Performing History, Troubling Reference Tracking the Screen Re
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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