Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject

Abstract

Reenactments, the more or less authentic re-creation of prior events, provided a staple element of documentary representation until they were slain by the “verite boys” of the 1960s (Robert Drew, Ricky Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, David and Albert Maysles, Fred Wiseman, and others), who proclaimed everything except what took place in front of the camera without rehearsal or prompting to be a fabrication, inauthentic. Observational or direct cinema generated an honest record of what would have happened had the camera not been there or what does happen as a result of the camera recording people who know they are being filmed. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North might be admired for the evidence it provides of Flaherty’s patience, exquisite eye, and apparent lack of preconceptions, but his entire salvage anthropology model of coaxing Allakariallak to do what “Nanook” would have done some thirty years earlier, without motorized vehicles, rifles, canned food, wood-frame homes, or filmmakers along for the ride, amounted to one colossal, unacknowledged reenactment and, therefore, fraud. Times have changed. Reenactments once again play a vital role in documentary, be they of the Solidarity movement that cannot be filmed in Far from Poland or of a murder for which radically disparate accounts exist in The Thin Blue Line, the schematic simulation of a harrowing escape in Little Dieter Needs to Fly or of events during the final days of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, Obstinate Memory. Apart from the occasional charges of deceit that surround the use of reenactments indistinguishable from actual footage of an historical event, reenactments are