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Presenting Reenactment Jonathan Kahana Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media Volume 50 Issue 1 Double Issue: Reenactment Dossier and Article 3 Cinephilia Dossier 2009 Introduction: What Now? Presenting Reenactment Jonathan Kahana Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/framework Recommended Citation Kahana, Jonathan (2009) "Introduction: What Now? Presenting Reenactment," Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media: Vol. 50: Iss. 1, Article 3. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/framework/vol50/iss1/3 DOSSIER: REENACTMENT IN CONTEMPORARY DOCUMENTARY FILM, VIDEO, AND PERFORMANCE What Now? Introduction: What Now? Presenting Reenactment Jonathan Kahana This dossier of articles on the uses of reenactment in documentary-based film, video, and performance art of the past quarter-century originated in panels that I organized and participated in at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Visible Evidence conferences in 2007 and 2008. The impetus for those panels was a critical hunch that reenactment was mak- ing a comeback, a feeling that throughout the landscape of contemporary moving-image culture—in mainstream film and television, at festivals of documentary and avant-garde cinema, and in galleries and museums—one was seeing the return of techniques of historical restaging that had once been quite common in documentary and social realist film. The eureka moment for me came when I found myself, in the space of a week or so, listening to presentations at my university by two quite dif- ferent American filmmakers, George Stoney and Liza Johnson. Both had been invited to discuss projects that had taken them to impoverished areas of the American South, where two quite different (but not unrelated) kinds of oppression and neglect had made daily life a struggle. The resulting films had been crafted with local residents, whom the filmmakers had asked to play themselves in small quotidian dramas. A half-century apart, Stoney and Johnson had created American versions of what Cesare Zavattini, one of the pioneering theorists and practitioners of Italian neorealism, called pedinamento, which Ivone Margulies translates in an important essay on cin- ematic reenactment as the “shadowing of everyday facts at close range.”1 Margulies uses the documentary work of Zavattini and his fellow neoreal- ists as the model for a social pedagogy of reenactment in cinema, in which ordinary people are given the task of “interpret[ing] their human roles in society,” so as to give themselves and others a “second chance,” when Framework 50, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 46–60. Copyright © 2009 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. Introduction psychological or social circumstances have initially prevented them from acting as they would have liked.2 We tend to think that documentary filmmaking became aware of itself (or, in the critical jargon, self-reflexive) quite recently: at some point, say, after Stoney made his classic works of documentary reenactment for the Georgia State Department of Health, including Palmour Street: A Study of Family Life (US, 1949), his first film as a director, and All My Babies: A Mid- wife’s Own Story (US, 1953), the film I had heard him speak about at NYU. Made in a semi-narrative style that had been conventional for decades, the innovation of Palmour Street and All My Babies was to put black people in speaking roles in which they could act out the challenges for impoverished communities of maintaining good health (mental health, in Palmour Street; natal and maternal health in All My Babies), as well as some of the methods of addressing them and the racial discrimination that was the unspoken subject of both films, and of Stoney’s interracial production methods.3 It has been convenient to distinguish the era of Stoney’s earliest films from a later period of filmmaking and viewing—arriving some time in the 1980s or 1990s—by the term “postmodernity,” which has been taken to mean, when applied to realist and documentary cinema, the end of credulity in methods of narra- tive construction and historical explanation. But it was clear to me that the film I heard Johnson discussing, South of Ten (US, 2006), an experimental documentary made with residents of the devastated Gulf Coast of Missis- sippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, was no less a work of pedinamento than Stoney’s. Both films could be said to serve the exemplary or redemptive function that characterized, according to Margulies, the neorealist sense of reenactment. And in both films, acting serves as the critical, if not contradic- tory, foundation of a documentary effect, wherein the nonprofessional actors’ “theatricality calls into question the authenticity of [their] gestures.”4 My interest in convening public conversations on reenactment was spurred, in part, by the coincidence of these two film presentations, and the déjà vu experience of seeing methods of performance and storytelling in doc- umentary film of