Ascetic Stages

This chapter investigates the relationship between the spare, concentrated theatricality aesthetics favored by post-Holocaust cinema and the imperatives of modern and contemporary testimonial reenactment in posttraumatic situations. It examines the convergence between cinema, the courtroom, and in-person reenactment in Rouch, Morin, and Lanzmann’s cinema, discussing how the viewer is implicated in these post-verité reenactments (Williams, Nichols). The chapter looks in particular to the monologue reenactment as a privileged form of testimonial in situations evoking atrocities (Ganda’s monologue in Moi un Noir, Marceline’s in Chronicle of a Summer, and Karski’s in The Karski’s Report). It relates these films’ conflation of past and present to other revisitations of empty sites in Night and Fog and testimony films such as Time of the Ghetto (Rossif, 1961) as well as Loridan Iven’s La petite prairie aux bouleaux. And it discusses the repetitive movements of Lanzmann’s touching camera as a form of phatic reenactment.

Celebrity Reenactment, Biopic, and the Mortal Body

This chapter analyzes two stars’ biopics from the 1950s: Carlos Velo’s Torero! on bullfighter Luis Procuna and Sophia: Her Own Story (1980) featuring the famous Loren playing herself and her mother in a TV biopic. The chapter analyzes the constraints posed to celebrity self-reenactment: how different temporal orders: of biology (the star’s aging body), the recurrent circuitry of star iconography, and the flexible order of aesthetic representation balance precariously in these narratives. Taking the cue from André Bazin’s analysis on bullfighting and death in the cinema, this chapter analyzes the specific roles of archival footage and of reenactment in star biopics. In particular, it looks at how reenactment’s temporal indeterminacy contrasts with documentary images of bullfights. The chapter situates Velo’s work within Mexican experiments with ciné-verdad as well as Zavattini’s international influence in these efforts in 1950s Mexico.

Senseless Mimesis

This chapter discusses the second-to-last sequence of scenes in Serras da Desordem as indicative of the unredemptive quality of contemporary reenactment films. The conclusion relates the cold analytical record of the realities at the reservation of the Awá Guajá Indians to the perverse ethnography of Jean Rouch (Les Maitres Fous) and Luis Bunuel (Las Hurdes), where a purposeful indeterminacy regarding time and chronology, a stasis, and a foregrounded repetition and circularity imply a critical view that has none of the prospects of transformation proper to modern neorealist and verité reenactment. Framed by Serras’ relentless fragmentation, this sequence’s dry look suggests the power of reenactment to destabilize all documentary record.

Reenactment and A-filiation in Serras da Desordem

This chapter discusses Serras da Desordem (Hills of Chaos) (Andrea Tonacci, 2007), which concerns an isolated Indian who reenacts atrocities that happened thirty years earlier, including his displacement and wandering until making contact with a rancher’s family and eventually rejoining the remainder of his group. The chapter analyzes the film’s hybrid texture, its mix of reenacted scenes with archival and TV and media images and the implication of cinema in the record of multiple instances of exploitation throughout Brazilian history. It also studies two long-span films returning to events that happened twenty years earlier—Twenty Years Later: A Man Marked to Die (Eduardo Coutinho, 1964–1984) and Corumbiara (Vincent Carelli, 2006) on first contact with isolated indigenous groups as a comparison with Tonacci’s approach to return and to Brazilian history. The chapter considers Tonacci’s self-ethnographic early projects and his experimental films in relation to this ambitious allegory on Brazilian exploitation in the 1970s; it reads Tonacci’s untranslated communications by Carapiru as a willed form of opacity, an enforced, enacted process of dislocation and alienation and an indictment of Brazilian politics, a process termed “a-filiation.”

