Yr 3 Reenactment 2016 Week 1: The War Game

What do I mean by re-enactment? To enact To re-enact Re-enactment’s place in documentary

What is a documentary? John Grierson in the 1930s famously called it ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ What do we think this means? What are the connotations of this? What is the documentary’s relationship to its source material? It’s assumed to be INDEXICAL But it’s possible to argue that all documentaries are re-enactments of sorts – a replaying of a truth that happened at another time/is still to happen (in case of War Game).

Different kinds of re-enactment: Salesman (Maysles Bros, 1968)

What’s going on in the clip? What’s spontaneous? What’s re-enacted? Does the presence of re-enactment undermine this film’s documentary status? Bill Nichols (Zurich) has called the re-enactment in documentary ‘the impossible attempt to repeat the unique’  i.e. a substitute for an unrepeatable action, that is more authentic. But is the unique action more real?

Re-enactment and this module One of the things I want you all to do through this module is to view the POSITIVES of re-enactment, to see what it says about the notion of an authentic truth – is truth ever stable, solid? Or is it relative? Can re-enactment therefore reveal as well as camouflage the truth? Is selection always distorting? As Bill Nichols counsels, ‘reenactments are clearly a view rather than the view from which the past yields up its truth’ (Nichols 2008: 79) – but is even the original truth only A TRUTH is what re-enactments ask.

What sorts of re-enactment are we looking at? Today’s is a PRE-ENACTMENT (Nichols’ term) A hypothetical enactment of something that could happen in the future but is being imagined an example of what Winston would call the ‘conditional documentary’: ‘fact-based hypothet situs shot in established doc style using actors could yield documentaries about situations yet to happen’ (Winston Intro to The Doc Film Book, 25).

Open your module outlines One thing all re-enactments do is to bring historical or future actions into the PRESENT – to imbue the lost subject with PRESENTNESS Being there. Always ask yourselves what the effect of this is; what’s its value.

Peter Watkins

Cont.

Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins