alterations and the acknowledged, close remake, which replicates the original narrative with minimal or no change.10

Van Sant’s remake of Psycho infamously ‘set a new level of tenacious adherence to its predecessor’,11 pushing the limits of the concept of a direct remake that

7 For example, see Robert Eberwein’s elaborate taxonomy in ‘Remakes and Cultural Studies’, in Play It Again, Sam, pp. 15-33 (pp. 28-31). 8 James Limbacher, Haven’t I Seen You Somewhere Before? Remakes, Sequels and Series in Motion Pictures and Television, 1896-1978 (Ann Arbor: Pierian Press, 1979), p. viii. 9 Michael Druxman, Make it Again, Sam: A Survey of Movie Remakes (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1975), pp. 13-4. 10 Harvey Roy Greenberg, ‘Raiders of the Lost Text: Remaking as Contested Homage in Always’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 18.4 (Winter 1991), 164-72 (p. 170), quoted in Verevis, Film Remakes, p. 9. 11 Brian McFarlane, ‘Book Review of Verevis’s Film Remakes’, Senses of Cinema, 41 (October-December 2006), par. 1, available at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/book-reviews/film-remakes-verevis/ (accessed 18 February 2011).

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acknowledges and stays close to the original. Van Sant’s is by no means the first, or even the first direct, remake of a Hitchcock film, but it does constitute, as Constantine Santas says, ‘the first verbatim remake of a Hitchcock classic’.12 His Psycho is therefore also what Forrest and Koos term a ‘true’ remake, because it ‘copies the way the original’s images are presented on the screen’.13 Van Sant maintains that his ‘Psycho-don’t-change-anything shoot’ was an ‘anti-remake statement’ that emerged out of his anger at Hollywood remakes that ‘would rob the screenplay and forget all the other inputs’.14

While the language of the distinction between the ‘true’ and ‘false’ remake might suggest a preference in the critical reception for the ‘true’ over the ‘false’ remake, in fact the opposite is the case. Forrest and Koos borrow these categories from the critical reception given the remake by French film scholars. Daniel Protopopoff and Michel Serceau regard the ‘false’ remake, characterised by ‘auteurist reworking and re-interpretations’, as far preferable to what they call the ‘shameless plagiarism’ of the ‘true’ remake.15 This attitude to the ‘true’ remake reflects the wider critical reaction to Van Sant’s approach, which proved very unpopular with critics. His ‘shameless plagiarism’, deliberate and openly acknowledged, was the subject of intense, angry and negative reviews which widely considered it an irreverent and foolhardy insult to an original masterpiece, little short of ‘cinematic blasphemy’.16 Van Sant was ‘simply asking for bad reviews’, says James Naremore, proposing that some films have ‘such artistic prestige and historical significance that remaking them, as opposed to quoting them or borrowing their ideas, seems crass and

12 Constantine Santas, ‘The Remake of Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998): Creativity or Cinematic Blasphemy?’ Senses of Cinema 10 (November 2000), par. 2, available at http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/10/psycho.html (accessed 18 February 2011). 13 ‘Introduction’, Dead Ringers, p. 20. 14 Gus Van Sant, ‘Guardian Interviews at the BFI: Gus van Sant’, Guardian, 16 January 2009, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/19/guardian- interview-gus-van-sant (accessed 18 February 2011). 15 Forrest and Koos, ‘Introduction’, Dead Ringers, p. 21, referring to Daniel Protopopoff and Michel Serceau, ‘Faux remakes et vraies adaptations’, in Le Remake et l’adaptation, ed. by Michel Serceau and Daniel Protopopoff (Paris: CinemaAction, 1989), pp. 37-45. 16 Santas, ‘The Remake of Psycho [...] Creativity or Cinematic Blasphemy?’

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pointless’.17 A landmark of suspense cinema, Psycho is considered the first truly violent film on the American screen. In 1992, judged by the U.S. Library of Congress to be of cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Van Sant’s unique endeavour to reproduce shot-for-shot one of cinema history’s most ‘critically saturated’18 films led, perhaps inevitably, to endless nit-picking by critics who were anxious to parade their own intimate acquaintance with the original.

No other remake of Hitchcock has generated the same degree of critical outrage. In 1998, the year in which Van Sant’s Psycho was released, two other direct Hitchcock remakes reached the screen: Andrew Davis’s A Perfect Murder, based on Dial M for Murder (1954), and a TV-movie version of Rear Window (1954), starring Christopher Reeve.19 Neither attracted the outrage levelled at Psycho. Remaking, borrowing and referencing Hitchcock has long been a cinematic and televisual phenomenon, and in Verevis’s view, Van Sant’s very literal and self-conscious remake of Psycho is not so markedly different: it ‘differs textually’ from the multiple circuits of referencing, adapting, remaking and reworking of Hitchcock’s classic ‘not in kind but only in degree’.20 Even the sequels and prequel to Psycho made in the 1980s—Psycho II (Richard Franklin, 1983), Psycho III (Anthony Perkins, 1986) and

17 James Naremore, ‘Remaking Psycho’, in Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual, ed. by Sidney Gottlieb and Christopher Brookhouse (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), pp. 387-95 (p. 388). 18 Bill Schaeffer, ‘Cutting the Flow: Thinking Psycho’, Senses of Cinema, 6 (May 2000), par. 2, available at http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/6/psycho.html (accessed 18 February 2011). 19 Santas, par. 2. 20 Verevis, Film Remakes, p. 68. For example, Mel Brooks’ take-off of Vertigo and Spellbound in High Anxiety; Francis Ford Coppola’s inspiration from Rear Window for The Conversation; and Brian De Palma’s infamous and ubiquitous borrowings from Psycho in Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981) and Body Double (1984). See David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer, ‘Introduction’ and Thomas Leitch, ‘How to Steal from Hitchcock’, in After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality, ed. by David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), p. 8, p. 252.

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Psycho IV: The Beginning (Mick Garris, 1990)—remake aspects of Hitchcock’s original film.21

In 1956, Hitchcock famously released a direct remake of his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much. While this ‘autoremake’,22 like Van Sant’s Psycho, is a direct and acknowledged remake, it differs drastically from Van Sant’s approach. The 1956 film is an acknowledged, transformed remake, which makes substantial transformations to the original film. Since it is driven by ‘auteurist reworking and re- interpretations’, it could be characterised as a ‘false’ remake.23 Although it retains the title and structure of the 1934 original, it has different characterisations. It also has what Stuart McDougal terms ‘different social, political and geographical dynamics’.24 In the eyes of critics and historians alike, Hitchcock had improved on the original, and the 1956 version is commonly favoured. In the director’s own judgement, ‘the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional’.25

It took Van Sant many years to convince Universal Studios, the legal owners of Psycho, to allow him to remake the film. In Van Sant’s case it seems to have been his economic and critical success that won him the studio’s approval. After all, as Robert Eberwein has remarked, ‘Some directors with sufficient clout and economic support may remake a film for personal reasons’.26 According to Van Sant, Universal was the company that I would go to for meetings, and every time they’d ask me what I wanted to do. The first time I said something like, ‘Why don’t you remake something like Psycho without changing it?’ And subsequently, after they laughed at me that time, I’d bring it up again the next year, and the next year, until finally when Good Will Hunting was up for awards, they wanted me to do something at Universal. And I said the Psycho-

21 Verevis, ‘For Ever Hitchcock: Psycho and Its Remakes’, in After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality, ed. by David Boyd and R. Barton Palmer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 15-29 (p. 22). 22 Forrest and Koos, ‘Introduction’, Dead Ringers, p. 22. 23 Forrest and Koos, ‘Introduction’, Dead Ringers, p. 21; Greenberg, p. 170. 24 Stuart McDougal ‘The Director Who Knew Too Much’, in Play It Again, 52-69 (pp. 59-61). 25 Quoted in Druxman, Make It Again Sam, p. 20. 26 ‘Remakes and Cultural Studies’, p. 18.

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don’t-change-anything-shoot, and their response was, ‘We think that’s a really brilliant idea.’27

These comments suggest that, as much as anything else, it was also Van Sant’s persistence that finally persuaded Universal Studios to proceed with the project.

Because Van Sant’s Psycho is an acknowledged, close remake of a film considered a ‘timeless classic’ that in 1960 was ahead of its time, no-one regarded it as an improvement on the original: it replicates almost exactly the narrative of Hitchcock’s original and ‘copies the way the original’s images are presented’.28 But, as McDougal has pointed out: ‘The notion of a remake becomes complex with a filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock because he was continuously and obsessively remaking his own work.’ Not only was it Hitchcock’s practice to return compulsively to particular themes, but he also ‘often remade a single shot or a transition between shots’ as well as ‘entire sequences’.29 It is this kind of remaking at the level of the shot, the sequence and the transition between shots, that is central to Van Sant’s remake. He deliberately repeats filmmaking conventions of more than 30 years earlier and consequently creates an anachronism. The redundancy of this repetition is reinforced by the fact that the original is now widely available on DVD.

Couldn’t the Original Movie Do? When ‘the old film is available alongside the new for video rental’, writes Thomas Leitch, remakes are often in competition with their originals and will typically ‘attempt to supersede [them] for all but a marginal audience watching them for their historical value’ with ‘the goal of increasing the audience by marginalizing the original film, reducing it to the status of the unseen classic’.30 ‘The true remake’, he continues, ‘admires its original so much it wants to annihilate it’. Whereas the shot- for-shot remake, by contrast, works, not to ‘annihilate’ the original, but rather to efface itself and draw our attention to the original film. Van Sant’s Psycho is very

27 ‘Guardian Interviews at the BFI: Gus Van Sant’, Guardian, 16 January 2009. 28 Forrest and Koos, ‘Introduction’, Dead Ringers, p. 21; Greenberg, p. 170. 29 McDougal, pp. 52-3. 30 Thomas Leitch, ‘Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake’, in Dead Ringers, pp. 37-62 (pp. 39-40).

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much what Leitch calls an homage, the primary purpose of which, he says, is ‘to pay tribute to an earlier film rather than usurp its place of honor’. It has not been a particularly common category for the Hollywood remake in Leitch’s view: ‘Homages deal with the contradictory claims of remakes – that they are just like their originals, only better – by renouncing any claims to be better’.31

Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake pushes the ‘homage’ category to its limit. Leitch argues that ‘a faithful homage would be a contradiction in terms (the most faithful homage would be a re-release)’.32 But Van Sant deliberately engages in this ‘contradiction in terms’, precisely at a time when re-release has become a largely unremarked commonplace. His Psycho deliberately ensures its redundancy and performs itself as a spectacular and garishly colourful act of disappearance. At a time when the ‘new availability of old cinema through new technology’ had become a commonplace, everyday aspect of film spectatorship,33 Van Sant’s is a uniquely strange achievement.

The critical dismissal of Van Sant’s efforts to virtually replicate Hitchcock’s Psycho was especially fuelled by the fact that in a major contrast to earlier historical times, when a film had limited currency beyond its initial release, by 1998, when the remade Psycho was released, the home video market had already effected a marked change in the relationship between originals and their remakes.34 In 1952, André Bazin said that he hoped the rise of archives and cine-clubs would result in the demise of the remake.35 Twenty-three years later Michael Druxman was still arguing that, [i]n doing a direct remake, producers hope to draw two types of people into the theatres – those who saw the original film, liked it, and are curious to see how the new stars will handle their roles; and those who have only heard of

31 ‘Twice-Told Tales’, pp. 47, 50, 49. 32 ‘Twice-Told Tales’, p. 47. 33 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p. 12. 34 Verevis, Film Remakes, p. 18. 35 André Bazin, ‘Remade in USA’, Cahiers du cinéma, 2.11 (April, 1952), 54-9 (p. 56); See also Forrest and Koos, p. 22.

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the original and have decided to see the new version because the old one is not available for viewing.36

The story of MGM’s purchase of the negatives of Thorold Dickinson’s original Gaslight (1939) in 1944, as George Cukor was preparing his remake for the studio is part of cinema lore.37 MGM wanted to wholly obliterate access to the original, destroying even the possibility that the original might again become available for viewing. In contrast, the original theatrical run of Hitchcock’s film was so successful that it was actually reissued into cinema theatres in 1965 and 1969. The television rights were originally purchased by CBS in 1966 and Psycho has been aired on general television since 1970 as well as widely circulated on VHS and on DVD and viewed and downloaded online.

Many of the film’s critics argued that the DVD player created the conditions for the redundancy of a shot-for-shot remake. This is certainly the view of Constantine Santas, who asks rhetorically, ‘What can an exact copy do for a viewer, especially a viewer to whom the original is so readily available?’38 And for James Sanford sitting through Van Sant’s Psycho is ‘like watching a team of Kinkos employees assembling the world’s most lavish Xerox job’.39 Roger Ebert, however, argues that Van Sant’s remake is, perversely, ‘an invaluable experiment’, because ‘it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in the chemistry that cannot be timed or counted’.40 Naremore thinks that it might have been better to re-release a 35mm print of the original film.41 While Martin Scorsese’s critically acclaimed 1991 version of Cape Fear circulated happily with J. Lee Thomson’s 1961 version on a collector’s edition DVD box set, Van Sant’s emphasis on shot-for-shot repetition summoned the

36 Make it Again, Sam, p. 18. 37 Leitch, ‘Twice-Told Tales’, p. 50. 38 ‘The Remake of Psycho’, par. 13. 39 James Sanford, ‘Review: Psycho’, available at www.imdb.com/reviews/155/15546.html (accessed 18 February 2011). 40 Roger Ebert, ‘Review: Psycho’, Chicago Sun Times, 6 Dec 1998, available at http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19981206/REVIEWS/81 2060301/1023 (accessed 18 February 2011). 41 ‘Remaking Psycho’, p. 394.

