Introduction: What Now?

Presenting Reenactment
Jonathan Kahana

Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Volume 50, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 46-60 (Article) Published by Wayne State University Press DOI: 10.1353/frm.0.0030

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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 making a comeback, a feeling that throughout the landscape of contemporary moving-image culturein mainstream film and television, at festivals of documentary and avant-garde cinema, and in galleries and museumsone 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 different 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 cinematic reenactment as the shadowing of everyday facts at close range.1 Margulies uses the documentary work of Zavattini and his fellow neorealists 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. 4660. 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 Midwifes 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 Stoneys interracial production methods.3 It has been convenient to distinguish the era of Stoneys earliest films from a later period of filmmaking and viewingarriving some time in the 1980s or 1990sby the term postmodernity, which has been taken to mean, when applied to realist and documentary cinema, the end of credulity in methods of narrative 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 Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, was no less a work of pedinamento than Stoneys. 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 contradictory, 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 dj vu experience of seeing methods of performance and storytelling in documentary 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 aesthetic 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 reenactment. 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

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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 examples 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 narrative structure, like Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [FR/US, 2007]), Todd Haynes (Im 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 adjustment 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 Guantanamo [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 television audiences from earlier true-crime reality shows like Fox Televisions Americas Most Wanted (US, 1988), as is the sensationalist appropriation of such techniques for gutter journalism (as with the E! channels 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 cinma vrit. Among the most visible and rigorous opponents of vrit 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 Smartest 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: interviews, 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,

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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 Standard 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 reenactment by any current practitioner or critic.)7 At some aesthetic and conceptual distance from these practices of docudramatic narrative, a parallel track was established by a number of documentary filmmakers in different parts of the world. Their work employed an unsettling combination of Freudian technique and method acting to unearth traumatic histories through harrowing on-location interviews, in films like Claude Lanzmanns epic oral history of the Holocaust, Shoah (FR, 1985), or Werner Herzogs film about an American pilots experience as a Vietnam War POW, Little Dieter Needs to Fly (US, 1997), and Rithy Panhs films about Cambodia in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge, including S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (FR/KH, 2003) and Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers (FR, 2007).8 At about the same time, a small wave of filmmakers better known in art world and academic circles were engaged in an entirely different sort of reenaction, remaking earlier works of documentary and avant-garde film. Jill Godmilows remake of a 1969 film by German filmmaker Harun Farocki, What Farocki Taught (US, 1997) and Elisabeth Subrins Shulie (US, 1997), the remake of a 1967 student film produced by Chicago acquaintances of radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, received considerable attention from critics and curators when they were released in the same year, and likely played some role in generating interest among American experimental film and video artists in remounting the work of earlier experimental filmmakers. In the related but culturally distinct domain of contemporary art, one could find ample evidence of a similar preoccupation with quasi-documentary techniques of historical fiction and historical performance among the makers and critics of experimental film and video, including those displayed and discussed in various kinds of large group shows, like History Will Repeat Itself, a 20072008 curatorial collaboration between the Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Not Quite How I Remember It, a 2008 show at the Power Plant gallery in Toronto; and Realisms, the second part of a yearlong show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., called The Cinema Effect. Many of the same artists could be found in these shows: a number of them combine performance art with film and video installation to restage a variety of historically significant events. Notable examples included the British conceptual artists Jeremy Deller, whose Battle of Orgreave reconstructs a 1984 confrontation between striking British coal miners and the police, and Rod Dickinson, who has organized reenactments of the so-called Milgram Experiment, the FBI siege of the Branch