A Sort of Psychodrama

This chapter explores the political and cultural contours of the late 1950s impetus for autocritique in France, focusing on two films engaged with antiracist role-play and self-awareness: The Human Pyramid (Jean Rouch, 1959) and Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin, 1961). The chapter tracks the reception of psychodrama and group dynamics in late 1950s France correlating interests on authenticity, self-determination, and racism apparent in publications such as Arguments (Morin’s coedited journal) to cinema verité’s intent to stage a transformative process on camera. This program coalesces in Chronicle’s notorious postscreening scene, and it also emerges in The Human Pyramid’s suspended resolution in achieving an integration between French and African students at a high school in Ivory Coast. The quandaries of trying to register process in film are highlighted in the fixation with authentic emergent speech in cinema verité and in analyses of the brilliant ruptures of registers in The Human Pyramid.

Casting Relatives

This chapter briefly situates approaches to early cinema reenactment and embodied spectatorship (Allison Griffith, Kristen Whissel, Mary Ann Doane) as well as the reception for reconstructions of past events (Miriam Hansen and Dan Streible). It reflects on the notion of social representativity prevalent in 1930s cinema as well as the reasons why the choice of actual members of a family may or may not matter in reenactment (Joris Ivens, Robert Flaherty, and Georges Rouquier). The chapter focuses on attempts to address the limits of reenactment through genetic links or an overemphasis on literalness: Orson Welles’s Four Men in a Raft (one of the episodes [1942] projected for It’s All True and reconstructed in 1993); Leslie Woodhead and Bud Greenspan’s Endurance, the reenacted biography of Haile Gebrselassie the Olympic runner, cast with many of his family members; and Zhang Yuan’s Sons, where an entire family reenacts the period prior to the internment of the father for alcoholism.

Trial Stages

This chapter examines Rithy Pahn’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and its disturbing tableaus featuring the ex-guards of S21 reenacting acts of torture and reciting documents extracted under duress at the very site where these atrocities were committed. Following an interest in the dissonant effects of spare, empty sites, this chapter explores the affinity between contemporary reenactment film and juridical and psychoanalytic discourse; it considers the theatrical effects of the perpetrators’ affectless behavior in relation to notions of traumatic reenactment, and it posits, through close readings of a number of scenes, a parajuridical aesthetics based on a triangulation between performance, recitation, and a narrating figure that serves as judge/professor. Panh’s articulation of an indicting, evidentiary structure and of a disturbing witnessing position for the viewer are analyzed in contrast to documentaries made around and about the International Court of Cambodjian Crimes, including juridical reconstructions at the site.

Neorealist Reenactment as Postwar Pedagogy

This chapter examines the Italian cinema contexts for Cesare Zavattini’s radical reconception of the notion of the nonprofessional actor—that everyone acts his or her life on camera—during the waning of neorealism. Pedinamento, closely tracking an event, and film-lampo, the investigation film, are analyzed as a transition from neorealist precepts to a verité focus on named individuals who turn their lives into exemplary narratives. Episodes from Love in the City (1953)—Zavattini and Maselli’s The Story of Caterina and Antonioni’s Attempted Suicides—are analyzed in their articulation of narrative of self-revision. A complementary omnibus project We the Women (1953) on famous stars’ everyday existence suggests the ways early 1950s reenactment engages thematically with the star system (e.g., Guarini’s Contest: 4 Actresses; 1 Hope, Franciolini’s Alida Valli) and with questions of authenticity and theatricality. In-person reenactment leads to modern cinema hybrids mixing acting and self-presentation (e.g., Visconti’s take on Magnani, Rossellini’s on Bergman).

Estrangement and Exemplarity

This introductory chapter starts with a brief analysis of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990) and the way in which reenactment serves as an ethical instrument for adjudicating motives and agency. It defines the import of in-person reenactment as a confessional-performative cinema genre distinct from other forms of dramatic reconstruction and historical or biographical illustration using actors or social actors. The notion of in-person reenactment, a mode of making public one’s past on camera so as to provide an exemplary narrative on film, is introduced as a motor of self-revision in cinema, a mode that parallels major cinematic movements of postwar realism.