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boundary between remaking and replaying too closely.42 The questions the remake raised for critics generally coalesced into a consensus on a question that captures well the spectatorial conditions into which Van Sant’s Psycho was released: ‘Couldn’t the original movie do?’43

The reasons for which Van Sant’s remake has been dismissed as redundant are the very reasons why the film is useful to the present thesis. Van Sant’s Psycho enables us to understand the shifting status of the cinema as a cultural institution and to think through the intersections between technical repetition, the remake and the re- enactment, especially as they relate to the changing conditions of film spectatorship. Debates about the impact of video and DVD on film spectatorship have tended to centre on the kinds of technical repetition opened up by the DVD player in terms of both the accessibility of a film to be replayed and also the different approaches to replaying available to, and employed by, film spectators. Laura Mulvey, for example, investigates a ‘new active spectatorship’ made available by the video and DVD player, orientated around the act of replaying. She explores the consequences of the fact that we can now watch specific scenes over and over again, fast-forward, rewind, pause, slow-down and speed up any particular film, or stop at any moment in a film as we please.44 Her analysis serves to emphasise that the conditions of film spectatorship are tied up with shifts in the nature of technical reproducibility. How the remake is caught up with these changes, however, has yet to be properly investigated.

Constantine Verevis asks two related questions about the nature of the film remake: ‘How is film remaking different from the cinema’s more general ability to repeat and replay the same film over and again through reissue and redistribution?’ and ‘how does remaking differ from the way every film is “remade” – dispersed and transformed – in its every new context or re-viewing?’45 Because remaking overlaps with other forms of repetition available to the cinema, Verevis argues that a ‘broad

42 Verevis, Film Remakes, p. 16. 43 Santas, ‘The Remake of Psycho’, par. 7. 44 Death 24x a Second, pp. 22, 26. 45 Film Remakes, p. 1.

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conception of the remaking of Psycho’ would acknowledge ‘any of the several re- releases of Psycho (from 1965 onwards) and its subsequent licencing by MCA for network and syndicated television screenings, and (later) sale to video tape and disc, as further revisions – or remakings – of the film’.46 He goes so far as to suggest that remaking might actually extend to ‘the cinema’s ability to repeat and replay the same film over and again’.47 In short, says Verevis, to reissue, re-release, redistribute or replay Psycho is also to remake it.

This approach to Van Sant’s Psycho highlights the problem of trying to think about repetition in the remake outside of a relationship with media time, specifically, the multiple kinds of repetition made increasingly available through re-distribution, re- issue and replaying. Taking my cue from Verevis, I ask, what can be gained from thinking about the remake as imbricated with these multiple forms of repetition, from replaying to redistribution? Rather than argue, as Verevis does, however, for an extension of the idea of remaking to include reissue, re-release and redistribution, I want to consider how Van Sant’s remake stages different relationships between these forms of technical repetition and those that characterise the remake and the re- enactment.

According to the press kit issued by Universal, Van Sant had a DVD of Hitchcock’s Psycho with him on the set, approaching the replaying of the DVD as a tool to facilitate its re-filming.48 Indeed, it is hard to see how, without such an aid, he could have realised his intentions to take the idea of the remake as a repetition literally. It is the unique relationship between these two different forms of repetition – replaying and re-filming – that holds the key to the way in which Van Sant’s film can help us to think about the shifting status of technical repetition in a complex and changing media world that cinema inhabits. By heightening the degree of repetition in the remake with the help of the DVD player, Van Sant created a remake of Psycho that

46 Film Remakes, p. 74. 47 ‘For Ever Hitchcock’, p. 15. 48 Press kit, Psycho, dir. by Gus Van Sant (Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment, 1998), p. 10.

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was itself enabled by, and entangled with, the new forms of technical repetition made available by the DVD player.

By bringing the DVD player onto the set, Van Sant set up a direct interaction between re-staging, replaying and retiming and all three forms of repetition were central to the successful production of a shot-for-shot remake. With the DVD version of the original playing alongside the shooting of each scene, Van Sant required his cast and crew to keep time with Hitchcock’s original. He timed the duration of each scene to coincide precisely with that of the earlier film.49 By trying literally to re- enact Psycho at the same pace as the original film, the production negotiated directly with the tension between performance and repetition inherent in the re-enactment.

The acts of re-enactment performed on-set by Van Sant’s actors and production team were able to attain a specific level of literal repetition precisely because the DVD of Hitchcock’s original was readily available to be replayed. The crew were able to repeat, with a remarkable degree of accuracy, a whole range of actions necessary to the production of a shot-for-shot remake. Even original camera movements are re- performed, including, for example, Hitchcock’s finger-pointing camera that moves in on the enveloped cash, in Marion’s bedroom and again later, immediately after her murder, as the cash sits wrapped in a newspaper in her room at the Bates motel. It was the full range of temporal manipulations opened up by the DVD player – the ability to pause, rewind, fast forward, speed up, slow down and replay the film in digital form – that facilitated this unique attempt at a shot-for-shot remake. Actively manipulating the temporality of the original Psycho over repeated viewings of the DVD even enabled Van Sant to hone in on continuity mistakes he and his team had identified in the original and carefully replicate them.

The Pensive Spectator A key figure in Laura Mulvey’s discussion of the shifting nature of film spectatorship is that of the ‘pensive spectator’, who is ‘engaged with reflection on

49 Press kit, p. 10.

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the visibility of time in the cinema’,50 and this figure has emerged with the new conditions of film spectatorship made available by the DVD player. Mulvey derives her notion of the pensive spectator from Raymond Bellour’s discussion of the way in which freeze-frame analysis opens up an awareness of the relationship between movement and stillness in the cinema, maintaining that Bellour anticipated the kind of reflection on the film image that is now readily available to every DVD spectator.51

Mulvey argues that the interruptions and delays imposed on the flow of a film through return and repetition expose ‘the cinema’s complex relation to time’. The temporalities inherent in film include not only stillness and movement, but also a multiplicity of different speeds – kinds of time that the DVD player makes readily available to the film spectator. As the pensive spectator manipulates the temporality of a film, s/he not only transforms her/his relationship with that film, but also transforms the film itself. When a scene is ‘halted and extracted from the wider flow of narrative development’, when it is ‘broken down into shots and selected frames and further subjected to delay, to repetition and return’, Mulvey argues that, ‘hitherto unexpected meanings can be found hidden in the sequence’.52

Pensive spectatorship of the original Psycho – a mode of viewing that is attentive to and shaped by repetitions, returns, temporal delays and freeze-frame analysis – underlies Van Sant’s remake. Pensive spectatorship enabled the making of the shot- for-shot remake, underpinning the attempt at literal repetition. Van Sant’s Psycho is therefore shaped by the imbrication of the shifting nature of movie spectatorship with the shifting temporalities of technical reproducibility. New ways of consuming old movies has become, with Van Sant’s Psycho, a new way of remaking movies that offers a reflection on new kinds of film consumption, on the complexities of film time and on technical media’s forms of repetition. This pensive spectatorship

50 Death 24x a Second, p. 11. 51 Death 24x a Second, p. 195. 52 Death 24x a Second, pp. 8, 144.

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enables Van Sant to create out of his Psycho a critical reflection both on cinema’s past and the complexities of cinema’s present.

The Delayed Spectator Existing academic material on the remake has tended to draw attention to the different kinds of audience that the remake anticipates and engages. Thomas Leitch, for example, distinguishes between the audience that has never heard of the original film it is based on, the audience that has heard of the film but not seen it, the audience that has seen it but does not remember it, the audience that has seen it but liked it little enough to hope for an improvement, and the audience that has seen it and enjoyed it.53

Eberwein agrees, suggesting that the remake encourages us to ‘return to the original and reopen the question of its reception’.54 While Van Sant operates as a pensive spectator of the original Psycho, he explicitly anticipates a different kind of delayed spectator for his remake, a spectator who may never have seen the original, and especially who never saw it on the cinema screen. The spectator whom Van Sant envisions for his remake arrives at the original masterpiece a generation too late and via technologies unavailable at the time the original was made. He himself is one such spectator, for he did not see Psycho on the cinema screen until he went to film school.55

Van Sant’s aligns this vision of the delayed spectator with his desire to approach Psycho in the spirit of the tradition of staging classics works over and over again in theatre: There is an attitude that the cinema is a relatively new art and therefore there’s no reason to ‘re-stage’ a film. But as the cinema gets older, there is also an audience that is increasingly unpracticed at watching old films, silent films and black and white films.56

53 ‘Twice-Told Tales’, p. 40. 54 ‘Remakes and Cultural Studies’, p. 15. 55 Psycho press kit, p. 5. 56 Ibid.

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Van Sant draws on the tradition of the theatre through a reflection on the shifting status of spectatorship in the cinema. It is his sense that the cinema was ageing, and that film spectatorship had transformed over the lifetime of the cinema, that inspired him to re-stage Psycho. His emphasis on re-staging also infers the theatrical cinema experience. What Van Sant’s remake also stages is a particular historical formation of the cinema: he re-stages Psycho for the cinema theatre.

Reflections on the way in which the cinema had aged, prompted by its centenary celebrations in 1995 (three years before Van Sant’s Psycho was released), were inflected with the coinciding decline and potential obsolescence of the chemical and mechanical technologies that had sustained the cinema over its history. These technologies are synonymous with specific spectatorial conditions: unique and specific occasions of viewing, largely confined to the movie theatre. The decline in these technologies corresponded with the decentring of the theatrical cinema experience, one in which watching a film is a unique and ephemeral event.

As long ago as 1982, Stanley Cavell maintained that cinema’s ‘evanescence’ was becoming less and less inevitable, that emerging distribution technologies were drawing attention to the historical specificity of the experience of movies as exhaustible, disappearing objects.57 In The Virtual Life of Film, Rodowick tells how his sudden discovery in 1989 that Pasolini’s entire oeuvre was available at his local video store marked the moment at which he recognised that film-watching had truly begun to shift from being something rare, requiring the pursuit of unique and specific circumstances, to becoming a customary aspect of his daily life. For Rodowick, this realisation changed his sense of cinema’s relationship to time and with it the realisation of ‘profound consequences for the phenomenology of movie spectatorship’.58

By bringing the theatre’s age-old tradition of re-staging plays to the cinema, Van Sant highlights the ways in which technical reproducibility has produced particular

57 Stanley Cavell, ‘The Fact of Television’, Daedalus, 111.4 (1982), 75-96, (p. 78). 58 Virtual Life of Film, pp. 26-8. Italics in the original.

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ideas and forms of repetition. Joseph Stefano, who wrote the original screenplay for Hitchcock and returned to it for Van Sant, was enormously gratified to see his work treated like a classic American play. He was enthusiastic about the idea of re-staging Psycho: I don’t know of any screenwriters who have had their work remade in the same sense that say, Arthur Miller, has seen his plays redone. Even though the opportunity to see my work brought to life again is something I simply never expected, I thought it was a wonderful thing to happen.59

However, Naremore spots a fundamental difference between a script intended for the stage and one intended for the screen, when he argues that Van Sant’s remake is ‘not simply a re-filming of Joseph Stefano’s script, but an elaborate quotation of things that were literally printed on another film’.60 The critical outrage that greeted the shot-for-shot remake serves to underline how contentious this act of elaborate quotation (framed as an act of re-staging) was. It is these specific conditions of film spectatorship that mark the remake as, in the words of Verevis, a ‘particular case of repetition’,61 one that cannot be separated from its implication in the shifting nature of movie spectatorship and the shifting temporalities of technical reproducibility.

At the same time, Van Sant’s emphasis on re-staging also focuses attention on the ways in which re-staging traditions do inform particular strategies of repetition that underlie the remake production process. The production notes included in the film’s press kit stress the ways in which the remake realised Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène. These included the decision to use the original floor plans and the very Universal Studios lot on which the first Psycho had been filmed, as well as efforts to base costumes and furnishings on the original designs and outlines and, as has already been noted, with the aid of the original shooting script, to replicate Hitchcock’s blocking.62 This emphasis on the production of mise-en-scène frames the remake as the re-enactment of key aspects of the production process. Van Sant even tried to work as closely as he could to Hitchcock’s original 37-day shooting schedule,63

59 Psycho press kit, p. 7. 60 ‘Remaking Psycho’, p. 390. My italics. 61 Film Remakes, p. xii. 62 See Psycho press kit, pp. 4-17. 63 Psycho press kit, p. 10.

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virtually implying that the original production process itself was an event ripe for re- enactment.

Rather than recreating the ‘original experience’, however, these production strategies are deployed in such a way as to produce a remake that inhabits mixed temporal locations. New technologies are used to produce an experience that is at once updated and outmoded. Decisions about how to integrate the updated with the out- dated are discussed in considerable detail in the film’s promotional materials. The press kit reports how the original score was re-recorded and expanded under the supervision of Danny Elfman to take advantage of new sound-recording technologies. But these new technologies were used to re-produce an out-dated experience. The score was re-recorded in stereo, rather than the original mono, but the sound designers tried to recreate the harshness of the original recording as it would have blared out of the speakers in the cinema without fidelity.64 Hitchcock wanted the opening shot of his film to be a long, complete pan/zoom helicopter shot over the city into Marion’s hotel room, but this was impossible, as the helicopter shot was newly invented and could not yet be perfected.65 Instead he had to make do with a combination of swish pans and dissolves. For the remake, taking advantage of the technological developments of the intervening 38 years, Van Sant and his director of photography Christopher Doyle achieved the complete traveling helicopter shot.66 On the other hand, like Hitchcock, Van Sant used rear-screen projection—taking advantage of the latest rear-screen projection technology available— for the early driving sequences, even though by the late 1990s digital effects had largely superseded the old technique.67

It is in the tension between the emphasis on shot-for-shot and the emphasis on updating the mise-en-scène that the significance of Van Sant’s remake becomes fully

64 Psycho press kit, p. 13. 65 Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), p. 80; Bill Krohn, Hitchcock at Work (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 234. 66 Psycho press kit, p. 11. 67 Ibid.