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Jonathan Kahana Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and other events; the Israeli-American video artist Omer Fast, maker of a series of long, multi-screen videos that mix documentary conventions like the interview with non-narrative montage and tableaux on the topic of military action and reenaction; Pierre Huyghe, the French video artist whose double-screen film The Third Memory (FR, 1999), re-creating the bank robbery in Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, US, 1975), is one of the most widely shown works in this style; the American conceptual artists Sharon Hayes and Mark Tribe, both of whom use performance and video to revisit signature moments in the recent history of American radical politics; and Artur Zmijewski, a Polish artist who has made a number of works revisiting traumatic acts of institutional violence through different forms of historical performance, and who was represented in the Hirshhorn show with a piece re-creating Philip Zimbardos so-called Stanford Prison Experiment. It would seem to strain credibility to use the same namereenactmentfor such a methodologically, institutionally, and geographically diverse cultural phenomenon. Although it is the job of publicists, journalists, and curators to insist that a zeitgeist can be identified, and that doing so is of some intellectual value, a properly historical analysis of the cultural production of now would remain skeptical of such a one-dimensional view of the present, especially one that maintains the importance of what curators like to call site-specific art, while relying on the internationally non-specific flows of financial and cultural capital represented by the usual-suspects list in the previous paragraph. But testing and straining belief in the now and in the habits, rituals, and laws that keep it in place is precisely the aim of the works considered by the contributors to the dossier that follows. By bringing together work on documentary and narrative cinema, ethnographic film, forms of film and video essay, and performance and installation art, the interview and articles that follow provide some sense of the continuities between projects conceived for very different purposes and audiences. Ranging across this landscape of styles and settings, from the conventional devices of the biopic and the sanctified space of the museum to collaborative, experimental, and radical structures of cinema, video, and performance, the following articles take up issues common to this wide variety of rehearsals, whether these are explicitly articulated in the works as problems, or merely latent, coming to light only through interpretation. These themes include the place of memory, testimony, and narrative construction in historical knowledge; the ritual and unconscious dimensions of action; the function of film and other recording media for the production or preservation of cultural and collective memory; the imaginary and fantasmatic aspects of character and performance in documentary film and media, and the role of documentary in the construction of social fantasy; the therapeutic value of reenactment; the uses of embodiment in various kinds of learning and pedagogy; the tensions between political, social, and theatrical senses of acting; predictive and

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Introduction future-oriented applications of reenactment; and the nagging feeling that a culture of nostalgia, repetition, and simulation have limited our capacity for originality, authenticity, and agency in our media and our actions. To prepare the reader to follow some of these threads through the analyses that follow, and to see them as the continuation of enduring concerns, it will be useful to briefly mention the multifarious identity of reenactment in the history of documentarywhich cannot be recounted at any length hereand to compare two different treatments of this problem to the convolutions of the very concept of enactment, sedimented in the oldest English-language appearances of the term. One of the few contemporary historians of documentary to pay significant attention to reenactment, Brian Winston, goes so far as to propose a definition of documentary based on reenactment, in which detail, publicsphere interaction of subjects, and plot simplicity are just as viable as the usual indexes of documentary ontology: authenticity of the documentary actor, his or her actions, and the locations. Commenting on the use of reenactment by filmmakers like Joris Ivens and Humphrey Jennings in the 1930s and 1940s, Brian Winston places their work on a spectrum of reconstruction that stretches all the way from the lowest level of filmmaker interventionthe pure recording of natural disasters and other events uncontrolled by the filmmakerto historically or physically impossible situations that are entirely fabricated by the filmmakers. Between these two extremes, the degrees of construction and intervention by the filmmakers steadily increase, from simple requests for permission to film people as they go about their lives, or minimal acts of staging, like asking documentary subjects to repeat an action the cameraperson missed, to the dramatization of events that may or may not actually have taken place, with or without the participation of the actual people whom the depicted events concern.9 Anticipating the revival of critical interest in reenactment, Bill Nichols has recently followed Winstons lead, proposing a helpful taxonomy of varieties of reenactment that echoes Winstons, but with a tentative teleologytoward self-reflexivitythat is absent from Winstons account. This spectrum of types ranges from less reflexive forms like docudramatic realism, of the sort we find in historical dramas and true-crime television, to the more stylized, selfconscious, and ironic forms we are likely to find in activist and experimental film and video practice. As is true also of his well-known enumerations of the modes of documentarya list which has grown from two, in his 1981 book Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media, to four in his 1991 book Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (via Julianne Burtons reworking of the first list in Toward a History of Social Documentary in Latin America), to six in Introduction to Documentary (2001)10 types of reenactment can be found at different periods, although it is clear that more recent forms are privileged for their reflexive relation to older, realist forms, where the staging of history is meant to have evidentiary value. Drawing on

