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Documentary Re-enactments A Paradoxical Temporality That Is Not One Bill Nichols “Could you do the kiss again?” Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroitor, 1962) Re-enactments, the more or less authentic recreation of prior events, provided a staple element of documentary representation until they were slain by the “verité boys” of the 1960s (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 script, rehearsal or direction, 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 did happen as a result of recording what happens when people are filmed. Observational temporality possessed the flat, onedimensionality of real time divorced from its past, but it gloried in the complex dynamics of interactions whose future was unknown at the moment of filming. Times have changed. Re-enactments once again play a vital role in documentary, be it of a Solidarity movement that cannot be filmed in Far from Poland (Jill Godmilow, 1984), a murder for which radically disparate accounts exist in The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988), the schematic simulation of a harrowing escape from captivity in Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1998), or events during the final days of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, Obstinate Memory (Patrizio Guzmán, 1999). Apart from the occasional controversy, such as that surrounding the use of re-enactments that cannot be distinguished from actual footage of the historical event—a turn that shifts the debate from strategies of representation to questions of deceit—re-enactments are once again taken for granted. They pose, however, a number of fascinating questions about the experience of temporality and the presence of fantasy in documentary. These are the issues this essay explores. Re-enactments occupy a strange status; it is crucial that they be recognized as a representation of a prior event, while also signaling Miller 4:Whats minta 1 9/3/08 4:51 PM Page 171 that they are not the representation of a contemporaneous event. They stand for something, but are not identical to what they stand for. This is akin to the status of play compared to fighting, at least in the formulation provided by Gregory Bateson in his essay on “A Theory of Play and Fantasy”: “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.”1 The controversy surrounding the 2004 Academy Award short documentary winner, Mighty Times: The Children’s March (Robert Houston, 2004), involved charges that re-enactments blended imperceptibly with authentic footage of civil rights activity in the South in the 1960s, as did archival footage of other events, such as the Watts Riot in Los Angeles. Viewers must recognize a reenactment as such, if issues of deception are to be avoided, and if the re-enactment is to function effectively, even if this recognition also dooms the re-enactment to its status as a repetition of something that already occurred, elsewhere, at another time and place. Unlike the contemporaneous representation of an event—the classic documentary image, where an indexical link between image and historical occurrence can be claimed—the re-enactment forfeits its indexical bond to the original event and yet, paradoxically, it draws its phantasmatic power from this very fact. The shift in level prompts awareness of an impossible task: to retrieve a lost object in its original form even as the very act of retrieval generates a new object and a new pleasure. The viewer experiences the uncanny sense of a repetition of what remains historically unique. A specter haunts the text. What constitutes a lost object is as various as all the objects toward which desire may flow. The working through of loss need not entail mourning: it can also, via what we might call the phantasmatic project , evidence gratification, or pleasure, of a highly distinct kind. Documentary film generally entails a performative effort to register what is or will immediately become past in a mise-en-scène produced by a desire to retrieve, re-experience, master or enjoy. Re-enactments double this performative dimension by hinging themselves on the viewer’s awareness that what is represented, represents what has already occurred. As a collective activity, fantasy—from the folie à deux to documentary film—functions as ideology.2 It provides the psychic foundation for...

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