Preston Sturges Authenticity of the Image and of Testimonial “In-Person Reenactment” from Familiar and Big Time

r In Person: Margulies’s book is a vivid and wide-ranging in Postwar account of this type of re-enactment, offering Reenactment insight with implications that stretch across Cinema and Contemporary documentary and cinema history as a whole. New York: Oxford by Ivone Margulies. An associate professor in film and media at University Press, 2019. 227 pp., illus. Hunter College, author of a book on Chantal paperback: $29.95. Akerman (Nothing Happens: Chantal Alter- man’s Hyperrealisr Everyday [Duke Universtty From Nanook’s apocryphal seal hunt to Press, 1996]), and editor of Rites of Realistn: .., the kitschy dramatizations of an Unsolved Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Duke Universrty Preston _._.- Mysteries episode, re-enactment has been a Press, 2003), Margulies’s scholarship has long . uuivud consistent formal gambit throughout docu- been invested in documentary, French cine- Sturges mentanj's history. Over the years, as well, the ma, and the presence of the body on screen. sealants restaging of past events with nonprofessional The present volume seems a culmination of The Last «n-um actors has fallen in and out of fashion—some- her long engagement with these subjects. out times considered standard practice, sometimes Deftly argued and intricately constructed, Years of ._._...,..-- seen as documentary’s béte noire. Indeed, it’s In Person compn‘ses seven chapters that track, \nh \a-m.‘ 4...: IM- a...“ Inna-inww...“ something of an old film history chestnut that in roughly chronological order, the appear- Hollywood's the great wave of ve’rité and direct-cinema ances of in-person re-enactment in nonfiction First Writer-Director films of the 19505 and 19605 used their obser~ cinema from WWII to the present—from vational mode to reject it outright, expunging Orson Welles’s 1942 short film Four Men in a Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges the practice from nonfiction cinema in favor Raft (from his aborted, post-Ambersons of their apparently more “immediate” style. omnibus project It’s All True) to Rithy Panh's "Fascinating." -Francis Ford Coppola Nevertheless, re-enactment remains an 2003 film 521: The Khmer Rouge Killing oft-deployed strategy of nonfiction film- Machine and Andrea Tonacci’s 2006 film Hills "Every past, present and future making—despite, or perhaps precisely of Disorder. Along the way, Margulies con- because, it prompts queries about the structs a fascinating canon of what she terms screenwriter owes Preston Sturges authenticity of the image and of testimonial “in-person reenactment” from familiar and big time. He was the first Hollywood accounts, suggests linkages between docu- unfamiliar films alike. Appraisals of major screenwriter to control his own mentary practice and psychotherapeutic movements such as Italian neorealism, cinema exercises relating to trauma (e.g., “the talk- ve’rite’, and Rouchian ethnofiction, are com— work by becoming film's first writer- ing cure”), and broaches the slightly muddy plemented by forays through more rarefied director. I owe him my hyphen as question of what might constitute the “per— comers of film history and even a few bastard well as my pure awe of his talent." formance” of documentary subjects. While genres, like “celebrity re-enactments” which some filmmakers—Peter Watkins, for cast notable figures in their own biopics. —James L. Brooks instance—have made consistent use of the These latter examples make for some of Paper $29.50 device in their filmmaking since before the the book’s most entertaining reading. Mar- Forthcoming in September days of Wiseman and the Maysles brothers, gulies’s extensive consideration of these rela- post-ve’rité re—enactment was probably most tively underexplored examples—such as The widely utilized, however dubiously, as a sta- Iackie Robinson Story (1950) and The Greatest ple component of TV docudrama and a (1977), featuring Muhammad Ali—amplifies Britpop favorite activity of Civil War history enthu- the peculiarity of re-enactment’s gesture, in BRITPDP siasts. It was only recuperated as a “serious” which recognizable figures rehearse iconic CINEMA documentary practice by filmmakers in the Cinema 19805 such as Jill Godmilow and Errol Mor— ris, who took it up as a device for reflexively From 0 foregrounding the artificiality of nonfiction PM “Mum!” 10 "US ’5 ENG“!!! filmmaking that would otherwise (suppos- Trainspotting edly) go unnoticed. More recently, varia- to This is 0 tions on re-enactment have taken on more opaque applications in hybrid fiction/non— England fiction works, such as Pedro Costa’s films Matt Glasby and, in the art world, installation video by artists such as Jeremy Deller, Sharon Hayes, "Atimely, genre-defining book that and Wu Tsang. provides both food for thought Re—enactment’s multitude of forms and and a iterations would make for a rich, if over- yearning nostalgia for the hope and whelming, topic of consideration for film promise of the 19905.