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Jonathan Kahana both anthropology and Freudian psychoanalysis, Nichols argues for fantasmatic styles of reenactment, rehearsals that stand in for a historical event while indicating that they are, at the same time, neither an indexical record of that event nor merely a later act of representation, but rather some uncanny combination of the two. (This ingenious formulation draws from Gregory Batesons gloss on how animals explain to themselves the rules and the meaning of their play-fighting: These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.)11 Both authors return to reenactment (or regard its return) as a hidden foundation within the history of documentary, one that, excavated by historians or filmmakers, might be employed in the remaking or deconstruction of the contemporary concept of documentary. But where Winstons typology sees reenactment in semiotic terms, as a language out of which different rhetorics or paradigms of true story are shaped and contrasted to each other, thus making it appear as if the documentary tradition had a progressive history, Nichols views reenactment as a kind of repressed instinct in the unconscious of the form, one that can be, in Freudian terms, worked through. As a threat to the supposed indexical base of documentary cinema, reenactment raises the possibility of histories of the form that predate film, and although Winston and Nichols are concerned only with cinematic reenactment, their taxonomies open onto much longer genealogies. One genealogy would start with the term reenactment itself. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, enactment is itself already a concept in which the problems of staging and mediation figure quite significantly, even before the belated addition of the prefix re-. To enact is, in the first three senses provided by the OED, to effect a permanent change in a social or institutional body with a singular utterance: 1. To enter among the acta or public records; also, to enter in a record or chronicle. 2. To make into an act; hence, to ordain, decree. 3. To declare officially or with authority; to appoint. These definitions, which date from the fifteenth century, are speech acts, in the linguistic sense of the term: they are their own audience and have immediate significance. To enact in these senses of the term is to render a judgment, make a decision, or establish a fundamental principle for a group without passing through a stage of mediation beside the medium of the declared idea itself. But a second set of definitions, also originating in the early modern period, places more emphasis on the staging of the announcement of the new condition and on its presentation to and effect upon an audience: 4. To work in or upon; to activate, influence. Also, to implant, inspire (a feeling, etc.) into a person.

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Introduction 5. To represent (a dramatic work, a scene) on or as on the stage; to personate (a character) dramatically, play (a part). To perform (a ceremony).12 In these latter definitions, a material and human transformation of some sort must take place before it can be said that enactment has occurred. Enactment in these senses is both a temporal and spatial process, one that can not only figuratively but also literally take place, and one that covers a social distance: between one person and another, or between one or more and more than one. In contradistinction to enactment as an official declaration or inscription, these last two definitions suggest an impermanent and intersubjective process, a rhetorical or mimetic effect dependent upon anothers belief in or reaction to the act-ing in question. It is something of a letdown, after all the intriguing play of contradiction between these various definitions, to see that the OED has relatively little to say about reenactment, which it defines merely as a rehearsal or repetition of the two broad categories of enactment: 1. To enact (a law, etc.) again.; 2. To act or perform again; to reproduce.13 The enmeshment of the two actions of enactmentto do; to perform is a centuries-old problem, captured in its etymology and revived over a century ago in the birth of the moving image. Filmed reenactmentswhich date more or less to the origin of cinemareopen the gap between the two original senses of enactment. It would, of course, be a mistake to claim that film singlehandedly revived this problem, or that there were no institutional, public, or collective practices of reenactment prior to or beside cinema. Various kinds of historical re-creations helped establish the public face of the American left in the early twentieth century, for instance; and in the same period, the staging of lost, disappearing, or outlawed indigenous cultural and ritual practices were central to the commercial-public exploitations of American salvage anthropology. And for centuries prior, reenactments of the Passion were a staple of Christian communities. But with cinema, the ontological ambiguity in the concept of enactment is practically unavoidable. Because the moving image comes to us with an effect of immediacy built in, one that installs itself in and as an authoritative record of the past simply because of the technical conditions of its production and its exhibition, the medium already seems to have the effect of public history, decreeing to audiences of any filmed event that it was this way, this happened. Under the conditions of these public displays of social recording, of a past that lives again before us, it can be very difficult to distinguish actual actions from performanceswhich hasnt stopped critics of moving images from trying, for over a hundred years. Filmed reenactments are thus of a piece with the problems apparently posed in a new way by those more recent forms of docudrama or metafictions which place in abeyance, according to Hayden White, the distinction between the real and the imaginary. Everything is presented as if it were of the same ontological order, both real and imaginaryrealistically imaginary

