9 DOCUMENTARY

Stella Bruzzi

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 ofErrol 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).

The reenactment's relationship to documentary is complex. If, as was argued in New Documentary (Bruzzi, 2006), all documentaries are performative acts, a shifting triangulated negotiation between filmmakers, text, and audiences underpinned by the acceptance that the only “truth” captured on documentary film is the performance in front of the camera, then it is also possible to see ah documentaries as enactments—as representations and repetitions of actions that occurred in the past. This relationship between act and enactment is a foundational block of all documentaries. However divergent documentary films are from each other, they all present the difference between act and enactment; what changes is the level of performative display of this foundational difference (performance and Performativity). The term reenactment presupposes the existence of a prior enactment, and so is the filmic articulation of temporal displacement; but is not documentary always, in some sense, a reenactment, as Paula Rabinowitz articulates, “a graphing of history, in and through the cinematic image and taped sound, onto the present” (1993, pp. 119—120)? This looser conceptualization of reenactment might be exemplified by a sequence such as Michael Peterson’s dynamic account of his dead wife's final evening in the first episode of Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s The Staircase (2004), in which, pursued by a handheld camera, Peterson follows Kathleen’s path from the family pool to the house moments before he discovered her near death at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

(It ought to be noted that although Peterson here and elsewhere in the series protests his innocence, the original trial found him guilty of Kathleen’s murder.) This is not a classic reenactment in that it lacks dramatization, but the interviewee’s active “walking through” of actions she/he is describing for the camera offers a compelling example of the therapeutic, emotive value of documentary reenactment. Useful to think of enactments and reenactments as points along a continuum, as constituent parts of the documentary process, reenactments are so attractive to the documentary filmmaker because, in spite of their demonstrable detachment from the original “acts” they dramatize, they bring remote past actions and events to life and into the present. A restaging, even of a manifestly completed action, thereby unfolds filmically in the present tense; it is being enacted now.This active presentness characterizes all reenactments.

The documentary reenactment is only relatively rarely a straightforward re-telling, a literal dramatized iteration of a historical event; more frequently it offers a re-opening, a re-visiting or a re-interrogation of an event. This critical dimension is one of reenactment’s most compelling features, a status directly attributable to Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker who elevated reenactment to an altogether different plane. Reenactments, he believes, “burrow underneath the surface of reality in an attempt to uncover some hidden truth” (Morris, 2008a); they are not just about looking again, but offer the opportunity to discover, unravel, and re-examine anew (evidence; production of historical meaning). At first glance, it may seem that Morris’s preoccupation with unearthing “what really happened” is at odds with the film noir-ish style of his reenactments, from the infamous slow-motion chocolate milkshake flying through the air in The Thin Blue Line to the controversial dramatizations of torture in Abu Ghraib in Standard Operating Procedure (2008).

And yet in his oeuvre he has deployed dramatization as an investigative tool to express the unreliability of memory, which, as articulated in one of his New York Times blogs, he conceives of being “an elastic affair” (2008a). “We remember selectively,” Morris continues, “just as we perceive selectively.” Reenactments are the documentary’s ultimate tussle with the past.

Three recent British documentaries illustrate, in different ways, this characterization of reenactment as a site of struggle with the past: Jeremy Deller’s and Mike Figgis’s The Battle of Orgreave, Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, and Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life (2011). Turner Prizewinner Jeremy Deller restaged a “living history” site-specific performance of the pivotal and violent clash at the coke plant at Orgreave, South Yorkshire, on 18 June 1984, at the height of the 1984—1985 Miner’s Strike. The Battle of Orgreave was Deller’s site-specific reenactment of 16—17 June 2001, now only accessible via Mike Figgis’s Channel 4 documentary, which added a significant amount of material (principally interviews and archive footage) to the original reenactment. As the overarching documentary makes clear, Deller’s choice to restage the

Documentary

clashes at Orgreave between some 6,000 picketers and 8,000 police signaled a decision to use reenactment not to restage benignly a potently symbolic historical episode but to reopen a barely healed wound. The reenactment of Orgreave is inherently political, as well as being an audacious, entertaining work of art; it pulls together diverse groups of people—former miners (veterans of the pickets of 1984—1985), emergency services personnel present on that day, local residents, and members of more than 20 historical reenactment societies—and its effects are charged and complex. Deller's motivation for putting all these groups together was to remind his audiences “that history didn't end in 1945” (quoted in Slyce, 2003, p. 76). The past and the present are not distinct domains here; reenactments position the two in perpetual, frequently violent, dialogue.

