Pierre Huyghe ends his short film The Third Memory (FR, 2000) with a clip of television footage from August 22, 1972. The shaky recording from a handheld camera shows John Wojtowicz pointing and yelling at a crowded street of police, bystanders, and media corps. A slight young man in a white T-shirt, Wojtowicz paces on a sidewalk in front of a bank while screaming, Put those guns down, put those fucking guns down! His impassioned commands mingle with the sound of droning helicopters and other voices yelling, Get back . . . alright, put 'em down, put 'em down. In the preceding nine minutes, Wojtowicz, this time wearing a suit, reenacts the events of August 22, 1972, when he attempted to rob a Chase Manhattan Bank in Brooklyn, New York. Now twenty-eight years older with silver hair and a portly build, Wojtowicz directs extras to play out the events from his past. A composed Wojtowicz supplements his directions with retrospective commentary while also playing himself as historical bank robber. These two representations of the same event diverge in numerous ways-in performance, dialogue, mise-en-scene, and cinematography-and even while the authenticating body of Wojtowicz connects the two, it also evinces the twenty-eight-year gap between them. As the young man disarming the police and the older man directing extras, Wojtowicz asserts his command by staging the unfolding events, and selfconscious performance marks both his sidewalk protestations and direction of extras. In these related yet distinct pieces of footage, Wojtowicz's identity bridges significant temporal and spatial gaps between his two performances, and these gaps reveal a key dynamic at work in reenactments: a dialectic of connection and difference between the reenactment and the preceding event to which it refers.1 This possibility for difference sparks the creative and critical ways artists put to use the reenactment. The prevalence of reenactments in contemporary art practice has steadily increased in recent years. While rooted in histories of artistic appropriation and performance, the artistic reenactment has emerged as a key cultural form of the twenty-first century, a phenomenon traced in numerous thematic exhibitions (and related publications) over the past few years: most notably, Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art at Witte de With, Rotterdam (2005); Once More . . . With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture at Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland, UK (2005); and History Will Repeat Itself, a collaboration between the German organizations Hartware MedienKunst Verein and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2007).2 For the most part, artists deploy the reenactment for two common critical purposes: to rewrite history by offering a forum for other viewpoints traditionally kept outside the grand and to deconstruct the images and accounts that have composed these narratives.3 These aims- allied with revisionist and deconstructive readings occurring in every discipline- are central to what Robert Blackson, the curator of Once More . . . With Feeling, calls the reenactment's emancipatory agency.4 By offering a means of expression to a formerly oppressed person, reenactments can help him or her to recover agency through the generation of new narratives and representations that potentially eclipse formerly dominant ones, or, in other words, to assert difference.5 Blackson argues that this liberating trait distinguishes the reenactment from kin of simulation, reproduction, and repetition and is what draws both practitioners and audiences to it again and again.6 From this perspective, we might ask: from what did the reenactment in The Third Memory liberate Wojtowicz? In between Wojtowicz's 1972 robbery and its reenactment in 2000, Sidney Lumet directed the popular Hollywood film Dog Day Afternoon (US, 1975), based on the original robbery, with Al Pacino starring as Sonny Worzik, the character based on Wojtowicz. …