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Jonathan Kahana or imaginarily real, with the result that the referential function of the images of events is etiolated.14 Writing a decade and a half ago, in the wake of yet another postmodern crisis of the historical referentin this instance, the scandal of Oliver Stones paranoid retelling of the Kennedy assassination in JFKWhites comments are meant to remind his audience this crisis is a modernist problematic, not a postmodernist one, and its emergence can be dated to any number of historical and cultural events of the previous century or so. But an etymological perspective suggests that theres no reason to stop there in looking for a source of the confusion that moving images of history produce. If the recent resurgence of interest in historical reenactment among makers of moving images is any indication, the crisis marked in different but overlapping publics by Stones film and by the volume of scholarly essays which includes Whites reflections seems, in fact, to recur in a regular way. As Vivian Sobchack says in her introduction to The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (where Whites essay appears), this is itself just a reflection of the intertwining of representational media and history in everyday life. (That it is nearly impossible to remember what could have seemed, a decade and a half ago, so world-historically significant about the mass media examples Sobchack uses to signify this developmentForrest Gump, the Disney controversy, the O. J. trial, the History Channelseems in itself to prove her point that the public significance of the mass media had come to depend upon the constant announcement of crises whichlike the Simpson trial of the centurywere on the one hand special and historic and on the other diurnal and temporally repetitive.)15 Like the essays in The Persistence of History, the following articles assume that a question about the ability of moving image media to make history hurt is once again being posed.16 In them, techniques of reenactment appear as a return of sorts to primordial questionspresent from the start in the very definition of enactment as a public and historic act of representationabout the capacity of any historical medium to keep separate the signifiers and signifieds of history. But unlike that earlier volume, the authors in this dossier do not necessarily seek an escape from this vertiginous spiral. Nor do they see it necessarily as yet another form of mass deception channeled through the commercial media. (For that reason, many of the works of documentary and avant-garde film and video discussed in the following pages are likely to be much less familiar to many readers than Forrest Gump [Robert Zemeckis, US, 1994], JFK, Schindlers List [Steven Spielberg, US, 1993], The Thin Blue Line, and the other works of mainstream American commercial cinema used to make the argument for or against a postmodern historical sensibility in contemporary cinema.) Indeed, even within the same article, the reader of this collection of essays will find a remarkable diversity of opinion on the effects and meanings of reenactment, as it is practiced in the wide range of moving image forms represented. If there is some agreement among the contributors to this

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Introduction dossier (and the filmmakers about which they speak) that this is a moment in which reenactment again raises questions of some urgency for filmmakers, artists, and critical thinkers, it is just as true that, for each of these authors and filmmakers, reenactment troubles the now in which any definite statement of its coordinates or its meanings could be made. And to that end, the place and time of the contemporary has been established in the broadest possible terms in this collection of articles, three of which consider forms of reenactment in cinema and three of which discuss more recent appearances of reenactment in the world of contemporary art and art criticism. The first article, my interview with Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan, about their important but rarely seen film Two Laws (AU, 1981), serves as something of a historical reference point for the articles that follow. Made between 1979 and 1981, Two Laws was, in part, a response (as Cavadini and Strachan make clear in the interview) to the prevailing ethics and aesthetics of documentary and of ethnographic filmmaking in the West. But it was also an attempt to incorporate olderin some important senses, immemorialand non-Western cultures of reenactment into Western documentary film practice and documentary consciousness. By doing so, Strachan and Cavadini were establishing some lasting questions about the agency and action of filmic representation, and making clear that such questions must be posed in transnational political terms. In The Black Holes of History: Raoul Pecks Two Lumumbas, Christopher Pavsek considers the authorship of reenactment in Raoul Pecks two films about the life and short political career of the Congos first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba: la mort du prophte/Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (CH/DE/FR, 1992) and Lumumba (BE/DE/FR/HT, 2000). Where the first film is a reflexive essay, concerned as much with the present struggle to make a film about the past as it is with its ostensible subject, the second is made in a style familiar to viewers of the classical Hollywood biographical narrative. Drawing out the Freudian themes articulated explicitly in Death of a Prophet, Pavsek calls it a film about failure itself . . . marked by the great historical failure of Lumumbas project for Congolese independence and national unity. Pavsek notes that the incorporation of this failure into the structure of the first filmwhich fails in various ways to function as a documentary, insofar as it demonstrates the political and artistic difficulty of returning to the literal and figurative scenes of imperialist and neocolonial crimesis one of that films strengths, creating black holes of history that mark the sites of another possible future. Pecks inability to enact a proper documentary statement, in other words, becomes a way for Peck to tease out the layers of political history, through what Freud called the screen memories of everyday forgetting. Looking into the gap of years and styles between the first and second films, Pavsek finds a similar forgetting taking place in Pecks restaging of historiesLumumbas, and Pecks ownin the narrative consolations of the biopic genre.