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apparent. The remake replicates the timing of the original film narrative but updates the means by which its temporalities are reproduced. Updated fashions and furnishings, for example, sit uneasily in out-dated narrative conventions. Van Sant’s remake inhabits a setting contemporary with the times in which it was released in the late 1990s, but re-enacts the modes of suspense that the original pioneered. This produces a sense of redundancy because the narrative conventions the film re-enacts, innovative and shocking in the original Psycho, are tired and clichéd nearly four decades later. As Godfrey Cheshire observes, the original Psycho ‘depended on narrative surprises that can’t possibly be surprising now; on genre conventions that were superseded decades ago; and on material considered daring in 1960 that’s long since lost its power to raise even an eyebrow’.68 Naremore agrees, saying that Van Sant fails because he is ‘unwilling or unable to generate even a modicum of the fear Hitchcock induced in his original audience’.69 While the original film terrified Naremore in 1960, Van Sant’s registers on his ‘personal fright meter […] far lower than any number of movies that were clearly influenced by Psycho, including Polanski’s Repulsion, Freidkin’s The Exorcist, Spielberg’s Jaws and even De Palma’s Carrie and Dressed to Kill.’70

Druxman argues a problem for film remakes is that in ‘many cases, the moral values or situations in a once-exciting story have become so antiquated that even the best screenwriter cannot make the plot workable for contemporary audiences’.71 Limbacher likewise argues, ‘Many are made with the best intentions […] but often as not, a story which broke box office records in 1935 may prove completely out of touch with the times in 1955 or 1974, even though rewriting and updating are meticulously done.’72 Van Sant’s Psycho explicitly foregrounds this kind of anachronism, updating ‘the times’ in which the film was set but simultaneously

68 Godfrey Cheshire, ‘Psycho – “Psycho” Analysis: Van Sant’s Remake Slavish but Sluggish’, Variety, 6 Dec 1998, available at http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117913763?refcatid=31 (accessed 18 February 2011). 69 ‘Remaking Psycho’, p. 388. 70 ‘Remaking Psycho’, p. 389. 71 Make It Again, Sam, p. 24. 72 Haven’t I Seen You Somewhere Before?, p. viii.

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succeeding to make the narrative seem old-fashioned and out-of-date. Santas argues, for example, that while $40,000 in the original movie was ‘enough to tempt, but not large enough to defy logic’, even the upgrade to $400,000 in the remake ‘seems far, far too much to carry in one’s pocket even in today’s world, where cash transactions are rare’.73 The updated opening scene, in which Sam Loomis and Marion Crane lie in a post-coital state of nudity, fails to conjure even a whiff of mischief out of what was originally a highly scandalous, but less explicit, scene. Druxman argues that, ‘Changes in production and acting techniques as well as the […] maturing social attitudes of the public’ have made many of the original films that were ‘early classics’ themselves into ‘anachronisms’.74 However, while Van Sant’s remake embodies and foregrounds the anachronism of the intervening years, Hitchcock’s Psycho has endured as a ‘timeless’ classic.

The Temporally Dislocated Spectator In Leitch’s taxonomy, the true remake ‘seeks to make the original relevant by updating it’.75 Van Sant achieved quite a feat in producing a new film, up-to-date with contemporary mores that also used up-to-date digital production and post- production techniques, that did not supersede the original, but actually set itself up as already obsolete, already superseded. His meticulously faithful practice of re- enactment presented the remade version as a strange, redundant object. Druxman refers to what he terms ‘timeliness’ as a common factor driving the decision to remake a film: The coming of sound, colour and wide screen, for example, prompted remakes of films that were liable to be enhanced by these processes. New screen techniques might have been perfected or the theme of a film becomes relevant again.76 In the case of Van Sant’s Psycho, it is its disappointing redundancy that is central to its radical approach and central to its ability to be timely. The ‘timeliness’ to which his remake refers is the changing nature of film production and reception.

73 Santas, ‘The Remake of Psycho’, par. 9. 74 Make It Again, Sam, p. 24. 75 ‘Twice-Told Tales’, p. 49. 76 Make It Again, Sam, p. 18. See also Forrester and Koos, Dead Ringers, pp. 3, 20.

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Forrest and Koos argue that remakes ‘reflect the different historical, economic, social, political and aesthetic conditions that made them possible’.77 Horton and McDougal propose that, ‘To watch Robert Mitchum in the original 1962 Cape Fear and Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 version is not just to watch widely differing acting and directorial styles, but to experience the historical and cultural changes that have occurred within the twenty-nine years separating these films.’78 By contrast, to watch Van Sant’s Psycho is to experience the relationship between the historical/cultural changes and technological changes of the intervening years. The promotional materials for Van Sant’s Psycho, in particular the production notes and press kit, make scarcely any reference to issues of theme and characterisation, but instead, in extensive detail and with great self-consciousness, emphasise the technical aspects of the production process.

‘Periods of intense technological change are always extremely interesting for film theory’, argues Rodowick, ‘because the films themselves tend to stage its primary question: what is cinema?’79 The current transitions have also, he continues, made us ‘suddenly aware that something was cinema’, and prompt us to ask, not only ‘what is cinema?’ but also, ‘what was cinema?’80 Van Sant’s Psycho does more than prompt these questions, it puts them into dialogue with one another. Laura Mulvey’s term ‘delayed cinema’ describes an engagement with the cinema that participates in this dialogue between the cinema’s past and its future. She argues that ‘the coincidence between the cinema’s centenary and the arrival of digital technology’ created a false opposition ‘between the old and the new’.81 This false opposition fails to take into account the fact that digital convergence has produced a complex dialectic between digital and analogue technologies. The delayed cinema, which engages directly with the realities of digital convergence, challenges ‘patterns of time that are neatly ordered around the end of an era, its “before” and its “after”’.82

77 Dead Ringers, p. 3. 78 Play It Again, Sam, p. 6. 79 Virtual Life of Film, p. 9. 80 Virtual Life of Film, p. 31. 81 Death 24x a Second, p. 26. 82 Death 24x a Second, p. 23.

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Instead of establishing a relationship between ‘before’ and ‘after’, Van Sant’s Psycho blends old and new, reflecting the period of intense technological change in which it was made, characterised by the convergence of outdated and updated technologies working together in the same media environment. The remake meticulously integrates these updated and out-dated elements, playing with the temporalities of a so-called ‘timeless classic’ in such a way as to make the remake appear anachronistic and outmoded. With his redundant new remake, Van Sant managed to stage for us not only an idea of the cinema that is passing away, but also the contradictory, changing times in which the cinema currently lives. It is the uneven temporality, set up through the tension between the outdated and the updated, that makes Van Sant’s remake a version of Mulvey’s politically charged delayed cinema and foregrounds this tension in the remake genre more generally. In Van Sant’s Psycho, the mixed temporal locations of the remake produce a different kind of temporally dislocated spectator who witnesses a remake that uses new technologies to produce outdated experiences and updated fashions and furnishings and morals that do not match with the outdated narrative conventions. The remake performs a relationship to cinema history through a reflection on this marginalised, delayed and temporally dislocated spectator.

The Television Spectator As I have suggested, the Psycho press kit points out that, ‘[l]ike many film-watchers of his generation, Van Sant first saw Hitchcock’s Psycho on television’.83 Rodowick, another child of the generation for whom television programming and broadcasting practices played a central role in shaping and transforming film spectatorship, argues:

[M]y generation might owe a certain historical attitude to film to the functioning of broadcast television as a film museum. […] For many of us, television was our first repertory theatre, and to television we owe strategies of programming by genre and close analysis based on repetitive viewing.84

83 Psycho press kit, p. 5. 84 Virtual Life of Film, p. 28.

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Van Sant watched the original Psycho, first of all, as this other kind of delayed spectator, the television spectator, before he became its pensive spectator and before he pursued the temporal dislocations that marked the shifts in spectatorship taking place at the turn of cinema’s centenary.

The television spectator is an especially important figure in relation to the original Psycho. The reverence in which Hitchcock’s Psycho is held as a ‘timeless’, enduring classic obscures the fact that the film was made within the Hollywood studio system at a time when the old Hollywood cinema was in crisis as a result of the rise of television and of independent film production in America. According to Stephen Rebello, because of Paramount Studio’s reluctance to finance Psycho, Hitchcock began to explore ways in which the film’s budget costs could be trimmed. (Paramount merely distributed the final film.) His solution: to return to black-and- white, to low-budget, scaled-down production values and ‘plan his new production as scrupulously as he would any big-budget feature film, but shoot it quickly and inexpensively, almost like an expanded episode of his TV series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”.’85 He financed the film himself and made it at television pace with multiple set ups (between fourteen and eighteen a day) using some of his regular television collaborators and crew at MCA and Universal-International.86 Hitchcock also frequently used two cameras during production, a standard practice for television at the time, but not for cinema. According to Bill Krohn, on days when two cameras were used, ‘the assistant who worked the slate was upgraded to first camera assistant, while the first assistant operated the additional camera’. Krohn adds, ‘This would have been one reason for using a television cameraman and crew to shoot Psycho.’87

The trailer for Psycho was even modelled on Hitchcock’s introductions to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and scripted by James Allardice, who wrote the lead-ins for the television series.88 Robert Kapsis proposes that the trailer would have led television

85 Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, p. 26. 86 Rebello, pp. 26, 28, 84; Verevis, Film Remakes, p. 61. 87 Hitchcock at Work, p. 224. 88 Rebello, pp. 27-8.

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audiences to believe that ‘Psycho would be in the tradition of Hitchcock’s macabre little teleplays’.89 Television audiences, he goes on, would have taken pleasure in their teleplay expectations being tickled by ‘the black-and-white photography, the moments of suspense, the sardonic wit and macabre humor, the ordinariness of its characters and the drabness of its setting’.90

For Mulvey, Hitchcock’s decision to return to black-and-white, to low-budget production values and to the studio certainly acknowledges the emerging conventions of television production, but it also ‘harks back to an earlier era of Hollywood’.91 In doing this, she writes, the film produces ‘a sense of the “new” out of a rearrangement of the “old”’: Psycho represents a moment of change in the history of the film industry. […] The crisis in the old Hollywood film industry, caught at a crossroads, faced with its own mortality, gave him the opportunity to write its epitaph, but also to transcend its conventions and create something startling and new.92

Hitchcock responded to the complex transitions underway in film production – which manifested as a crisis for the Hollywood studios and a crisis of funding for Hitchcock – by employing production techniques associated with the ‘threat’ itself. In Psycho he created a hybrid of film and television production techniques. Since the second half of the twentieth century, according to John Ellis, cinema and television ‘need each other’ and are ‘bound in a relationship of mutual dependence’, based on money, audiences and cultural positioning.93 Psycho constitutes an early ancestor in this relationship of mutual dependence, signalling what was to come and embracing hybridity rather than crisis, jealousy or competition.

89 Robert Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), p. 60. 90 Ibid. 91 Death 24x a Second, p. 85. 92 Ibid. 93 John Ellis, ‘Cinema and Television: Laios and Oedipus’, in Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), pp. 127-35 (p. 127).

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With Psycho, the pace of the production was that of television but, in Mulvey’s account, the ‘look’ suggested both television and an earlier, more prosperous era of Hollywood. The production techniques Hitchcock employed made Psycho appear like a teleplay but also at the same time, like an old black-and-white Hollywood movie, signalling both a return to the past and an incorporation of the new. As well, at the time when the original Psycho was released, classical black-and-white Hollywood films still constituted a significant amount of the material broadcast on US television. Psycho is therefore marked by innovations that are also often anachronisms. The use of black-and-white especially embodies both the status of a relic from cinema’s past, already being recycled on television, and simultaneously the look of a fresh new competitor. The film responded to the unique historical moment in which it was made with a combination of the updated and the out-dated. In other words, Hitchcock’s Psycho staged the temporal dislocations that marked its own historical moment just as Van Sant’s remake stages the temporal dislocations that mark its own historical moment.

Van Sant’s approach to Psycho, however, does not signal these historical specificities and temporal dislocations in the original. His decision to film the remake in colour is perhaps the most obvious violation of the historical specificity of Hitchcock’s Psycho, which was, as we have seen, very deliberately filmed in black- and-white. Hitchcock had already made Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, North by Northwest and Vertigo in colour before he made Psycho. Hitchcock had even already shot the 1956 remake of his 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much in technicolour. As Naremore describes, Since the middle fifties he [Hitchcock] and his chief cameraman, had developed a sensitive and beautiful color photography, which achieved its fullest expression in Vertigo (1958). The opening parts of Psycho offer a completely different visual experience, more like an elaborate version of Hitchcock and Russel’s black-and-white TV shows.94

94 James Naremore, Filmguide to Psycho (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 28.

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Psycho was not filmed in black-and-white because it pre-dated films in colour, Hitchcock used black-and-white both as a reference to early films, something old, and at the same time to television, something new.

However, in 1998, colour television having been selling in large numbers in the US since the late 1960s, the use of black-and-white had an entirely different meaning from that which it had four decades earlier. The frivolous, garish, rosy, bright ‘candy-box’95 colour choices for Van Sant’s remake perhaps reference instead the subsequent reformulation of Psycho by the slasher movie.96 Psycho is the major ancestor to the genre, especially two of its seminal works, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978).97 In this, the remake reflects the changing status of the conventions Psycho pioneered and the new genres it subsequently inspired. It maintains the original out-dated narrative conventions, but makes Psycho look like the kind of movies that have worn those conventions into clichés.

