ABSTRACT
From Flaherty onward, documentary and reconstruction were inseparable. Today, you might film how a boy found an unexploded bomb in a ploughed field by having him return as an elderly man to the very spot where he found it. You might even half-bury a bomb casing and shoot his actions as he remembers them, laying his voice over the actions. Importantly, there’s no ambivalence because the audience knows from its viewing history that the scene is an imaginative reenactment and intended to dramatize the ambiguities of human memory. Especially when a person must run through several versions in search of the most likely, such techniques can be fertile. You are exploring what happened but also the instability of human recall. Alain Resnais did this long ago in his baroque fictional epic, Last Year in Marienbad (France, 1961).