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Jonathan Kahana Collective histories of state violence and the cinematic forms appropriate to them are also the subject of Shattering Silence: Traumatic Memory and Reenactment in Rithy Panhs S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Deirdre Boyles reflection on the use of reenactment in Panhs powerful interviewbased documentary S-21, which stages the return of survivors and perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide to the site of their conjoint traumatization. Taken together with Cavadini and Strachans commentary on the making of Two Laws and Pavseks discussion of Pecks films, Boyles reading of S-21 demonstrates the importance of a local theory of reenactment, one calibrated to the methods of reenactment employed by filmmakers to address particular problems of history and memory, even when the institutional and political sources of the collective trauma in question are roughly comparable, as is true of these films subjects. In the case of Boyles analysis of Panhs filmmaking, the theoretical apparatus includes a genealogical investigation of the history of psychology, where Boyle finds alternatives to the Freudian concept of repression. The Freudian model has been central to critical work on many varieties of the literature and culture of genocide work which is sometimes organized under the heading of trauma studies. Against the universalizing tenets of this work, Boyle argues, however, that Panhs practice of reenactment is designed specifically to deal with Cambodians dissociated memories of the Khmer Rouge period. The resulting film is, in this sense, both a way to engage public conscience about the evil done in the name of the stateas is true of many works of political documentaryand a way to realize the limits and barriers to cinematic transmission of such horrors. The next three essays in the dossier move from the aesthetic and social structures of cinema to works of reenactment designed for the diverse spaces and screens of contemporary video art. In The Real Movie: Reenactment, Spectacle, and Recovery in Pierre Huyghes The Third Memory, Ruth Erickson takes up one of the best-known examples of reenactment in the art world, Huyghes ten-minute restaging of the events chronicled in Dog Day Afternoon, featuring John Wojtowicz, the man on whom Al Pacinos gay bank-robber character was based. Wojtowicz is seen in Huyghes reconstruction of a few scenes from the film directing himself and others in what he calls the real movie, a more authentic version of the events from which Pacino, director Sidney Lumet, screenwriter Frank Pierson, and other high-priced Hollywood talent made Dog Day Afternoon. Noting the increasing interest in reenactment among contemporary artists and curators alike in the decade since Huyghes project was first exhibited, Erickson observes a tacit understanding of its critical function in this period, one not altogether different from the modernist critique of historiography outlined by Hayden White: contemporary art, argues Erickson, employs reenactment to champion viewpoints traditionally kept outside the grand narratives and to deconstruct the images and accounts that have comprised these narratives. But by reading Huyghes simulation through the Situationist concept of spectacle, Erickson suggests