Van Sant’s remake cannot re-stage the historical specificities of Hitchcock’s Psycho. It stages its own changing times instead. In doing so, the remake adds to the existing anachronisms of the original. In Van Sant’s Psycho, anachronism is achieved largely by the emphasis on shot-for-shot repetition itself, an emphasis facilitated by the DVD version of Hitchcock’s Psycho being played alongside the re-enactment being performed on-set by the cast and crew. Today, in 2011, the two Psychos are circulating on DVD in the same media environment. So how does Van Sant’s Psycho trouble or settle the place of Hitchcock’s Psycho in cinema history? Does it ‘hold up a mirror to the original film’, as Van Sant proposed, circulating in cinema history as the original’s ‘schizophrenic twin’?98

95 Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Hack Job’, Chicago Reader, 25 Dec 1998, available at www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=6514 (accessed 18 February 2011). 96 Verevis, ‘For Ever Hitchcock’, p. 23. 97 Carol Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, Representations, 20 (Fall 1987), 187-228 (p. 192). 98 Psycho press kit, p. 5.

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Robert Eberwein questions a tendency among film critics to treat ‘the original and its meaning for its contemporary audience as a fixity, against which the remake is measured and evaluated’. He argues that the meaning of the original must instead be understood as ‘still in process’.99 For most of the reviewers who wrote about the remake, the perceived banality of Van Sant’s Psycho only served to solidify the place of Hitchcock’s Psycho in cinema history as a superior masterpiece and a ‘timeless classic’. Nonetheless, Van Sant’s Psycho reminds us that the cinema isn’t timeless. Times change and with them so does the cinema. The circulation of the remake in the same marketplace provides a vision, just as Hitchcock’s Psycho did, of cinema in transition.

99 ‘Remakes and Cultural Studies’, p. 15.

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Chapter 6

Performing Differently in a Parallel Universe Re-enactment, Delayed Cinema and Fugitive Testimony

At the end of the twentieth century new technologies opened up new perceptual possibilities, new ways of looking, not at the world, but at the internal world of the cinema. The century had accumulated a recorded film world, like a parallel universe, that can now be halted or slowed or fragmented.

Laura Mulvey1

One can say that the sampling and reworking of a digital image is a new performance of it.

D. N. Rodowick2

The eager adoption of the VCR into lounge rooms in the 1980s was followed by the DVD player in the 1990s and the rise of online film viewing and downloads in the 2000s. With these new modes of viewing, the ability of the viewer to control the temporalities of films and other audio-visual materials in the viewing situation has become an aspect of media use that is taken for granted. The re-timing of moving images – always available, in principle, to the projectionist – is now something

1 Death 24x a Second, p. 181. 2 Virtual Life of Film, p. 16.

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everyone can do, thanks to the viewing apparatuses of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As I argued in Chapter 5, and as numerous film theorists have pointed out, we can now fast-forward, rewind, pause, slow-down and speed up film and video footage on a wide range of reasonably affordable personal recording and playing devices. We can make time reversible and engage with a multiplicity of different speeds, repetitions and non-linear temporalities and this marks a widely recognised shift in film spectatorship.3

New viewing technologies are changing our relationship to repetition. The new kinds of control offered to spectators over the temporalities of technical repetition have become so commonplace that this must impact on our understanding of the re- enactment as a practice and a representational form that always entails the act of repetition. Fundamental to my argument in this thesis is the belief that the re- enactment cannot be understood outside of its mediation and I have identified some of the ways that the transformations that the re-enactment has undergone as a representational form over the last century are tied to changes in screen and photochemical media. I want in this chapter to develop some of the ideas I addressed earlier regarding both the relationships between re-enactment and other forms of repetition and I raise again the question of how the re-enactment’s investments in performance and theatricality are tied to technical reproducibility. From the outset, I have pointed to the re-enactment as a pervasive form of historical representation in film and other screen based media. If our relationship to the past is increasingly structured around and through moving images, then the ways in which we access the past are also increasingly shaped by viewing technologies that enable us to control and manipulate moving images. Here I contend that the kinds of re- timing made available by means of contemporary replay technologies have opened up new questions about how we understand re-enactment as a form of historical representation. I am interested in the way in which replay technologies enable us to ‘re-play’ film and media events in ways that re-enact those events.

3 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, pp. 27-8.

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Re-enacting a film or media event by manipulating its technical timing can become a way of interrogating film and media events that can negotiate directly with the tension between performance and repetition central to the re-enactment as a representational form. As I have discussed, a re-enactment must ensure that it is recognised as a repetition and as a performance of a past event (although as I indicated in Chapter 4, this pre-existing event can be fictional). In her essay ‘Avant- garde Re-enactment: World Mirror Cinema, Decasia, and The Heart of the World’, Michele Pierson writes, ‘In a re-enactment, something is repeated (a past way of living, or doing, or acting), and through the activity of its performance, that which is repeated is also transformed.’4 This emphasis on the way that performance in the re- enactment always transforms what it repeats is central to my understanding of how replay technologies can re-enact film and media events.

Throughout the thesis I have argued that performance plays a crucial role in the way in which the re-enactment authenticates itself as historically accurate and is thus central to the ways in which a re-enactment announces itself as a re-enactment. In this chapter, I explore how the shifting parameters of performance—in terms of both what is recognised as performance and new locations of and for performance— impact on understandings of the re-enactment. In an epigraph to this chapter Rodowick argues that ‘sampling and reworking’ a digital image can ‘produce a new performance of it’.5 Unlike earlier forms of performance for film, television and video, this ‘new performance’ is not reliant upon a pro-filmic field: it is not based in what happens in front of the camera, but rather on what happens in and through the reworking of audio-visual material. Personal recording and playing devices enable us to make recorded events perform in new ways, one of which is through the re-timing of moving images: slowing down or speeding up their movement and halting the flow of movement and time to create new ‘performances’.

I want to investigate two instances in which, by means of re-timing, a moving image has been made to perform differently in and by texts that have reworked the

4 ‘Avant-Garde Re-enactment’, p. 2. 5 Virtual Life of Film, p. 16.

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temporal structure of the original moving image. Douglas Gordon’s 1993 award- winning video installation 24-Hour Psycho, which digitally slowed the whole of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) to a rate that simulates two frames per second, was first shown at the Tramway in Glasgow and at Kunst-werk in Berlin in 1993.6 It has since been shown in galleries all around the world. Exhibited without any soundtrack on a free-standing three-metre by four-metre translucent screen that is positioned diagonally in the centre of a darkened gallery space, 24-Hour Psycho enables visitors to move around the installation and view the projection from both sides of the screen. The installation, which pre-dates the release of Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho by five years, exemplifies one way in which the re-timing of an existing film can produce a new performance of the events of that film.

The other example I focus on is George Holliday’s home video of four Los Angeles Police Department officers assaulting a twenty-five year old African American man, Rodney King, as it was infamously re-timed by the LAPD officers’ defence lawyers. The assault took place in the early hours of 3 March 1991, as King was surrounded by twenty-five officers and a police helicopter. The re-timing of Holliday’s video of this event was effected during the six-week court trial California v. Powell, Koon, Wind and Briseno (1992). The prosecution presented the video of the assault of King as its ‘star witness’ and ‘an automatic indictment’,7 but during the trial proceedings the video was made to perform for the defence. Jury members were made to watch the videotape more than thirty times at different speeds and in every conceivable way, frame-by-frame, in freeze frames, forwards and backwards, and in slow-motion with voice-over narration. These techniques were one means by which defence

6 In 1996, Gordon won the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded to a British contemporary artist under fifty, largely on the strength of 24-Hour Psycho. It was the first time the prize had been won by an artist working with video. 7 Quoted in Frank Tomasulo, ‘“I’ll See It When I Believe It”: Rodney King and the Prison-House of Video’, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modernist Event, ed. by Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 69-88 (p. 78).

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counsel were able to convince the jury to acquit the four officers of charges of assault and excessive force.8

I have chosen to discuss two examples from very different contexts – the courtroom and the gallery – in order to highlight the fact that re-enactment is not limited to any one medium or cultural form, or, indeed, to any simple or straightforward idea of performance. It has been my contention from the outset that the re-enactment has always been a highly mobile and adaptable form, travelling easily across media and institutional contexts. It is important to note that because the re-timing of Holliday’s video was a performance that took place only in the courtroom for the benefit of twelve jury members, details of it only reached the attention of the public via written and verbal accounts. By contrast, Gordon’s installation has been shown in public galleries for almost two decades and has been experienced by thousands. Rather than deal with them consecutively, I propose to bring these two case studies – cinema history re-timed for gallery consumption and home video re-timed for a jury – into conversation, by moving back and forth between them. My aim here is to foreground the similarities between these two radically different re-enactments that have been seen as having very different ‘politics’.

Each of these re-enactments has been discussed in relation to different debates in film theory and critical theory. The extensive theoretical work on the court case California v. Powell, Koon, Wind and Briseno has focused primarily on the idea that visual evidence is always fugitive in that it can have multiple and provisional meanings. The interpretations of the video produced in the courtroom by the defence illustrated for many scholars what Patrice Petro describes as ‘the evidential force and the powerful indeterminacy of the image and its reception’.9 As I shall show, their re-timing of the video was a crucial factor in the defence’s ability to change the status and meaning of Holliday’s original recording. The re-timing of Hitchcock’s

8 In April 1993, in a second Federal civil-rights trial, Officers Koon and Powell were found guilty of civil-rights violations. Officers Wind and Briseno were acquitted. 9 Patrice Petro, ‘Introduction: History Happens’, Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video ed. by Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. x.

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Psycho in 24-Hour Psycho, on the other hand, interrogates the conventions of cinema’s exhibition and raises questions about how cinema has been transformed over the course of its existence.

In contrast to the defence team’s multiple manipulations of the temporality of Holliday’s video, Gordon employs one technique to re-time Psycho: he simply slows it down. First exhibited on VHS tape, 24-Hour Psycho now runs on DVD, which Gordon says provides the easiest and most successful means of slowing Hitchcock’s film down to a rate that simulates two frames per second.10 He uses these domestic replay technologies to produce a monumental reflection on cinema history. Frequently discussed in debates about the status of cinema at the end of the twentieth century, 24-Hour Psycho was first exhibited just as the 1995 celebrations for cinema’s centenary were approaching, a centenary that was marked by musings about how cinema had changed and aged. Gordon’s video installation stages a dialogue in the gallery space between cinema’s celebrated history, epitomised by Hitchcock’s Psycho, and readily available electronic and digital home viewing technologies.

In 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Laura Mulvey positions 24-Hour Psycho as ‘a significant, and a public, meditation on new forms of private spectatorship’.11 Mulvey uses the term ‘delayed cinema’ to describe an increasingly ubiquitous engagement with cinema that uses electronic and digital technologies to slow, halt, delay, repeat and return to images, moments or sequences in a film. She focuses on how engagement with films by means of delays, repetitions, returns and other forms of re-timing made available through domestic viewing devices can produce many different kinds of spectatorial encounters with cinema as well as different transformations of the films themselves.

In Chapter 5, I argued that delayed cinema uses the DVD player to establish a connection between the past and the future of cinema. In this chapter, I want to turn

10 See ‘Meet the Artist: Douglas Gordon’, Hirshhorn Museum, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXY99WS-Byo (accessed 18 February 2011). 11 Death 24x a Second, p. 102. Italics in the original.

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to the ways in which delayed cinema – understood here as primarily about a degree of investigation into the illusion of movement – can lead to a practice of re- enactment. I consider how 24-Hour Psycho investigates the tension between movement and stillness at the heart of film exhibition. Furthermore, I examine how its re-enactment of Hitchcock’s Psycho produces new performances and new events out of the original film, performances that reveal that the particular narrative events for which Psycho is celebrated can only operate at the speed of 24 frames a second. Focussing on how the reworking of the temporal structure of the Rodney King video enabled a very particular re-enactment of the events it contained, I want to demonstrate how this re-enactment certified the video’s status as fugitive testimony by anchoring the video in an interpretive framework that contradicted the ‘meaning’ of the video that was circulating in the public domain.

In bringing together these two very different examples of how the re-timing of a moving-image can produce a form of re-enactment, let it not be thought that I am suggesting that the re-timing of moving-images by means of replay technologies always and inevitably results in re-enactment. Rather, my aim is to demonstrate how, in some instances, re-timing can make an original film or video perform again in a way that constitutes a form of re-enactment. As I discussed in the Introduction, it has been primarily in contemporary art theory and performance studies that re-enactment has been understood as a strategic practice that opens up questions about the relationship between technical reproducibility, performance, mediation and idea of the event. In both examples under discussion here, re-enactment also becomes a strategy for scrutinising film and media events by controlling and interfering with their technical timing. In doing so, both re-enactments also open up questions about the ways in which we rely on replay technologies to access, experience and verify the past.

A Parallel Universe Both Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Bill Schwarz have argued that we now experience the past in relation to and through media time. Nowell-Smith focuses on cinema’s

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role in recording history and declares that ‘[t]he history of the cinema is the history of the twentieth century.’12 Inspired by Nowell-Smith, Schwarz makes the case that [c]inema, radio and television not only created new narrative times and organised new sensations of time (real and imagined, so long as those distinctions work); they also depended for their existence on unprecedented time frames and created new indices of social, or historical, time.13

As I observed in the Introduction, Schwarz contends that the impact of cinema, radio and television on modern societies requires historians not only to think about historical time as occupying different velocities, scales and speeds, but also to entertain the possibility that historical time could be subjective or fragmentary.14 For Nowell-Smith, cinema’s history is intricately connected to what he calls ‘changing patterns of subjectivity. [...] Cinema is embedded deep into what one might call the external histories of the century – those of economics and politics for example – but even more deeply into the history of modern subjectivity.’15 This history of subjectivity includes our increasing ability to control the temporalities of film and other audio-visual materials on our domestic and mobile replay technologies.

