Documentary

Reenactment has been part of documentary since its inception, although not always a welcome one; it has also, of late, made something of a comeback. In the first part of the 20th century, technology compelled documentary filmmakers like Robert Flaherty and Humphrey Jennings to reconstruct events, lives, and dialogue. With infinitely superior equipment and technology at their disposal, however, later documentary filmmakers have made a conscious choice to use reenactment as a means of representing and getting at the truth, although, as Bill Nichols counsels, “reenactments are clearly a view rather than the view from which the past yields up its truth” (Nichols, 2008, p. 79). Reenactment is a wide-ranging, somewhat nebulous term when applied to nonfiction film, spanning simple and functional reconstructions to the exaggeratedly stylized reenactments exemplified by the work of Errol Morris, whose The Thin Blue Line (1988) changed conceptions of reenactment irrevocably. As Nichols intimates, it has more than a whiff of subjectivity or selectivity about it; reenactments are undertaken, the form’s detractors might argue, when there is no “enactment,” no authentic actuality footage to be had. The resurgence in interest in reenactment in films as diverse as The Battle of Orgreave (Jeremy Deller, 2001), Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2005), The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010), Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012), and The Jinx (Andrew Jarecki, 2015) suggests, however, that reenactments are far more than prosaic, literal reconstructions of otherwise inaccessible events not captured on camera. Whereas historically, reenactments often presented a clear differentiation between past and present, more recently, reenactment has been mobilized to interrogate, even reformulate a troubled past with its unreconciled future(s), to destabilize the very notion of closure or resolution and go beyond the simple dialectics of pitting a past against a present. Reenactments in documentary can achieve many things: they can plug narrative gaps; they can be used to embellish or add texture and nuance to personal accounts (for example, in the form of interviews) or archival footage which might otherwise appear dry or incomplete; they can, as in The Thin Blue Line, offer alternative, even contradictory versions of the same memories or events; they can simply take the form of restaging events (as in living history historical reenactment).