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Introduction that The Third Memory resists such a neat narrative of liberation, while calling attention as well to its rampant textual and contextual contradictions, wherein the goal for both Huyghe and his subject is to claim an image and economic gain closely associated with stardom. With its highly personal content, its auteurist aspirations, and its rarified conditions of exhibition and reception, Huyghes multi-screen and multimedia installation marks, at first glance, the dramatic differences between the art world and the public spheres of social documentary film. But it could also be argued that Huyghe and many contemporary artists have turned to documentary methods and to the matter of the everyday precisely to break down such sociological and formal boundaries; and from a certain perspective, Huyghes work with Wojtowicz derives from the same ameliorative principles as Pahns work with the victims of the Khmer Rouge, Cavadini and Strachans collaboration with Aboriginal groups in northern Australia, or, for that matter, the Italian neorealists work with peasants and the urban working class in postwar Italy. In Gender, Power, and Pedagogy in Coco Fuscos Bare Life Study #1 (2005), A Room of Ones Own (2005), and Operation Atropos (2006), Karen Beckman explores the work of another contemporary artist whose use of reenactment brings together aesthetic experimentation and corrective social analysis. Placing herself in the frame of this multimedia group of performance works, Fusco attempts to learn by reenactment the methods and effects of military discipline and punishmenton the militarys own operatives and on enemy combatantsand, in doing so, to learn something about how learning and torture are connected. At the same time, however, Beckmans essay establishes a contrast between Fuscos work and some other uses of reenactment described in the dossier, in which experience and the personal rise above ideology, and are the basis for a claimby artists and by criticsthat reenactment is a redemptive or progressive technique. Opening on journalist Christopher Hitchenss bathetic performance of his own torture for a Vanity Fair article, Beckman contrasts the ethical clarity Hitchens reaches by reenacting the waterboarding of prisoners and detainees held by American military forces with Fuscos discovery of how difficult it is to determine what torture is, and how to prevent it from happening. Tracing this troubling theme through a set of related stagings by Fusco of pedagogical theory and practice, Beckman comes to the bracing conclusion that re-enactments constitute central and paradoxical components of our oppositional discourse, including the spaces of liberal education. Beckmans reading helps us understand reenactment as a discipline, with both punitive and critical valences, both of which are present where we re-enact elements of the structure of power that makes torture possible. The final essay in the dossier, Paige Sarlins New Left-Wing Melancholy: Mark Tribes The Port Huron Project and the Politics of Reenactment, returns us to another immemorial problem for documentarythat of the documentvia a critical examination of Tribes Port Huron Project, a multimedia initiative

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Jonathan Kahana to restage a number of landmark political speeches by American radicals in the 1960s, and to archive and distribute the performances in digital form. Placing the work of Tribe, a Brown University professor of modern culture and media, in a context of nostalgia for an authentic left politics, Sarlin raises valuable questions about the use and abuse of historyand of the concept of the archive, a term stretched so thin at present that it is practically meaninglessin contemporary cultural criticism. Sarlin diagnoses a modern variant of what Walter Benjamin called left-wing melancholy in the performances staged, recorded, and circulated by Tribe, as well as appreciations of Tribes work in venues like October, the journal of aesthetic and cultural theory, as a model of how to return art to political relevance at a time of war. Sarlin maintains that, on the contrary, Tribes project gives a blank form to the differences and the similarities between then and now, assuming a form of resonance and significance that the project then re-produces and amplifies, but which allow it and its champions to avoid important questions about the historical models they adopt. By raising the question of how the activities and technologies of recording and collecting conduce to collectivity, Sarlin returns readers to questions central to the problem of thinking about documentary as a form of social or political enactment. This problem subtends every documentary work worthy of the name, since that namedocumentarycontains the problem of how a document can become a likeness of itself, and projects the presence of a reader or observer, one who measures the distance the documentary travels from its source in the document, and for whom this travel is made to matter. Applied to situations of reenactment, in all the forms this activity can take, documentary foregrounds this problem in terms of movement. If social documentary is always at some level a problem of movementfrom artifact to explanation; from viewing to affect or actionthe use of reenactment in documentary reinforces it, moving the documentary viewer between Europe in 1968 and Aboriginal Australia; between Brussels and Kinshasa; between the Vietnam era and the period of Iraq; between crime, art, and mass culture; between the methods of torture and of pedagogy, or of torture and documentary itself. But while they animate this movement, the following discussions help us narrow the apparent distance between the past and present forms of documentary. In this way, documentary reenactment can be seen not as a turning away from the present, but as a way of posing the question, what now?a question whose meaning changes depending on how it is performed, and one that it might now and again be more important for documentary to ask than to answer. Jonathan Kahana is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University, where he co-directs the graduate program in Culture and Media. He is the author of Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (Columbia University Press, 2008) and of articles on documentary and avant-garde film, cultural