Mulvey addresses related concerns in Death 24x a Second, where she identifies both the ways in which history is archived cinematically and the ways that access to this history is enabled by particular viewing technologies. Responding to Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998), which intertwines cinema history with the recording of the history of the twentieth century, she suggests that ‘cinema will increasingly become a source of collective memory of the twentieth century for those who missed living through it’.16 Frank Tomasulo also believes that understandings of historical events rely heavily on film, television and video: ‘Our concepts of historical referentiality (what happened), epistemology (how it happened), and historical memory (how we interpret it and what it means to us) are

12 ‘On History’, p. 160. 13 ‘Media Times/Historical Times’, p. 93. 14 ‘Media Times/Historical Times’, p. 101. 15 ‘On History’, pp. 171, 160. 16 Death 24x a Second, pp. 24-5.

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now determined primarily by media imagery.’17 How we access this collective, historical memory is increasingly shaped by the time-frames made available by the VCR and DVD player. Mulvey believes that these machines open up new sensations of time that have transformed our relationship to the history of both the century and the cinema. She imagines the cinema at the end of the twentieth century as a kind of ‘parallel universe’, a ‘recorded film world’ that, like the recorded events of the ‘real’ world, can be ‘halted or slowed or fragmented’.18

As new events become part of the recorded world of cinema’s ‘parallel universe’, we increasingly read them through an understanding of time shaped by the DVD player and online viewing technologies. From its earliest days in the last years of the nineteenth century, film has been associated with the successful production of the illusion of movement. By contrast, Mulvey’s vision of the cinema universe at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, has become increasingly characterised by the slowing, halting, extracting, skipping, repeating and fragmenting of sequences. In her view, electronic and digital replay technologies serve to foreground ‘the aesthetic exploration of movement and stillness as a privileged quality of the cinema’.19 Now that we can, by the mere press of a button, tinker with the illusion of movement by stopping and starting the flow of images, what we now think of as film is something that not only moves, but that we can make move. If we experience the past in relation to and through media time, as Nowell-Smith and Schwarz argue, our relationship to the past is also increasingly shaped by replay technologies that enable us to experience time as multi-directional, fragmentary and moving at different speeds.

In Chapter 3, I proposed that in the current media environment a re-enactment is certified not so much the events it re-enacts as the media representations of those events. In Chapter 2, I looked at the way in which a re-enactment can effectively change the historical event it re-enacts, blurring the boundaries between the event and its representation. Here I want to move forward and propose that our ability to

17 Tomasulo, pp. 70-1. 18 Death 24x a Second, p. 181. 19 Death 24x a Second, pp. 181-2.

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play around with time’s directionality through contemporary replay technologies can problematise the parameters of a film or media event. Both Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho and the LAPD defence lawyers show how the re-timing of film and video can make a familiar film or media event give a very different performance of itself. It is important to note that Holliday’s home video footage of King’s assault and Hitchcock’s Psycho already had the status of media and film events before the specific re-timings I am discussing here. Holliday made his nine-and-a-half minute recording on a cheap small-format home video camera from the balcony of his Lake View Terrace apartment in South-Central Los Angeles, ‘sandwiched between mundane scenes of Holliday family members playing Nintendo and the family cat licking its paws’.20 He sold the recording to Los Angeles TV station KTLA, who aired ninety seconds of it on its 10pm news programme on 4 March 1991, not much more than 24 hours after the assault had occurred. KTLA made the footage available to CNN, who distributed it to other networks, nationally and internationally, and in the process making it and the assault it captured into a global media event.21 The televised tape sparked widespread public outrage and debate, especially in the United States. Los Angeles Mayor, Tom Bradley, was prompted to establish an independent commission to investigate police brutality and racism in the LAPD. The commission’s report, which was critical of the police department, was released on 9 July 1991, eight months before the video became the centrepiece of the first court trial of the LAPD officers.

Holliday filed a copyright infringement against a number of television stations over their use of his video recording, but on 11 June 1993, US District Court Judge Irving Hill ruled that the tape was of such significant national interest that in this instance the right of the public to view the footage outweighed any property rights Holliday might hold. The footage, he said, was ‘as important, or more important, than My

20 Tomasulo, p. 74. 21 The significance of amateur video footage as eyewitness evidence of crimes, disasters and other events of interest to news media has only increased since 1991 as the spread of video cameras to mobile phone devices and the easy upload of such video footage to social media and news websites makes their circulation all the more rapid.

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Lai’.22 To the mind of Holliday’s attorney, James Jordan, the videotape was ‘the most viewed and, I daresay, the most important videotape of the twentieth century’.23

Min Huong Song argues that the events in the video were ‘enacted and reproduced on our television screens ad nauseum’ to produce a ‘primal scene’ that has since made the video ‘the source of a preferred tableau vivant of police misconduct’.24 The circulation of the video images of King ‘on the ground, one arm stretched outward to protect his face, a circle of light illuminating uniformed figures wielding steel batons against him’, became shorthand for police brutality.25 A primal scene, as defined by Ned Lukacher, is an ‘ontologically undecidable intertextual event’, situated ‘between historical memory and imaginative construction’ that becomes ‘the historical source for the meaning and interpretation of other texts’.26 When the King video was subsequently employed in the 1992 court case, one of the major tasks of the LAPD officers’ defence team was to cast doubt on the status of the video as a primal scene for police brutality and to direct its meaning away from this dominant interpretation.

The primal scene for 24-Hour Psycho is not a home video turned news media event. It is Hitchcock’s original Psycho – a major feature film by one of cinema’s best- known directors and a landmark in cinema history – that provides the historical interpretive source for the video installation. One of the most profitable films of all time, Psycho broke every box-office record Hitchcock had set and shattered attendance records around the world in 1960. The first cinema screenings of Psycho also marked the film as a new kind of movie event. Paramount hired uniformed Pinkerton guards to enforce Hitchcock’s policy that no-one be admitted to theatres once the film had started. Hitchcock established this policy primarily to maximize

22 Quoted in Gale Holland, ‘Media had Right to King Video Tape, Judge Rules’, Copley News Service, 11 June 1993. News video reports of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam were crucial in turning public opinion against the American intervention into the Vietnam War. 23 James Jordan,‘9⅓ Minutes Changed Life of Videotaper’, Atlanta Journal- Constitution, 24 April 1993, A3, quoted in Tomasulo, p. 75. 24 Min Huong Song, Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 69. 25 Ibid. 26 Primal Scenes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 24.

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the impact of an unprecedented narrative event he had contrived: the celebrated shower scene, in which the protagonist is killed off halfway through the film.

As I discussed in Chapter 5, Psycho is also one of cinema’s most ‘critically saturated’ films.27 While Psycho has always been popular and accessible ever since its release in 1960, in theatres and on television, the new possibilities in film spectatorship opened up by VCR, DVD and online viewing have given spectators more control over the precise way in which they engage with this landmark movie. As has already been noted, the re-timing of films not only transforms our relationship with those films, but also transforms the films themselves. New details, new associations and new events emerge that produce ‘unexpected links that displace the chain of meaning invested in cause and effect’.28

When the ‘frame rate’ of Hitchcock’s Psycho is slowed down, its running time is extended from 109 minutes to a full twenty-four hours, giving viewers an entirely different cinematic event. This creates a tension between Hitchcock’s images and their slowed-down selves, as the original Psycho haunts the installation in the memories and expectations of its gallery visitors. The effect of slowing Psycho down to such a halting pace is to draw attention to the individual ‘frames’ of which it is comprised. In the courtroom, the defence re-choreographed the video in order to change the significance of the events it contained. The skipping, slowing, halting, freezing and repeating of sequences from the video of the LAPD officers’ assault on Rodney King in Mulvey’s terms served to ‘displace the chain of meaning’ contained in the video when it ran in real time.29

A central aspect in the LAPD defence strategy was the re-screening of Holliday’s video footage in slow motion, without audio, while the officers themselves and expert witnesses performed voice-over narrations interpreting every single action and reaction contained in the footage. In a ‘frame-by-frame’ analysis of the videotape, Sergeant Charles Duke, an instructor at the Los Angeles Police Academy

27 Bill Schaeffer, ‘Cutting the Flow: Thinking Psycho’, par. 2. 28 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, pp. 144, 27-8. 29 Death 24x a Second, pp. 27-8.

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and an expert witness for the defence, maintained that nothing more than reasonable force was used against King and that every one of the fifty-six blows from the officers’ batons was fully justified.30 Duke’s evidence, combined with the slow- motion replay of the attack on King, effectively translated a vicious and unwarranted assault as an action fully in line with appropriate police procedure.

The police officers also gave detailed accounts of their motives as the slow-motion footage rolled. Michael Stone, Officer Powell’s defence lawyer, described this strategy as the defence team getting ‘the jurors to look at the case not from the eye of the camera, but from the eye of the officers’.31 The re-timing of the video with accompanying commentary effectively presented the jury with a re-enactment in which that which had not previously been visible was now made abundantly so: Rodney King as aggressor and the LAPD officers in fear. The interviews with the defendants led to the slowed-down video footage painting a picture of four police officers concerned for their own safety in the face of a dangerous, provocative, out- of-control suspect. For example, Officer Powell, prompted by his lawyer, described his mental state, as he inflicted savage blows on King, as ‘completely in fear for my life, scared to death’.32 Officer Briseno, as he watched himself on the video, testified that his heavy stomping on King’s shoulders was an effort to get the suspect to ground so that his fellow-officers could cease clubbing him with their batons. He didn’t follow police procedure and simply hold King down with his knee, he said, because he feared getting accidentally struck by a baton.33

30 See Doug Linder, ‘The Trials of Los Angeles Police Officers in Connection with the Beating of Rodney King, 2001, par. 16 , available at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lapd/lapdaccount.html (accessed 18 February 2011). 31 Quoted in Jenelle Taylor Gibbs, Race and Justice: Rodney King and O J Simpson in a House Divided (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), p. 49. 32 Quoted in Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 28. 33 See Linder, ‘An Account of the Los Angeles Police Officers’, par. 29.

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Re-timing and Fugitive Testimony As I have outlined, for many film and media theorists, the defence lawyers’ success in convincing the jury to acquit the LAPD officers served to underline the importance of thinking about how technically reproducible images embody profound ambiguities, tensions and contradictions.34 Petro, for example, takes up Roland Barthes’ conceptualisation of the photograph as ‘certain but fugitive testimony’35 to articulate the tension at the centre of academic debate about the referential capacities of the image. Petro reasons, Indeed, as the fate of the Rodney King video powerfully demonstrates, photographic testimony is always (and at once) overloaded yet insubstantial – open to multiple interpretation and debate.36

Eyewitness video footage was made to present a new interpretation of the events it captured, giving it the status of both ‘“certain” testimony – indisputable, incontestable, irrefutable’ and ‘transient, fleeting and “fugitive”’.37 By convincing the jury that the police had not used excessive force in apprehending King, the defence created a scenario in which, in the eyes of many outraged commentators, the video could no longer be relied upon as an independent witness of the events it captured. Min Huong Song argues, for example, that the acquittal of the officers generated intense anxiety regarding the fugitive nature of video testimony, because it showed that the distance between sign and referent could be ‘irrefutably and perilously wide’.38

The re-timing of the video was crucial in undoing its previous associations with assault. The events recorded on the video had been circulating in the public arena as evidence of police brutality and racism for more than a year prior to the trial. However, by stopping, re-starting and slow-motion, the defence was able to re-enact

34 At the Society for Cinema Studies conference in April 1992, which coincided with the acquittal of the LAPD officers, a petition circulated that expressed moral outrage at the verdict. Yet this initial outrage, Tomasulo, pp. 79-80, contends, depended on an ironic contradiction with cinema scholars’ own emphasis on how close textual analysis can challenge the idea that there is a correct reading inherent in a text. 35 ‘Introduction: History Happens’, p. x, quoted in Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 93. 36 ‘Introduction: History Happens’, p. xiv. 37 ‘Introduction: History Happens’, p. x. 38 Strange Future, p. 86.

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that evidence so as to create a performance that contradicted its original meaning. The defence sought to draw attention to the video as fugitive testimony by separating the images from their previous circulation as tableaux vivants of police brutality and re-anchoring them to the officers’ perspective by means of re-timing and re- narrativisation strategies. In doing so, the re-enactments in the courtroom aligned the video more closely with a different set of television events and tableaux vivants more commonly presented in television crime dramas, in which police officers are typically seen in pursuit of, and arresting, dangerous suspects in dangerous situations. The re-enactment of the video instigated its new association with the interpretive frame of television crime drama against the primal scene of the assault, as it had been enacted on television news programmes around the globe.

The new meaning given to the events of the assault serves to highlight the status of visual evidence as fugitive testimony, but also the fact that re-enactments are not anchored by their external referents. The events of the re-enactment are no longer its referential support. Rather the re-enactments are comprised of the performative rhetorical frames that produce an event after the fact. The defence team’s strategy was to construct an interpretive frame around the video, making it perform meanings that would sway the jurors in favour of the officers. Bill Nichols’ analysis of the case focuses on the way in which the performative and rhetorical strategies employed by the defence lawyers ‘systematically set out to construct an interpretive frame of which the videotape itself would serve as confirmation’.39 The jury’s decision to acquit the police officers was not, Nichols contends, ‘a question of ultimate truth, but of how a specific outcome occurs in a particular interpretive arena, through specific strategies and rhetorical moves’.40 Tomasulo also maintains that for the defence to succeed ‘the King video had to be converted specifically into a narrative text’ to ensure that the events in the footage became intelligible to the jury within a specific interpretive framework. Hence his essay’s title: ‘I’ll see it when I believe it’.41

39 Blurred Boundaries, p. 22. 40 Ibid. 41 ‘I’ll See It When I Believe It’, p. 76. Italics in the original.

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The dispute in the courtroom did not centre on whether or not King had been beaten fifty-six times with a metal baton, kicked seven times and struck with two blasts of 100,000 volts from a TASER electrical stun gun by Sgt Stacey Koon, all of which the videotape helped to establish. (Despite hours of court time devoted to it, close scrutiny of the tape failed to determine whether King had been struck on the head by any of the baton blows, an act which would have automatically convicted the police officers of excessive force.) The issue was about whether the physical force used was appropriate or excessive for the situation from the point of view of a ‘reasonable’ police officer.

