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Abstract
While the re-enactment is a form of historical representation that has not received the serious critical attention it deserves, it continues to be a pervasive form of historical representation in film and television. It plays a key role in a number of genres (most notably the documentary, the docudrama, and the biopic) and frequently appears in less expected locations (including video installations, remakes and police procedural television). While re-enactments pre-date cinema, it is cinema—and the technically reproducible image more generally—that has played a crucial role in the development of the re-enactment as both a form of historical representation and a genre. This thesis explores the pervasiveness of the re-enactment in film and other screen based media, tracking its evolution, its mobility and its adaptability in a range of genres and institutional contexts.
This thesis argues that in all its diverse manifestations, the re-enactment is always caught between two agendas. On the one hand it sets out to take things literally, to repeat things as they happened, and on the other seeks to foreground itself as a re-enactment, which requires that it self-reflexively foregrounds its theatrical, performative nature. Focussing on the tension between these two agendas, this thesis builds a ‘back history’ for the re-enactment and pursues its dispersal into areas where its persistence has not typically been acknowledged.
Because re-enactments perform pre-existing events, the issue of reference is paramount. To date, however, the questions that the re-enactment poses for reference have been overlooked in film and television debates. This thesis addresses this theoretical void by engaging critically with film theory debates that examine the relationship between technical reproducibility, time and reference. It argues that the re-enactment cannot be understood outside of its mediation and its relation to time, identifying transformations in the re-enactment that continue to take place as a result of its incorporation in different forms of technical media. It examines the functions of theatricality, temporality and indexicality in the re-enactment, investigating how these have developed in relation to shifts in the conceptualisation of the referential dimensions of the technically reproducible image.
This argument is developed through readings of an eclectic array of film, television and video examples. These include early film re-enactments; the storming of the Winter Palace sequence in October (Sergei Eisenstein,1927); the biopics Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008), Control (Anton Corbijn, 2007), Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003) and Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999); television drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000- ); Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998); Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993); and the uses to which the video of police assaulting Rodney King were put in the court case California v. Powell, Koon, Wind and Briseno (1992).