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Introduction theory, and American politics in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Millennium Film Journal, and Social Text. He is the editor of The Documentary Film Reader (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Notes
Thanks are due Erin Baysden and Anne Ellegood of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, who provided materials from the Realisms show for me to consult (as well as arranging for me to discuss her curation of the show with Ellegood), and to Paul Fileri, whose editorial acumen I relied on to shape the final form of this introduction and the articles that follow it. Ivone Margulies, Exemplary Bodies: Reenactment in Love in the City, Sons, and Close Up, in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 221. Ibid. On Stoneys production methods for both films, see Lynne Jackson, A Commitment to Social Values and Racial Justice, Wide Angle 21, no. 2 (March 1999): 3337; and Jacksons The Production of George Stoneys Film All My Babies: A Midwifes Own Story, Film History 1 (1987): 36792. Margulies, Exemplary Bodies, 227. For an excellent account of the historical biography film and its importance to the early sound era in Hollywood, see Leger Grindon, Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). See, for example, Manohla Dargis, We, the People Behind the Abuse, New York Times, April 25, 2008, www.movies.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/movies/25stan. html; Richard Schickel, Standard Operating Procedure, Too Much Style?, Time, April 24, 2008, www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1734936,00.html; J. Hoberman, Errol Morris Lets Torturers Off Easy, Village Voice, April 22, 2008, www.villagevoice.com/2008-04-22/film/get-out-of-jail-free/; Paul Arthur, The Horror, Artforum (April 2008), www.artforum.com/inprint/id=19738. Errol Morris, Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One), Zoom, New York Times, April 3, 2008, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/playit-again-sam-re-enactments-part-one/; Play It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part Two), Zoom, New York Times, April 10, 2008, http://morris.blogs.nytimes. com/2008/04/10/play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part-two/; Cartesian Blogging, Part One, Zoom, New York Times, December 10, 2007, http://morris.blogs. nytimes.com/2007/12/10/primae-objectiones-et-responsio-auctoris-ad-primasobjectiones-part-one/; Cartesian Blogging, Part Two, Zoom, New York Times, June 9, 2008, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/cartesian-bloggingpart-two/; Cartesian Blogging, Part Three, Zoom, New York Times, November 12, 2008, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/cartesian-blogging-part-3/. This influence of these films can be sensed, in turn, in Errol Morriss own Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (US, 1999), which reviews the historical and historiographic terrain covered, quite literally, by Shoah, while giving equal time to the unconvincing arguments of the Holocaust deniers against (or for) whom Shoah was made. Morriss use of his by-then conventional style of reenactments to dramatize certain details of his subjects speech raises implicitly

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the question demanded by the whole project: After Shoah, why did such a film need to be made? The answer is discovered, at least in part, when the film follows Leuchter to Auschwitz, where he is caught on an assistants amateur video chipping away at the ruins of the gas chambers, in a horrifying imitationone could say, a reenactmentof the professional historian, a grotesque performance that is also meant to enter the as-if of the most pernicious kind of historical fiction: What if the Nazis were telling the truth and these really were just the walls of ordinary showers? Brian Winston, Honest, Straightforward Re-enactment: The Staging of Reality, in Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, ed. Kees Bakker (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 169. See Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 18285; Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3275; Julianne Burton, Toward a History of Social Documentary in Latin America, in The Social Documentary in Latin America, ed. Julianne Burton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 36; Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 99138. I am here paraphrasing Bill Nicholss argument in Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject from the form in which he presented it on the reenactment panel I organized for the SCMS conference in 2007. Nichols generously allowed me to review the manuscript of the full-length version of his essay, which has recently been published as Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject, in Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 7289. Gregory Batesons formulation appears in A Theory of Play and Fantasy, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1972]), 180. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. Enactment. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. Re-enactment. Hayden White, The Modernist Event, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (London: Routledge, 1996), 19. Vivian Sobchack, Introduction: History Happens, in The Persistence of History, 4. History is what hurts is Fredric Jamesons coinage. See The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 102.

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