A Different Set of Events In ‘The Modernist Event’, Hayden White argues, ‘The modern electronic media can manipulate recorded images so as literally to “explode” events before the eyes of viewers.’42 Writing in 1995, at a time when discussions of the ‘King case’ were still prominent in theoretical debates around the technical image and its cultural status and meanings, White makes an example of the circulation and manipulation of Holliday’s video to illustrate this point: The uses made in the courtroom of television images of Los Angeles police beating a black man (Rodney King) had the effect of making this seemingly unambiguously documented event virtually unintelligible as an event.43

The shrewd combination of a re-timed video and artful courtroom performances by the officers and the defence’s expert witnesses contrived to give each image new meaning and undo the logic of the actions and reactions represented on the tape when it ran in ‘real time’. Tomasulo points out that, because Holliday shot the video in a single, long-take, it conjured the impression of ‘transparent reality before the lens, creating a sort of “video vérité” observational mode’. But the defence lawyers, Tomasulo argues, transformed Holliday’s long-take into a ‘montage by “deconstructing” and decomposing it into isolated parts’.44 Individual freeze-frames

42 Hayden White, ‘The Modernist Event’, in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. by Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 17-38 (p. 23). 43 Ibid. Italics in the original. 44 ‘I’ll See It When I Believe It’, pp. 75, 76.

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were even blown up and mounted on boards in the court room, the better to serve the argument that the officers did not use excessive force on King.

As presented to the jury, the filmed assault was ‘doubly fragmented’: individual frames served to show specific actions and reactions in isolation, and selected moments of the tape were shown repeatedly. Hours and hours of court time spent on a few minutes of video produced a marked contrast between the duration of the original footage and the amount of time spent viewing it. Petro argues that by manipulating the temporality of the footage the defence lawyers were ‘able to defy temporal duration, deaden the emotional impact of the tape’.45 The tension between the duration of the video and the duration of the screening contributed significantly to the dissolution of the assault as an event and as a crime. It contrived for the violence captured in the video to be effectively undercut, undermined and, finally, dismissed.

Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho also transforms mediated representations of violence. The iconic shower scene – in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is stabbed to death by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkin) – marked Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as the first truly violent film on the American screen and remains one of the most well-known sequences in the history of the cinema. In 24-Hour Psycho the scene becomes unintelligible, indecipherable, drained of its potency and its ability to shock, alarm or unsettle the spectator. Of course, in the original scene, all the violence is implied, conjured through an extensive and masterful montage of spaces, times, bodies and sound effects. Bates’ knife never actually touches the body of Crane and the sounds effects of the blade slicing into flesh were created by plunging a knife into a melon. Chocolate syrup was used for blood, specifically because its consistency showed up well on black-and-white film.46

45 ‘Introduction: History Happens’, p. ix. 46 After years of debate it has also been confirmed that Leigh had a body double in this scene (despite Hitchcock and Leigh’s assurances to the contrary). Marli Renfro stood in for Leigh in those shots where Leigh’s face is not in the frame. See Robert Graysmith, The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shower (London: Titan, 2010).

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The assault on King, on the other hand, was very real and left him bruised and battered. ‘I felt beat up and like a crushed can’, he told a grand jury in March 1991. ‘That’s what I felt like, like a crushed can all over.’47 The prosecution’s decision not to put King on the stand during the trial, however, meant that his beaten body was represented during the trial solely by the videotape. And the re-timing of the assault on King’s videotaped body, and of his actions and reactions, ultimately resulted in the disappearance of King’s actual beaten body from the trial. This elimination was compounded by the fact that his body had also previously been known primarily in its circulation in the video on television news programmes. Both representations of violence, the events of ‘recorded film world’ and the recorded events of the ‘real’ world, became part of Mulvey’s ‘parallel universe’ where they could be ‘halted or slowed or fragmented’.48

24-Hour Psycho ‘explodes’ all the narrative events of Psycho, effectively making them unintelligible as events. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Ann Doane defines the temporality of cinema’s diegesis as ‘the way in which time is represented by the image, the varying invocations of present, past, future, historicity’ and the ‘temporality of the apparatus’ as ‘linear, irreversible, “mechanical”’.49 24- Hour Psycho plays with the relationship between these two temporalities by creating an experience of linear, mechanical apparatus time passing, but at a different rate from the time of the diegesis. It is as if the mechanical operation of the cinema has aged and become extremely tired. The film still moves at a mechanical rate and in a linear manner and the narrative order of Psycho is unchanged, but digitally slowing down the frame rate extinguishes Psycho’s narrative drive, which has been central to Hitchcock’s creation of suspense. Gordon performs an act of delayed cinema that suspends the very film that has become synonymous with the concept of motion- picture suspense. In doing so, Gordon shows how the shocking and innovative narrative events pioneered in Psycho are also produced by their screening at the rate of 24 frames per second.

47 Quoted in Linder, par. 10. 48 Death 24x a Second, p. 181. 49 Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 30.

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Slowing down Psycho to such an extent transforms what shocks, engages and draws in the spectator, overturning the emotional highs and lows of the original film. In his Point Omega, the storyline of which features visits to the exhibition of 24-Hour Psycho at the New York Museum of Modern Art, Don Delillo writes that [t]he dull parts of the original movie were not dull anymore. They were like everything else, outside all categories. […] But he yielded to the screen more readily at certain times. He conceded this, the screen empty of characters, the screen that reveals a stuffed bird or a single human eye.50

Each individual ‘frame’ of Psycho performs differently in 24-Hour Psycho from its usual performance at 24 frames per second. Blake Gopnik embraces gradations of light, individual portraits and empty spaces, evacuated of human action: At one moment, the piece is a suite of portraits, as the camera cuts from one almost-static actor to another. Then another look, a few minutes later, shows us a landscape, which – as Hitchcock cuts to another shot – becomes a moment of still life (a phone booth, an empty shower). [...] There are even abstract passages, such as when the film’s opening graphics are so slowed down as to become illegible, or when a quick pan across a set in the original becomes an indecipherable play of light and shade.51

The movement of both the actors and the sets and props takes on new life and new significance and the status of certain actions and events intensifies: ‘When an actor moved a muscle, when eyes blinked, it was a revelation.’52 New events and actions even emerge. Delillo’s character in Point Omega becomes obsessed, for example, with trying to count ‘the rings on the shower-curtain spinning on the rod when the curtain is torn loose, a moment lost at normal speed’.53 The spinning shower-curtain rings become an event in the video installation, but did not constitute an event in the original film. In this 24-Hour Psycho hails these individual frames, pointing to these unique events and performances that are inscribed in the film frames of Psycho but not available at 24 frames per second.

50 Don Delillo, Point Omega: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2010), p. 102. 51 Blake Gopnik, ‘Drawing out the Suspense’, Washington Post, 22 February 2004, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/exhibits/douglas- gordon,1086647/critic-review.html (accessed 18 February2011). 52 Delillo, p. 8. 53 Delillo, p. 9.

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The re-enactment of Psycho produced by 24-Hour Psycho uses similar techniques (stopping, starting, re-timing) to the defence in the LAPD officer’s trial, who manipulated Holliday’s video of King’s assault as fugitive testimony. The performances staged by Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho in the gallery space and by the defence lawyers in the courtroom signal themselves re-enactments by showing the ways in which the original film and media events are constituted by their technical timing. Each re-enactment is premised, however, on producing a different kind of spectator. The kinds of viewing positions that each of these re-enactments summon and enable reflects the different ‘politics’ at work in each re-enactment, the different arenas in which these re-enactments occur (the courtroom and the gallery space) and the audiences that these institutions invite (jury members and gallery visitors), as well as the outcome that each re-enactment is designed to try to achieve.

Spectators, Politics, Arenas and Outcomes The audience selected to watch the re-enactments performed in the King case were not gallery visitors, but twelve controversially hand-picked, mainly white individuals from Simi Valley, California. The defence team tried to encourage the jury members to be spectators willing to accept the status of the video as fugitive testimony and prepared to be convinced by the interpretation of the defence. The defence succeeded in provoking willing spectators and obtained their preferred outcome in the court room. It could also be argued that the intensive and multiple repetitions the video was made to perform by the defence team were also designed to produce bored spectators, wearing the jury members down so that they became indifferent and desensitised to the violence of the events they were being shown.

Of course, the outcome of the case could have been different if the jury’s response to the re-enactment of the video had been different. In Tomasulo’s view, it has never been proven – empirically or otherwise – that slow-motion examinations of violent scenes ‘desensitize’ spectators to the horror of physical brutality. Although it has been argued that slow-motion minimizes the effects of a violent scene because in the real world a fast blow is a harder one and that freeze-frame viewing reduces the impact of violence by making the baton strokes seem less relentless, the slow-motion technique might have

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even monumentalized the baton blows, thereby exaggerating their violent force in the minds of jurors.54

The approach taken by the LAPD defence team to the re-timing of the video could have back-fired had the jury not been so willing to agree with the slow-motion reconstruction of actions and reactions presented in the video as showing police responding appropriately to a dangerous suspect. Indeed, in a second Federal civil- rights trial in April 1993, the jury found Officers Koon and Powell guilty of civil- rights violations.55

The defence used the techniques of delayed cinema to convince the jury to accept a particular interpretation of incriminating events caught on video by making the video itself perform as evidence of officers following police procedure. Gordon uses the techniques of delayed cinema in 24-Hour Psycho, in contrast, in order to reveal mechanisms of cinema that usually remain hidden. As I discussed in Chapter 5, one of the key figures of spectatorship that Mulvey conceptualises as emerging through the framework of DVD spectatorship is the ‘pensive spectator’, who is ‘engaged with reflection on the visibility of time in the cinema’.56 She draws inspiration from Raymond Bellour’s discussion of the way in which freeze-frame analysis opens up an awareness of the tension between movement and stillness in the cinema, arguing that Bellour’s emphasis on pensive spectatorship anticipated the kind of reflection on cinema and on the film image that have now become much more readily available to every DVD spectator.

In Chapter 5, I argued that pensive spectatorship shapes Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho. The DVD player not only enabled Van Sant and his team to study Psycho closely, but allowed him to endeavour to make the remake perform in time with the original, creating a remake that was enabled by, and entangled with, the manipulations of the original film made available by the DVD player. Gordon is a pensive spectator of Psycho, just as Van Sant was, but his pensive spectatorship emerged out of a different engagement with Psycho that is grounded specifically in a

54 ‘I’ll See It When I Believe It’, p. 80. 55 Tomasulo, p. 78. 56 Death 24x a Second, p. 11.

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reflection the visibility of time in the cinema and he produces this reflection as the dominant aesthetic of his installation.

Doane points out that the attempt to fuse the relentless ‘temporality of the apparatus’ (‘linear, irreversible, “mechanical”’) to what she terms the ‘temporality of reception’ (watching a film in the cinema space) is a historically specific product of particular cinema exhibition practices as well as of the development of the conventions of classical narrative cinema.57 In 24-Hour Psycho, Gordon experiments with the relationship between the temporality of the apparatus and the temporality of reception. A press release for the exhibition of 24-Hour Psycho at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art describes, ‘The sluggish pace creates an acute awareness of the relationship between real time and film time.’58 Nathaniel Rogers recounts his experience of 24-Hour Psycho as follows, At two frames per second I was mesmerized, staring at Norman Bates who was a) moving very very slowly b) feeling guilty very very slowly c) turning off the motel lights very very slowly and d) cleaning up the bathroom very very slowly while Janet Leigh’s arm hung limply and tellingly in the frame. While all of this was happening very very slowly, it turns out the time was flying by. Before I knew it, 45 minutes had passed and I had to hurry through the rest of the MoMA exhibit.59

It is the binding of the temporality of the apparatus to the temporality of reception that enables the temporality of the diegesis to maintain the continuity and illusion of ‘real time’.60 24-Hour Psycho disrupts this unity by simply changing the speed of the temporality of the apparatus.

Doane contends that historically the three predominant temporalities of the cinema have worked to achieve a ‘reduction in the function of film as pure record of a time and a movement outside itself’ because the cinema’s ‘apparent ability to represent

57 Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 30. 58 ‘Douglas Gordon: Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, available at http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/296 (accessed 18 February 2011). 59 ‘24 Hour Psycho’, Film Experience Blog, 12 June 2006, par. 6, available at http://filmexperience.blogspot.com/2006/06/24-hour-psycho.html (accessed 18 February 2011). Italics in the original. 60 Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 31.

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the contingent without limit’ posed a threat to representation. ‘The cinema moves from the status of a machine that amazes and astonishes’, she says, ‘through its capacity as a record of time and movement to a machine for the production of temporalities that mimic “real time”’.61 Yet the idea of film as a record of a time outside itself is still, Doane continues, entangled with the production of the temporalities of classical cinema.