the 1950s apparently revived for a film of the recent past. Equally significant, however, was my discovery that there were relatively few critical resources on which one could draw to explain the critical and aes- thetic powers of reenactment in both filmmakers’ work, or the relation of this work to one important but largely overlooked branch of the documentary tradition. In this respect, it seemed that filmmakers and artists had been out ahead of the critical field in showing renewed interest in the powers of reen- actment. This impression is confirmed when one considers the ubiquity and variety of reenactment, in the broadest sense of the term, in moving-image work made and shown on television, in theaters, and in galleries today. In recent years, the spectrum of reenactment-based screen art and entertainment has stretched quite wide. The life stories of famous men have, of course, been fodder for commercial feature cinema for decades, and the 47 Jonathan Kahana portrait of the man of historical influence continues to operate as a prestige genre in Hollywood and for international art cinema.5 Prominent exam- ples from the last several years include Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, DE, 2004), Milk (Gus Van Sant, US, 2008), and the films of Oliver Stone, who has made a sideline of the genre with such films as JFK (US, 1991), Nixon (US, 1995), and his post-9/11 pair World Trade Center (US, 2006) and W. (US, 2008). Recently, the genre has also been of interest to filmmakers working in the spirit of experimental film, while remaining within the feature narra- tive structure, like Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [FR/US, 2007]), Todd Haynes (I’m Not There [US, 2007]), Anton Corbin (Control [UK, 2007]), Steve McQueen (Hunger [UK, 2008]), and Guy Maddin, who uses his own biography as the inspiration for films like Cowards Bend the Knee (CA, 2004) and My Winnipeg (CA, 2008), a film that features the restaging of some important moments in the Maddins’ family life, including the daily adjust- ment of a hall carpet. Reenactments in the loosest sense, these films adhere more or less to the details of their subjects’ lives while indulging in cinematic liberties of scenic and characterological reconstruction. In the same period, a vein of historical film has taken the authenticity of cinematic biography a step further, featuring performances by actors who play themselves in minor or central roles. In the recent films of directors like Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday [UK, 2002]; United 93 [US, 2006]) and Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People [UK, 2002]; In This World [UK, 2003]; The Road to Guan- tanamo [UK, 2006]), one sees the influence of television docudrama, where reenactment has a particularly rich life on both sides of the Atlantic: the made-for-television “true story” is a mode well known to American televi- sion audiences from earlier true-crime reality shows like Fox Television’s America’s Most Wanted (US, 1988–), as is the sensationalist appropriation of such techniques for gutter journalism (as with the E! channel’s use of nightly reenactments during its reporting of the 1996 murder trial of O. J. Simpson), techniques revived for the infamous ABC television account of the causes of the September 11 attacks, The Path to 9/11 (US, 2006). Reenactment has also been a staple of the commercial documentary work of filmmakers tired or suspicious of the claims of veracity made by proponents of the various forms of cinéma vérité. Among the most visible and rigorous opponents of vérité style, at least at the level of cinematography, is Errol Morris, whose The Thin Blue Line (US, 1988) might be seen as the film that revived interest in reenactment among serious documentarians (like Alex Gibney, whose Enron: The Smart- est Guys in the Room [US, 2005] borrows directly from Morris) and tabloid television producers alike. In The Thin Blue Line and the documentary films that emulate it, reenactments are used to supplement historical methods that viewers have grown to see as more authentically documentary: inter- views, archival or observational footage, and expository narration. Morris took this hybrid method to new heights (or, according to some critics, new lows)6 in his own film about the Iraq War, Standard Operating Procedure (US, 48 Introduction 2008), a film that drew fierce criticism for its luridly stylized dramatizations of torture and beatings of detainees by American military personnel and military contractors at the Abu Ghraib facility. (Around the release of Stan- dard Operating Procedure, Morris himself devoted a number of columns of his New York Times weblog, Zoom, to the topic of reenactment, writings that are among the most thorough reflections on the meanings and uses of reenact- ment by any current practitioner or critic.)7 At some aesthetic and concep- tual distance from these practices of docudramatic narrative, a parallel track was established by a number of documentary filmmakers in different parts of the world.
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