ABSTRACT
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. The reenactment’s relationship to documentary is complex. 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. 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”. Documentary reenactments reconstitute the past to ensure that it is not forgotten, but also to ensure that it is underst.