Of course, the increasing availability of films in electronic and digital formats has made it easier to access and disentangle these fused and concealed temporalities. In Death 24x a Second, Mulvey argues that ‘[t]hinking about film in the framework of the digital’ has disrupted the ways in which ‘film time’, defined as ‘the inscription of an image onto the still frames of celluloid’, has been concealed by ‘“cinema time”, the structure of significance and flow that constitutes the temporal aesthetic of any movie’.62 Mulvey focuses primarily on the tension between the co-presence of movement and stillness in the cinema as a key aspect of the changing visibility of cinema’s relationships to time: ‘While movement tends to assert the presence of a continuous “now”, stillness brings a resonance of “then” to the surface’.63 Individual freeze-frames provide ‘access to the time of the film’s registration, its “then-ness” in contrast to the “now-ness”’ asserted by ‘the flow of the image at 24 frames a second’.64

The speed of 24-Hour Psycho creates a situation in which Psycho becomes almost like a slideshow of photographs. It draws attention to both stillness and movement simultaneously, placing them in relationship to one another. In Mulvey’s view, digitally stilling a film creates an intriguing situation in which ‘the post-cinematic medium’ conjures ‘the pre-cinematic’.65 Calling on André Bazin’s conceptualisation of the temporality of photography, she proposes that in 24-Hour Psycho, ‘the process

61 Ibid. 62 Death 24x a Second, p. 30. 63 Death 24x a Second, p. 13. 64 Death 24x a Second, p. 102. 65 Death 24x a Second, p. 22.

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of “change mummified” becomes a spectacle in its own right’.66 24-Hour Psycho stages, in an unrelenting continuous flow, the ‘punctum’ of time ‘embalmed’.67 Yet, because 24-Hour Psycho uses digital technology to emphasise the idea of the individual film frame, its invocation of the materiality of the celluloid filmstrip is paradoxical, summoning the individual celluloid film frame not as a relic, but as a ghost.68 In Mulvey’s view, Digital technology enables a spectator to still a film in a way that evokes the ghostly presence of the individual celluloid frame. Technically this is an anachronism. It is only due to an imaginative association with film’s archaic structure that the materiality of celluloid comes to mind.69

In this respect, Gordon’s ‘pensive spectatorship’ is historically distinct from Bellour’s. While Bellour reflects on how stillness reveals the photogram and how its temporality is blended with that of movement and flow, Gordon’s pensive spectatorship reveals the photogram as an anachronism, offering a reflection on the extent to which ‘times’ have changed. Both engage in a reflection on cinema, but, as a pensive spectator who is a VHS and DVD spectator, Gordon’s reflection is marked by a historical shift towards electronic and digital exhibition and distribution.

24-Hour Psycho does not provide its spectators with any opportunity to control, manipulate or intervene in the dynamics between stillness and movement in Psycho. Instead, it sets up a scenario in which spectators create new relations to particular images by chance. In stark contrast to Hitchcock’s Pinkerton guards hired to police entry into the movie theatre, visitors to 24-Hour Psycho very rarely arrive at the start of Psycho and certainly very rarely stay for the whole film, encountering only a random fragment or a few sequences of Psycho during their time with the installation.70 24-Hour Psycho demonstrates that a change in speed can disrupt

66 Death 24x a Second, p. 103. 67 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 96; Bazin, ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, p. 14. 68 Amy Taubin, ‘Douglas Gordon,’ in Spellbound: Art and Film, ed. Philip Dodd and Ian Christie (London: Hayward Gallery and BFI,1996), p. 72, quoted in Death 24x a Second, p. 102. 69 Death 24x a Second, p. 26. 70 This kind of visitor experience was heightened during the exhibition of 24-Hour Psycho at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, which made an unprecedented

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Psycho’s continuity, but this experience of disruption is also created for spectators by their movement in and out of the installation as the film runs its course at glacial speed in the gallery space.

Some spectators have expressed frustration with the installation and its failure to give them the original film. Adrian Searle complains, Why is it that whenever I come across Gordon's 24-Hour Psycho (his slowed-down version of the Hitchcock film), all I ever get is some dull, stop- go, slow-mo frames from the car purchase scene, or a man taking 10 minutes to walk jerkily around a desk? I have never yet, in the nine years this work has been doing the international rounds, seen the shower scene.71

Even if a gallery visitor enters during the shower scene, they may still have the feeling that they missed it. As one visitor reports, I have seen Psycho several times and I thought I’d instantaneously know where I was narratively but, as it turns out, film projected at 2 frames per second is quite a different experience. I was lost. I don’t know how long it took me to realise that I had just missed the shower scene, but I had.72

The sense of always missing the events of the original Psycho as you watch 24-Hour Psycho is central to the installation’s re-enactment of the film.

Delayed cinema does not implicitly produce pensive spectators, as the dissatisfaction expressed by some gallery visitors demonstrates. These people struggle with the experience of missing Psycho rather than being provoked into a reflection on the nature of cinematic time. In a sense, the spectators of 24-Hour Psycho all become spectators of cinema history. The installation summons cinema’s past and puts spectators into a new relationship with it that estranges them from the ways in which they think they know and remember it. Those who watched the courtroom re- effort to turn 24-Hour Psycho into a major public gallery event. The Hirshhorn organised 24 hours of access to the museum from 28-29 February 2004, calling it ’24-Hour Access: 24-Hour Psycho’. More than 6,000 people attended the Museum during the 24-hour access period. Registering for a 24-hour marathon, individuals were given a small survival pack which included, along with their official badge, a shower cap for the shower scene, a toothbrush and fresh breath mints. 71 Adrian Searle, ‘Monsters Inc.’, Guardian, 5 November 2002, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2002/nov/05/art.artsfeatures, par. 3 (accessed 18 February 2011). 72 See Rogers, par. 3.

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enactments of the Rodney King assault were also spectators who were encouraged to become estranged, estranged from the events captured on the Holliday video and from what they knew of them through the video’s circulation in the public domain. Through this estrangement, both Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho and the LAPD officers’ defence lawyers showed how the re-timing of film and video can make a familiar film or media event perform itself differently.

Our access to the past is increasingly defined by viewing technologies that facilitate control and manipulation of moving images. The kinds of relationships we enter into with the past as it is mediated in moving forms are, of course, manifold and diverse. But this shift does require us to think through how the re-enactment’s engagement with the past has become shaped by its relationship to technical timing and re- timing. I have examined two specific instances in which contemporary replay technologies have enabled the ‘re-play’ of film and media events in ways that re- enact those events. My aim has been to draw attention to a new form for the re- enactment, one that has been fashioned out of an ability to interrogate film and media events by manipulating their technical timing. As I have outlined, the re- enactment has traditionally been regarded as the domain of history (and its practice that of performance) rather than of media, but Nowell-Smith, Schwarz and Mulvey have argued that we now experience the past in relation to and through media times that put us in contact with different velocities, scales and speeds.73 I have therefore engaged in thinking through ways in which the shifting parameters of repetition, performance and the event, and the nature of their interrelationships, central to the re-enactment, also signal the shifting parameters of re-enactment as a form of historical representation.

73 Schwarz, ‘Media Times/Historical Times’, p. 101; Nowell-Smith, ‘On History’, pp. 171, 160; Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, pp. 24-5, 181.

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Conclusion

To what extent is it possible today to think of the re-enactment as a distinct form of historical representation? To what degree might we be able to recognise a re- enactment (given that it foregrounds its performative, presentational aspects) but have more trouble identifying what the re-enactment might be? The question of what the re-enactment is, and of what ‘to re-enact’ entails, continues to be an important and valuable question to raise, especially since the re-enactment has become an increasingly pervasive form of historical representation in screen based media. It is a question that to date has very rarely been posed in the disciplinary field of cinema and television studies. As I have demonstrated, raising and addressing this question can provoke new insights into the relations between media times and historical times, particularly in relation to the increasingly mediated nature of historical events.1 It can also throw new light on the shifting status of referentiality in technically reproducible media and on the digital remediation of the film image. It is a question that can even be raised to challenge those forms of historicism the re- enactment itself might seem set up to perpetuate.

How and why this question has not been adequately attended to in cinema and television studies before is, in part, because it is a complex question to answer. In film, the re-enactment operated briefly as genre during the first decade of the cinema, then it became more associated with a form of historical representation that was found across media in different genres (most notably documentary, docudrama

1 Bill Schwarz, ‘Media Times/Historical Times’, 93-105; Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘On History’, 160-71.

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and particular fiction genres such as the historical epic, the biopic and the war movie) and across different cultural forms (as diverse as medical imaging, art gallery installations and courtroom presentations). The digital era has brought about further transformations to the re-enactment, primarily because the digital image’s challenges to understandings of photographic reference have impacted on ideas of historical representation. As a result of these changes there is no clear agreement as to what a re-enactment is. It is hardly surprising, then, that both the problems and the insights that the re-enactment can offer to film and television debates have for so long been unaddressed.

My approach in this thesis has been to establish some theoretical foundations for rethinking the re-enactment and its significance in understanding the relationship between media times and historical times. I have done so by examining some of the shifting forms and functions of the re-enactment across cinema’s one hundred and ten year history and by drawing on specific concepts and debates in film theory. My aim has not been to produce a singular definition of the re-enactment but rather to track some of its forms and manifestations and to do so as a way of tracing the increasing inseparability between media times and historical times.

Across this thesis I have examined the various transformations that the re-enactment has undergone through its relations with and incorporation into different forms of technical media. Grouping together a diverse and eclectic array of film, television and video examples in this thesis has helped me to embrace the re-enactment’s uneven and indiscriminate manifestations. I have examined both re-enactments that are commonly recognised as such (early re-enactment films during the first decade of the cinema, as well as in documentary, docudrama, historical films and biopics) and others that do not fall into familiar ideas or forms of the re-enactment but that nevertheless can be thought of as re-enactments in the ways that they repeat, perform and interrogate events (such as video installations, remakes and police-procedural television). In so doing I’ve aimed to open the terrain of what we think of as re- enactment in order to pursue its wide dispersal as a form of historical representation and to build a conceptualisation of the re-enactment that can position both more

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recognised and less familiar forms for the re-enactment in relationship with one another.

In developing these arguments I have drawn on key areas of film theory that have been particularly useful for thinking about the relations between media times and historical times. These include debates about the significance of the first decade of the cinema; about the translation of the concepts of montage and attraction between cinema and live performance; the circulatibility of the technically reproducible image; the shifting status of the indexical sign; the workings of cinematic temporality; and the movement of film and cinema across media platforms. I have used these debates to think through the emergence, persistence and dispersal of the re-enactment in film and to push the concept of re-enactment in new directions, emphasising the re-enactment’s multi-modality, mobility and adaptability.

The critical resources I have cultivated through this engagement are also the result of sustained critical analysis of the functions of theatricality, indexicality and temporality for the re-enactment as well as an exploration of shifting conceptualisations of the event, performance and repetition in the re-enactment. The first two chapters focussed mainly on the status of theatricality and reference in the re-enactment. Chapters 3 and 4 concentrated primarily on the relationships between indexicality and the re-enactment. Chapters 5 and 6 investigated the relationships between repetition, re-timing and re-enactment. While it would, of course, have been possible to divide the thesis into three parts based on these distinctions, to do so could have drawn attention away from the relationships between these concepts in the re-enactment.

Necessarily predicated on staging a past event, the re-enactment shows up the ways in which shifts in the status of theatricality in film are directly connected to ideas of reference. In Chapter 1, for example, I aligned the re-enactment’s theatricality with Tom Gunning’s efforts to draw attention to the exhibitionism that characterised the first decade of cinema and its persistence underground long after, arguing that the

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self-conscious exhibitionism of the re-enactment shifted status with the emergence and solidification of the conventions and referential distinctions of narrative cinema.2

My examinations of the re-enactment’s self-reflexive, presentational mode of address have also frequently been tied to investigations of the re-enactment’s relationship to spectatorship. In Chapter 2, for example, I showed how both The Storming of the Winter Palace and October, by means of their successful translation of the concepts of montage and attraction between cinema and live performance, managed to emotionally engage spectators at the intersections of the theatrical and the film-specific dimensions of re-enactment. In Chapter 5, I argued that Gus Van Sant’s self-conscious emphasis on staging in his remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho draws attention to the ways in which film spectatorship has transformed over the lifetime of the cinema. In Chapter 6, I compared the different kinds of spectators summoned and enabled by the re-enactment of cinema history in the gallery space and the re-enactment of a home video in the courtroom.

Chapter 3 showed how film re-enactments work to foreground investment in the theatrical dimensions of the pro-filmic field and I argued that they did so to ensure that spectators recognise them as the performance of a past event. I argued in Chapter 4 that this self-reflexive, presentational mode of address that has characterised the re-enactment from the first decade of the cinema remains crucial to the recognition of a re-enactment as a re-enactment in the digital era even as the terrain of the pro-filmic field becomes increasingly diluted in contemporary image production. This shows that it is still possible to conceptualise theatricality in the re- enactment without recourse to the theatrical dimensions of the pro-filmic field.

The relationships between Chapters 3 and 4 constitute a key pivot point in the thesis. The movement between these chapters marks a shift from more recognisable and conventional forms of re-enactment to less conventional forms of re-enactment and a shift to considerations of digital remediation. Whereas Chapters 1-3 focussed on building a framework and a ‘back history’ for thinking through the uses of re-

2 Tom Gunning, ‘Cinema of Attractions’, pp. 56-62.

Conclusion 194

enactment in film, Chapters 4-6 raised questions about the ways in which shifts in the production and distribution of film, television and video images in an increasingly digital media environment have impacted on the re-enactment. The primary relations between these Chapters 3 and 4 circulated around the nature of theatricality in the re-enactment, but also around the ways in which reference is performed in the re-enactment.

In both chapters the relationship between theatricality and reference is explored in relation to the indexical sign. By analysing the ways in which re-enactments regularly imitate or place indexical traces in the mise-en-scène, especially sets, props, costumes and performances, I showed how the concept of the indexical trace has played an important authenticating role in the film and television re-enactment. In an increasingly digital media environment, however, rather than indexical traces being made to perform an authenticating function for the re-enactment, I argued that we have entered a moment in which investment in the theatricality of the re- enactment can authorise the trace. I pursued this argument through Peirce’s work on the index. I examined the relationship between the two primary sub-categories of Peirce’s indexical sign and highlighted his enthusiasm for deictic indices – defined by demonstrative and performative acts that direct and focus attention. Focussing on the relationship between deictic indexicality and the re-enactment, I argued that the traditional oppositions between re-enactment and trace, index and theatricality must be re-thought.

