Raising Questions of Evidence
Inevitably, reenactment raises questions about historical evidence (Chandler et al., 1993). With reenactment’s strong claims to authentic and verisimilar renderings of the past, evidence often appears to be an unassailable category.
Yet some reenactment deals with a missing foundational text, a reenactment for which the enactment itself remains hazy. In this instance, reenactment can be said to retroactively generate a corpus of “affective evidence” about the contested and painful past (Pickering, 2020), a corpus that substitutes for evidence that may have been deliberately elided or always absent from the historical record. Reenactment conducted by the very people affected by traumatic events can thus help plug gaps in the official record. At the same time, it obviates the necessity of using filmic and other sources possibly produced by the perpetrators of violence. In this, Pugliese’s work, like that of cultural producers dealing with historiographically neglected cataclysms such as the Armenian genocide, follows a filmmaking practice employed by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah (1985). Rather than drawing on Nazi propaganda images for his documentary, Lanzmann had perpetrators, victims, and bystanders restage deportations, selections, and other mechanics of the Holocaust. This rendering into the present of past events puts the viewer into the apparent position of contemporaneous witness and adjudicator (Agnew and Konuk, 2020). In such forms of reenactment, historical evidence is not invoked in order to build an interrogable case about the past: such evidence may be irretrievable or altogether absent. Rather, the reenactment serves to fabricate evidence. And, as Bertolt Brecht envisioned for his epic theater, this ability to see events unfolding in simulated real time is accompanied by a moral as well as political imperative to act on behalf of the marginalized, impoverished, and wronged.Christian Vium’s ethnographic work with Caixana in Sao Sebastiao, Brazil, involving the reenactment of colonial photographs demonstrates how reenactment exemplifies this nexus between evidence and agency.
The imperative to act, and, as a Western anthropologist, to act in a specifically self-reflexive way, is challenged by the local people’s reinterpretation of the nature of historical evidence, raising questions about who is entitled to use this evidence and for what ends. The self-representation of the Caixana via the medium of photographic reenactments is, in Vium’s reading, not an intergenerational autobiographical gesture of the kind evinced by other contributions to this volume, nor yet is it principally an act of reclamation vis-a-vis the colonial past. Rather, reenacting is used to help constitute the longue duree of indigenous identity, which itself is made evidentiary within a broader political contest over land rights.If this speaks to national and supranational concerns, for Dorota Sosnowska, the Polish specificity of reenactment serves as a glocal corrective to what could be construed as a transnational form of historical representational practice. Focusing on two contrastive examples, Robert Kusmirowski’s Traumgutstrasse, about the Nazi bombing of Warsaw, and Forensic Architecture’s investigation into a 2014 Israeli bombing of Gaza, Rafah: Black Friday, Sosnowska argues that material reconstruction based on fragmentary evidence (rekonstrukcja) highlights the non-recuperability of the past and raises questions about the nature of historical evidence itself. In the case of Forensic Architecture, physical evidence, reconstructed through open-source information-gathering and spatial modeling, provides an apparently incontrovertible account of past events which seems to obviate the need for witness testimony. Such claims to objectivity have been called into question on account of their ex post facto dependence on modeling and the downplaying of victim agency (Agnew, 2020, 2022b). As Sosnowska suggests, elided from such an apparently seamless reconstruction is the possibility of a speculative and polyvocal account of the past. Kusmirowski’s artistic work, in contradistinction to that of Forensic Architecture, makes no such claims to authenticity or comprehensiveness.
Its fluid play with evidence leaves space for the viewer’s experience and imagination that may, in the end, be more effective at recuperating what Sosnowska refers to as “that which is dead, lost, violently excluded from view.”Reenactment, then, should allow the inexplicable to be interpreted and the past to be fittingly grieved. Such feats of understanding and mourning are not contingent on reenactment’s fulfilling a rigorous promise of comprehensiveness, reliability, or actual fidelity to past events; rather, it is the interrogatability and explanatory power of reenactment’s account that permits any subsequent reckoning. The pivotal events of 9/11 bequeathed such an interpretive and commemorative debt to the present, and it is this that is addressed in James Chandler’s contribution on Paul Greengrass’s United 93, a film that drew on the 9/11 Commission Report (2004) as its foundational text for reconstructing events and that enlisted historical agents, including air traffic controllers, flight crew, and military personnel, to restage their own actions. Both the film’s autobiographical gestures and its use of rigorous evidence would suggest a faithful account of events that redound to historical understanding. Yet, as Chandler argues in his nuanced reading of the film, United 93 makes claims to affective knowledge that exceed its own possibilities. Citing Greengrass (2006), Chandler points out that the film’s various forms of reenactment—witnessed, imagined, scripted, improvised—are intended to provide an “eye-level” “walk-through” of 9/11. The real-time responses of the actors, whether professional or lay, are meant to convey to audiences just what the events of that day “must have felt like” to those on board the fated plane as well as to those on the ground. As Chandler argues in relation to this Rankian type of claim, the dominant sentiment here is one of bafflement in the face of unprecedented and apparently inexplicable events. The film’s claim to affective knowledge thus emerges as a conundrum, he suggests, for it is predicated on a mode that hinges on familiarity even as it stages unfamiliarity and that foregrounds historical unintelligibility while making claims to understanding. As the long echo of 9/11 continues to reverberate with the West’s precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan and that country’s devolution into extremism, we would appear to be entering a new structure of the conjuncture (Sahlins, 1985, p. xiv, cited in Chandler), with historical frameworks being invoked for the interpretation of unintelligible events. It remains an open question as to whether reenactment will be adequate to the task of providing explanations that do more than simply allow us to reexperience our own sense of “collective mystification” (Chandler) and create a space for mourning that does not reflexively reproduce past injustices.