Introduction: What Now? Presenting Reenactment

Abstract

Introduction:What Now? Presenting Reenactment Jonathan Kahana (bio) 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 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 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 [End Page 46] 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 Midwife'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 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 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 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 déjà 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...

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