In 2005, at one of the early academic conferences on reenactment, I invoked R. G. Collingwood’s notion of history as reenactment to frame a paper about Roberto Rossellini’s Roma citta aperta (1945), a film now generally credited with inaugurating the cinematic movement known as Italian neorealism.
Part of my point in that paper was that Rossellini’s invention of a new cinematic mode deployed tactics of historical reenactment (of events in Rome in the final days of the war) that aimed to create a certain kind of relationship between the spectator and the screen.
Looking at a chain of events toward the end of the film, I argued that this relationship should be defined in affective terms as a certain capacity to suffer. Manfredi, a leader of the resistance, is arrested and tortured by the Nazis. The sympathetic priest Don Pietro is made to sit in a chair and witness this act of torture, which he does with open eyes. Both characters were based on figures in the Italian resistance. Don Pietro is soon placed in another chair and shot in an open field by a firing squad. The camera shows us a row of young boys who, in their turn, witness this travesty, taking in the execution of the suffering witness of another’s suffering. In the famous closing shot of the film, the children head off as a group toward the open city to become the citizenry of the future, interpellating the film’s viewers, I suggested, as newly fashioned neorealist spectators in the new order of things.In this chapter, I return to Collingwood to think further about history and cinema, reenactment and affect. Here, however, the emphasis falls more specifically on “affective knowing,” in keeping with the topic of the Cambridge conference for which I first drafted it, described by its organizers as addressing “the conceptual structure of the historical modes of understanding based in affective experience.”1 My case study this time is Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006), a cinematic restaging of the events of September 11 that, so I argue, shows a remarkably self-conscious interest in the conjunction of historical reenactment, cinematic spectacle, and affective knowing. It is true that cinematic reenactment is a special case among historical reenactments generally, one that, by comparison with live performance, raises special questions about the role of the spectator in reenactments. These are issues that I attend to here. It is also true that cinematic history and reenactment
DOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-3 practices have had many points of contact over the decades, from the early period that Tom Gunning calls “the cinema of attractions” through D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915; made at “Epoch Producing Co.”) into Italian neorealism and beyond (Gunning, 2006). Here, my argument about United 93 will be that reenactment techniques are in fact crucial to some of Greengrass’s most impressive effects, but that, precisely because of the variety and rigor of its engagement with these techniques, the film reveals both the powers and the limits of reenactment practice for affective knowing in the motion picture medium as it is currently constituted.