The performance of 2001 was a simulation; but although it was putatively not a refight, tied to the fear that it might get out of hand (at one point, one of the ex-miners involved in the reenactment threatens, “Fuck the £60! We're going for it!”) there was a collective awareness that this was a painful and pivotal turning point in history which should not be forgotten. During the course of the documentary Deller warns that reenactment is not therapy, that “it's going to take more than an art project to heal wounds.” For Deller, reenactment, as he states directly to camera, was about “confronting something” (memory and commemoration).

The Battle of Orgreave took place as close as possible to the site of the original “battle.” Although no blue plaque marks its spot and the plant itself is now buried under a new housing estate, the backdrops in the 2001 documentary are still identifiable today. Site-specificity lends a peculiarly symbolic resonance to reenactments; it brings us—the observer or viewer— into the historical events, not so we embody them, but so that they gain emotive resonance. Concomitantly, the multiple restagings in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, of the Kennedy assassination in The Eternal Frame (Ant Farm and T. R. Uthco, 1975) or the actual 9/11 air traffic controllers reprising their roles in the Newark airport control tower of the events of the day of the terrorist attacks for Paul Greengrass's United 93 (2006), bring the supposedly closed events of the past into the/our present, so the relationship to history becomes fluid and dynamic. Site-specific reenactment is the ultimate reliving of an event; it embodies presentness at the same time as it practices historical scrutiny. Clio Barnard returns to the Buttershaw Estate, Bradford, where playwright Andrea Dunbar grew up, for The Arbor, a documentary that interlaces layers of reenactment in a kaleidoscopic frenzy of“presents” that bring to life Dunbar's life and her work. Many reen-act- ments prioritize acting as a means of breathing life into the past; in the case of The Arbor, there are two specific uses of professional actors: to lip-sync, as stated at the outset of Barnard's film, to the voices of the interviewees, and to perform extracts from Dunbar's autobiographical plays on the green at the heart of the Buttershaw Estate.

The Arbor is thereby both closely aligned to the past it reenacts and intent on signaling its divergence from it. The faultless, seamless lip-syncing of the faceless interviewees' words function as a metaphor for the present's embodiment of the past, while the minimal staging and actorly performances of scenes from the stage play The Arbor in front of current estate residents more clearly enact the collision between past and present.

The Arbor opens with Dunbar's daughters, Lorraine and Lisa, offering conflicting accounts of shared childhood memory: a fire in their bedroom. The girls could not escape because Dunbar, asleep in her bed, had locked them in, and as the actors lip-sync to the daughters' words as they struggle to remember how the fire started, flames build up around them. In this surreal collage, levels of truth and reenactment dislodge each other like a series of restless tectonic plates, all nevertheless treated as components of the same contiguous physical space. Throughout, the fluid interweaving of various narrative strata carries us through the film's dialectical tensions. To return to site-specificity, there is a moment when the actor playing the brother in The Arbor is dragged, still in role, by a policeman across the green and behind the (different) actor who has

been lip-syncing Dunbar's real brother David's words. The uninterrupted flow from one brother to another, from one reenactment domain to another, irons out dialectical differences. By eliding the differences between fact and fiction, action and enactment, Barnard constructs a radical form of reenactment.

Dreams of a Life offers a moving example of another form of reenactment—as the hypothetical representation of an irretrievable, unknown past. Joyce Vincent died in her North London bedsit in 2003, her body only discovered three years later. Alongside dramatized reconstructions of versions of what interviewees have told her ofVincent's childhood and earlier life, Carol Morley places reenactments of her subject's entirely mysterious final hours. With their absence of dialogue, these haunting sequences concretize, give image-life to pure speculation. When they entered Vincent's flat, local council staff found a body in such a bad state of decomposition that it could only be identified by comparing dental records to a holiday photograph found in her flat. There was no body, were no clues. The elliptical, mute reenactments ofVincent's last moments can only be hypotheses, and they expose the limitations as well as the emotive potency of reenactments. Vincent is shown drinking milk directly from a carton, possibly to relieve the pain of her stomach ulcer; she is depicted wrapping Christmas presents, but we do not know for whom. For all their empathic catharsis, Morley's dreamy reenactments cannot get at the cause of death; they skirt round the issue, as the mystery that motivated Dreams of a Life remains unsolved.

Documentary reenactments provide the thread that makes sense of a fragmented narrative; they reveal truth(s), but lack the “lookalikeness,” the indexical bond “between the photographic image and the object in the real world to which the image refers” (Gaines, 1999, p. 5). However, reenactments should not merely be characterized as lack. A useful framework is offered by Freud's 1914 essay “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” with its invitation to understand the similarities and differences between the repetition or acting out of a memory and its fully therapeutic “working through.” Documentary reenactments reconstitute the past to ensure that it is not forgotten, but also to ensure that it is understood. Freud pondered whether or not the “compulsion to repeat... replaces the impulsion to remember” (150); reenactment at its best works as well as walks through the histories it airs.

9 DOCUMENTARY

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