Discussions of indexicality were not the only outcome, however, of the investigations I undertook in Chapter 3. I also established that in a media environment characterised by rapid and easy movement of technically reproducible images across media platforms, re-enactments frequently certify themselves as authentic through the re-enactment of film and media events already circulating in the public domain. It was in fact in Chapter 2 that I first asked whether an event can be separated from its mediation, arguing that The Storming of the Winter Palace and the October storming effectively re-mediated the historical event into a properly ‘revolutionary’ event. Here I proposed that re-enactments are anchored less by the

Conclusion 195

historical event on which they are based than by the performative, rhetorical frames they establish to depict the event. Continuing this idea into Chapter 6, I made the case that control over the technical timing of film and media events can enable us to replay these events in ways that can re-enact them, making that which is familiar perform differently.

Mary Ann Doane maintains that in the early years of the cinema ‘the requirement of external spectatorial knowledge was not atypical, but rather, constituted something of a norm. The spectator was often expected to have knowledge of another text (for example, newspaper accounts of a current event).’3 This expectation, crucial to early film re-enactments, has continued to be important for the re-enactment throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. I looked at the functions of such ‘external spectatorial knowledge’ in October (and its relationship to The Storming of the Winter Palace ) and in four biopics (in term in the relationships between these biopics and documentaries about the same lives). In Chapter 6, cross-referencing occurs through the use of film and media footage as the fabric of the re-enactment. The re-enactments discussed in Chapter 4 reference criminal and medical imaging technologies including, most notably, virtual endoscopy. The production notes for Van Sant’s Psycho actually cross-reference the filmmaking technologies of Hitchcock’s original film to frame the remake as the re-enactment of key aspects of the production process, turning the original production of Psycho into an event.

As I have demonstrated, it is not simply the idea of the event, but also the performance in the re-enactment, that has been shaped by the emergence of digital image production and the increasing circulation and distribution of technically reproducible images across media platforms. I have focussed on how actors’ performances in contemporary biopics are measured in relation to the audio-visual documentation of events in the lives they perform. However, by contrast to the accolades heaped on the actors who perform in the biopics discussed in Chapter 3, the performances of those who played in Van Sant’s remake of Psycho were almost universally panned as inadequate to their ‘originals’. In Chapter 5, I considered how

3 Mary Ann Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 160.

Conclusion 196

these actors’ performances were shaped by the playing of the original Psycho on DVD on the set of the remake. In Chapter 5 and also in Chapter 6, I focussed on this question of how the forms of re-timing available through the DVD player can engage the tension between performance and repetition that is central to the re-enactment as a representational form.

The negotiation between theatricality and repetition in the re-enactment has been continually reworked. Over the last one hundred years, this negotiation has developed in relation to changes in the functions, status and referential relationships of the film and television genres in which the re-enactment has appeared as well as wider transformations in the production and distribution of screen based media. I have characterised the two conflicting agendas in the re-enactment in terms of the re- enactment being caught between the attempt to emphasise exact repetition, which secures its authority as a form of historical representation, and the attempt to emphasise its theatrical, performative nature, which enables it to declare itself a re- enactment. In this thesis I have shown not only that the tension between these conflicting agendas makes the re-enactment a dynamic and highly self-reflexive representational form, but also that it makes the re-enactment an exemplary accomplice in the pursuit of the relationships between temporality, theatricality and referentiality in contemporary historical representation. Given the re-enactment’s prevalence as form of historical representation in screen based media, this pursuit has not only been warranted, its applications are potentially wide-ranging.

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Dissertations

Gapps, Stephen, ‘Performing the Past: A Cultural History of Historical eenactments’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, 2002)

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Online sources

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DVDs and bonus material

Cannon, Danny, and Larry Detwiler ‘The CSI Shot: Making it Real’, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 3:13-3:23, DVD commentary (Momentum Pictures, 2004)

Corbijn, Anton, ‘Director’s Commentary’, Control, DVD commentary (Madman Entertainment, 2007)

——, ‘The Making of Control’, Control, DVD commentary (Madman Entertainment, 2007) Black, Lance, ‘Hollywood Comes to San Francisco’, Milk, DVD commentary (Universal, 2009)

Epstein, Rob, ‘Director’s Commentary’, The Times of Harvey Milk, DVD commentary for 20th anniversary collector’s edition (Telling Pictures, 2004)

Jenkins, Patty, ‘Interview with Patty Jenkins and BT’, Monster, DVD commentary (Dej Productions, 2003)

___, ‘The Making of Monster Featurette’, Monster, DVD commentary (Dej Productions, 2003)

Mendelsohn, Carol, ‘The Writers Room’, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 3:13-3:23, DVD commentary (Momentum Pictures, 2004)

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Peirce, Kimberly, ‘Featurette’, Boys Don’t Cry, DVD commentary (Twentieth Century Fox, 1999)

Films

The 39 Steps, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Gaumont British Picture Corporation, 1935) The 39 Steps, dir. by Ralph Thomas (Twentieth Century Fox, 1956) The 39 Steps, dir. by Don Sharp (Company, 1978) The Adventures of Mark Twain, dir. by Irving Rapper (Warner Brothers, 1944) Aileen: Life & Death of a Serial Killer, dir. by Nick Broomfield (Lafayette Films, 2003) Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, dir. by Nick Broomfield (Lafayette Films, 1992) Ambulance at the Accident (Edison, 1897) Ambulance Call (Edison, 1897) Armageddon, dir. by Michael Bay (Touchstone Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2003) The Battle of Orgreave, dir. by Mike Figgis (Channel 4, 2002) The Battle of Santiago Bay (Vitography,1898) Battleship Potemkin, dir. by Sergei Eisenstein (Goskino, 1925) Ben Hur, dir. by Fred Niblo (MGM, 1924) The Birth of a Nation, dir. by D. W. Griffith (David W. Griffith Corp., 1915) Blow Out, dir. by Brian De Palma (Cinema 77, 1981) Body Double, dir. by Brian De Palma (Columbia, 1984) Bombardment of Take Forts by the Allied Fleets (Edison, 1900) Boys Don’t Cry, dir. by Kimberly Peirce (Fox Searchlight/Killer Films, 1999) The Brandon Teena Story, dir. by Susan Muska, Gréta Olafsdóttir (Bless Bless Productions, 1998) Cape Fear, dir. by J. Lee Thomson (Melville-Talbot Productions/Universal Pictures, 1961) Cape Fear, dir. by Martin Scorsese (Amblin Entertainment/Universal Pictures, 1991) Capture of the Biddle Brothers (Edison, 1902) Capture of Boer Battery by the British (Edison,1900) Capturing the Friedmans, dir. by Andrew Jarecki (HBO Documentary/Notorious Pictures, 2003) Carrie, dir. by Brian De Palma (Redbank Films, 1976) Charge of Boer Cavalry (Edison, 1900) Control, dir. Anton Corbijn (Three Dogs and a Pony, 2007) The Conversation, dir. by Francis Ford Coppola (Paramount Pictures, 1974) Conviction, dir. by Tony Goldwyn (Pantheon, 2010) Dial M for Murder, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Warner Bros., 1954) Dog Day Afternoon, dir. by Sidney Lumet (Artists Entertainment Complex/Warner Bros., 1975) Dressed to Kill, dir. by Brian De Palma (Cinema 77/ Filmways Pictures, 1980) Electrocuting an Elephant (Edison, 1903) Enemy of the State, dir. by Tony Scott (Touchstone Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 1998)

Sources 218

Execution by Hanging (Mutoscope/Biograph, 1905) Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (Porter/Edison, 1901) The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (Edison, 1895) The Exorcist, dir. by William Freidkin (Warner Bros, 1973) Gaslight, dir. by Thorold Dickinson (British National Films, 1939) Gaslight, dir. by George Cukor (MGM, 1944) Good Will Hunting, dir. by Gus Van Sant (Miramax, 1997) The Great Train Robbery dir. by Edwin Porter (Edison, 1903) Halloween, dir. by John Carptenter (Compass International Pictures, 1978) High Anxiety dir. by Mel Brooks (Twentieth Century Fox, 1977) How the West Was Won, dir. by John Ford (MGM, 1962) In the Name of the Father, dir. by Jim Sheridan (Universal Pictures, 1993) Jaws, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Universal Pictures, 1975) JFK dir. by Oliver Stone (Warner Bros, 1991) Joy Division dir. by Grant Gee (Hudson Productions/Brown Owl Films, 2007) Man on Wire, dir. by James Marsh (Discovery Films, 2008) The Man Who Knew Too Much, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Gaumont British Picture Corporation, 1934) The Man Who Knew Too Much, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures, 1956) Mighty Times: The Children’s March, dir. by Bobby Houston and Robert Hudson (HBO, 2004) Milk, dir. by Gus Van Sant (Focus Features, 2008) Million Dollar Baby, dir. by Clint Eastwood (Warner Bros, 2004) Monster, Patty Jenkins (Media 8 Entertainment, 2003) Nanook of the North, dir. by Robert Flaherty (Les Freres Revillon/Pathe Exchange, 1922) North by Northwest, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (MGM, 1959) October, dir. by Sergei Eisenstein (Sovkino, 1927) Pearl Harbor, dir. by Michael Bay (Touchstone Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2001) A Perfect Murder, dir. by Andrew Davis (Warner Bros, 1998) Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, dir. by Gore Verbinski (Walt Disney Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2003) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, dir. by Gore Verbinski (Walt Disney Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2006) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, dir. by Gore Verbinski (Walt Disney Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2007) Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, dir. by Rob Marshall (Walt Disney Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2011) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, dir. by Mike Newell (Walt Disney Pictures/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2010) The Prisoner of Zenda, dir. by Edwin Porter (Famous Players Film Company, 1913) Psycho, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Shamley Productions, 1960) Psycho, dir. by Gus Van Sant (Universal Pictures, 1998) Psycho II, dir. by Richard Franklin (Universal Pictures,1983) Psycho III, dir. by Anthony Perkins (Universal Pictures, 1986) Psycho IV: The Beginning, dir. by Mick Garris (Universal TV, 1990) Rear Window, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures, 1954)

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Repulsion, dir. by Roman Polanski (Compton Films, 1965) Schindler’s List, dir. by Steven Spielberg (Universal Pictures, 1993) Spellbound, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Selznick International Pictures, 1945) Strike, dir. by Sergei Eisenstein (Goskino/Proletkult, 1923) Tenderloin Tragedy (Biography, 1907) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, dir. by Tobe Hooper (Vortex, 1974) The Times of Harvey Milk, dir. by Rob Epstein (Black Sand Productions, 1984) Top Gun, dir. by Tony Scott (Paramount Pictures, 1986) Vertigo, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock (Paramount Pictures, 1958)

Television series

1900 House (Wall to Wall Television/Channel 4, 2001) Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Shamley Productions/Universal TV, 1955-1962) The Colony (SBS Independent, 2005) CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Jerry Bruckheimer Television, 2000- ) CSI: Miami (Jerry Bruckheimer Television, 2002- ) CSI: NY (Jerry Bruckheimer Television, 2004- ) Diagnosis Murder (Viacom Productions, 1992-2001) Dragnet (Mark VII Ltd, 1949-1959) Frontier House (Wall to Wall Television/Channel 4, 2003) Hill Street Blues (NBC/MTM Enterprises, 1981-1987) Miami Vice (Michael Mann Productions/Universal TV, 1984-1990) Police Story (Columbia Pictures Television, 1973-1977) Prime Suspect (Granada Television, 1993-2003). Quincy, M. E (Glen A. Larson Productions/Universal TV, 1976-1983) The Ship (BBC, 2001)

Artworks

24-Hour Psycho (Douglas Gordon, 1993) The Battle of Orgreave (Jeremy Deller, 2001) The Milgram Reenactment (Rod Dickinson, 2002) Seven Easy Pieces (Marina Abramovic, 2005) The Third Memory (Pierre Huyghe, 2000)

Exhibitions

Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History, curated by Nato Thompson (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 27 May – 22 April 2006)

A Short History of Performance, Parts I – IV (Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2002-2006)

Experience, Memory, Re-enactment, curated by Anke Bangma and Florian Wüst (Piet Zwart Institute, TENT Centre for Visual Arts, Rotterdam, February – May 2004)

Sources 220

History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance, curated by Inke Arns (Hartware MedienKunst Verein, Pheonixhalle, 8 June 2007)

Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, curated by Sven Lutticken (With de Witte Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 27 January – 27 March 2005)

Once More…With Feeling (Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland, 2 November – 16 December 2005)

Playback_Simulated Realities, curated by Sabine Himmelsbach (Edith-Ruβ-Haus für Mediakunst, Oldenburg, 3 September – 11 November 2006)

Re-enact (Casco, Mediamatic, Amsterdam, 12 December 2004)

Theatrical productions

The Blockade of Russia, dir. by Sergei Radlov, Stone Island, Petrograd, 20 June 1920

In Favour of a World Commune, dir. by Konstantin Mardzhanov, Stock Exchange Square, Petrograd, 19 July 1920

The Mexican, dir. by Valentin Smyshlyaev and Sergei Eisenstein, Moscow Proletkult Workers’ Theatre, the Second Central Theatre Studio, 10 March 1921

The Mystery of Liberated Labour, dir. by Yuri Annenkov, Alexander Kugel and S. D. Maslovskaia, Stock Exchange Square, Petrograd, 1 May 1920

The Storming of the Winter Palace, dir. by Nikolai Evreinov, Winter Palace Square, Petrograd, 7 November 1920

Even a Wise Man Stumbles, dir. by Sergei Eisenstein, Moscow Proletkult Workers’ Theatre, April 1923

Sources 221