“-Mel Hoyes, criticism and scholarship. Surprisingly, while British Film Institute L————‘it'sbeen by no means neglected in documentary studies, it’s been the subject of very few book-length studies. This makes film scholar Paper $24.00 lvone Margulies’s new book, In Person: Reen- actment in Postwar and Contemporary Cine- ma, a crucial addition to the field. Here, Mar- IVONE Distributed by the gulies focuses on instances in which filmic MARWUES University of Chicago Press subjects re-enact moments from their own lives on camera. But this greater degree of www.pr_essiuchicago.edu specificity is far from a narrowing of scope: CINEASTE, Summer 2019 71 moments earlier lives. Frequently, of their as No doubt one could make a lengthy list of Out ofSight would now be more likely to get these works feature multi- in the Ali example, films and filmmakers working in this mode, a minimal theatrical release and find the vast subjects ple actors playing the at differem which Margulies addresses only in' passing or majority of their audience—and, probably, frankenstein stages of their careers and newly omits entirely. In Person is compendious, not production funds—via Netflix or Amazon. archival footage. staged scenes with This comprehensive, and to some the selection of But if widespread respect for Twin Peaks, and suturing of disparate styles bodies points films might feel arbitrary and idiosyncratic. For which was immediately regarded as genuine in which up the unique ways cinema throws this reader, though, this balance of orthodox art, benefited from David Lynch’s back« reassembles time out ofjoint and it, con- and off-piste choices is a large part of the ground in cinema, The Sopranos seemed to structing new diegetic orders while prompting book’s appeal. Joshua Oppenheun'er’s The Act come out of nowhere. According to Brett the viewer to examine nuances and distinc- ofKilling, which has already been w1l‘dly over— Martin’s book Difficult Men, its creator tions in the qualities of the image and the praised by documentary scholars, needs no David Chase felt that he was slumming in bodies of the actors. more attention. By contrast, Tonacci’s television, since his reference points came Still more bizarre along these lines is the immensely rich and comparatively little-seen from Fifties and Sixties European cinema. example of Mel Stuart’s 1980 TV film Sophia: Hills of Disorder—which retraces the steps of Nevertheless, the show’s originality Her Own Story, in which Sophia Loren appears, an m'digenous man from a small Amazon tribe, stemmed from the way it domesticated the first, as her own mother (opposite the younger who may be the lone survivor ofa massacre in gangster. Given their lengthy running times Rina Braun playing Sophia) and, afterward, as the 19705—1'5 ripe for greater consideration and multigenerational narratives, The Godfa- herself in' her later years. This diz'zying splitting and Margulies’s detailed analysis ought rightly ther trilogy blew the gangster film up to an and doubling of Loren’s persona and body, to encourage more viewers to seek it out. epic scale. But Tony Soprano was a murderer compounded by the film’s multiple revisita— The sustained appraisal of Panh’s and who was also a suburban dad. Matt Zoller tions of familiar scenes from earlier films, Tonacci’s work in the final two chapters raises Seitz and Alan Sepinwall describe the pilot as makes for a strangely postmodern gesture for a another minor quibble: the book’s lack of a “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, made—for~telev1$'ion vanity project. But crucially, more comprehensive theory of contemporary and crime thriller, with dabs of ’705 Ameri— for Margulies, it also “provokes us to think re-enactment and its forms across audiovisual can New Wave grit. It mixes disreputable which logic—that of resemblance, genetics, media, beyond the cinema. This, of course, spectacle with flourishes from postmodern social group, or age—authonz'es reenactment’s could (and should) be a book all its own, and novels, dialectical theater and mid-century performance ofthe past.” that it’s missing here is likely due to Mar- European art-house cinema.” These provocations are sustained and gulies’s more retrospective gaze, and perhaps If there was anyfln'ng subversive about The revisited throughout Margulies’s comprehen- a means to avoid dating a book that already Sopranos, it lay in the not-so-subtle suggestion sive text through more well-known examples, offers a rich assessment of re-enactment’s his- that the show’s world was an exaggerated ver- as well. Indeed, one of the pleasures of the torical iterations. sion of the compromises and hypocrisies of book is reading its masterful re-engagements Nevertheless, one is at very least cun‘ous to ordinary middle-class American life. The fact with “classics” of documentary history and know the author’s thoughts on the matter, and that it was TV, not cinema, enhanced this; its theory, each time with a fresh lens or deeper given the proliferation and mutation of re- audience sat down in their living rooms contextual interconnectivity.

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