Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog

6. Reenactments

181 6 REENACTMENTS Lately, the practice of reenactment has made a certain comeback in documentary filmmaking. By reenactment, I mean the staged reconstruction of a past event, which creates a new and necessarily different event in the present. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1984) and Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1987) offer only the most well-known examples. Although on one level, their projects are incomparable, both films were taken to signal the resurgence of documentary as a form of historical representation and understanding, owing in part to their innovative and contentious approaches to reenactment.1 Once widely accepted, as evidenced by such canonical films as Nanook of the North (1922; dir. Robert Flaherty), Misère au Borinage (1934; dir. Joris Ivens and Henri Storck), Night Mail (1936; dir. Harry Watt and Basil Wright), and Native Land (1942; dir. Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand), each of which employs a different type of reenactment, the practice lost much of its appeal and cultural authority with the advent of observational cinema and the latter’s definitive claim to capture “life as it is.”2 Since then, many of the filmmakers who have challenged that claim—Lanzmann and Morris, among others, including Herzog—have occasionally done so by reimagining the practice of reenactment as a means of stylization, an approach to historical reconstruction , and indeed, a way of knowing. Its epistemological instability, its many uses and returns as a device that seems to be constantly falling in and out of favor, have established reenactment as a major perennial issue in documentary theory. Within this particular arena, however, the discussion has too often been framed in narrow and mostly ahistorical terms. What we need, going forward, are broader and more open perspectives. Many commentators imagine reenactment in terms of verisimilitude, an aesthetic 182 REENACTMENTS category closely associated with realism. At stake in this discussion, however, is a rather different issue: that of documentary’s “indexical” character. According to Bill Nichols, “documentaries run some risk of credibility in reenacting an event: the special indexical bond between image and historical event is ruptured. In a reenactment, the bond is still between the image and something that occurred in front of the camera but what occurred for the camera. It has the status of an imaginary event, however tightly based on historical fact.”3 This observation itself is based on certain assumptions that need to be made more explicit. First, Nichols assumes that actors serve to represent others (as opposed to historical participants representing themselves). The use of actors in documentary is a common enough phenomenon, especially for the purpose of portraying events that took place before film cameras were invented, or more recent situations in which camera access has been denied, and for evaluating the nature of conflicting evidence.4 Under these circumstances, the choice of reenactment is not surprising (it may even be expected), and the use of actors is simply understood. Second, Nichols puts emphasis on the documentary image and assumes that its indexical relationship to the historical world is necessarily compromised by the staging of actors before the camera. Issues of recorded sound (as in speech and oral testimony), which can also be framed in terms of indexicality, and typically involve a temporal delay of one kind or another, are not considered. Finally, Nichols would seem to assume that historical reconstruction should represent an event exactly as it occurred, as though this were theoretically possible. Each of these assumptions remains open to debate and needs to be explored in specific situations. Ivone Margulies has done just that in a recent essay on reenactment films such as Close-Up (1990; dir. Abbas Kiarostami)—a film, incidentally, much admired by Herzog—and Sons (1996; dir. Zhang Yuan), where historical subjects themselves reenact certain events from their own lives. Even in such cases, she argues, reenactment obtains its evidentiary force not in terms of verisimilitude but rather by means of a performance that takes place for the camera. Under these conditions, “reenactment radically refocuses the issue of indexicality. The corroborating value of reenactment does depend on our knowledge that these particular feet walked these particular steps,” she writes. “But it is the intentional and fictional REENACTMENTS 183 retracing that enacted lends to these faces and places an authenticating aura. This aura, the indexical value of reenactment, is present but at a remove.”5 The upshot, instead of likeness, is a performance that is...