Reenacting Events

A controversial aspect of the documentary is its ability to conjecture. You do this on a minor scale when you ask questions, expose contradictions, or juxtapose opposites in order to make the audience find answers to the tension you have created. Conjecture on a larger scale often means reconstructing bygone situations. Perhaps some vital episode in your subject’s life happened before you began filming—a crucial career interview, say, for a job that your reformed criminal main character has already begun. The company decided to take a chance and hire him, and this has changed his life. For him the encounter was pivotal, so you need to represent it in the film. Your participants are ready and willing to reenact the scene, but can you—should you—film it? Will your audience need to know it’s a reconstruction? If so, how do you let them know? To pass the scene off as the real thing would be highly misleading. You would rightly be accused of faking, and this could seriously damage your credibility—even your career. Some films run a “Scene reenacted” subtitle, but this seems like overkill if narration or voice-over makes this clear in spirit by using a distancing past tense.

In The New York Times (http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/|play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part-one/), Errol Morris writes in fascinating detail about the way he used reenactment to scrutinize witness testimony in The Thin Blue Line (1980, United States). He includes telling comment on the misuse of reenactment as well as archive footage. There is, for instance, only one set of shots showing Jews being put on a train to the death camps, yet the same footage is used for any film (including one of my own) for deportations in any part of Europe. Those familiar with a period’s archives are distressed to see footage transposed in time and place to serve a multitude of historical narratives. Today, cropping or altering images is only a mouse-click away and offers a seductive solution for problems of narrative or missing coverage. If this is done in plain sight to serve the spirit of the truth, it may not be a problem. But whenever the audience is deceived into accepting what it sees as reliable evidence, then it can only be called deception. For a full exploration of the problems, read Morris’ article and the train of correspondence it evoked.

The dividing line is one of good faith; there is nothing controversial about showing that a participant got caught shoplifting, if factually this is what happened. But if he maintains that the store police entrapped him, it matters very much whether we see the actual arrest or a reenactment. Several people’s integrity is up for judgment.

Truthful Labeling

In Amsterdam, some talented film students in the 1990s made an explosive documentary. It showed dropout kids playing a deadly game where they lay their arms between the wheels of railroad wagons. As the engine started in the distance, they would wait as long as possible while the clink – clink – clink of the couplings got nearer before jumping clear. The film culminates with a horrific hospital scene in which the smallest boy has lost both arms. Lodewijk Crijns’ Kutzooi (1995, Netherlands; Figure 20-1) turned out to have been wholly and masterfully fabricated—indeed, not a documentary at all, but a mockumentary. Like those with whom I saw it (mostly documentary teachers), I was irate with the film for bamboozling us, as I think any audience would be, ¹ for we had trusted what it seemed to be—recorded actuality.

FIGURE 20-1 The youngest boy after losing both arms in the mockumentary Kutzooi (frame from film).

The point is that when someone swaps the labels we feel manipulated—indeed, Otto Schuurman showed the film to make this very point. Ironically, we would have praised it to the sky had the makers shown it as a Ken Loach type of fiction film drawn, as it truly was, from Dutch working class life.

Using Actors

Some documentaries recreate biographical material using actors, or even create someone representative but imaginary. Historical biographies routinely use actors when no archive footage exists of their subject, but this is still an acceptable way to explore history if it is identifiable as such. Eric Stange, himself a producer of history films, wrote:

Such material can stimulate the audience’s imagination or fill significant gaps in the narrative. It can also, as the rest of the article suggests, rapidly become money-saving clichés. See any episode of the PBS series Secrets of the Dead (2001 – 2008, United States) for plentiful examples. The producers deserve plaudits for tackling so many fascinating riddles of history, but their visual material is often stretched perilously thin.

Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line (1988, United States) uses reenactment to show six different versions of the shooting of a Texas traffic cop, each based on a witness’s account in the trial. Part of the film’s purposes is to show just how unreliable witnesses’ memories are and to prove—as it does conclusively—that not one of their accounts was accurate.

Wholesale Reconstruction

When reconstruction involves several scenes or even a whole film, the sources on which their veracity rests can be eyewitness memories, documents, transcripts, photographs, or hearsay. Large-scale reconstruction that draws on several sources must carefully identify what it’s using or risk alienating its audience. British television once showed an acted reconstruction directed by Stuart Hood of the trial of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Adapted from court transcripts of the famous 1920s trial, it proved intelligent, restrained, and austerely memorable. Actors portraying the accused, the lawyers, and the judge used only the words and ideas preserved in court records. This made it trustworthy and undoubtedly documentary in spirit.

Usually included with the documentary genre is Peter Watkins’ Culloden (1964, United Kingdom)—a beginning-to-end reconstruction of a 1746 battle in the Scottish Highlands. It shows how feudally Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army was raised and how cruelly the British crushed his Jacobite cause. Apart from the costumes, tactics, and location, there’s little other pretense of historical accuracy, since what the officers and foot soldiers say in Watkins’ “interviews” are a modernist guess at what they might have expressed at the time. The film nevertheless conveys respect for the distant historical actuality and much empathy for its unlucky participants. Yes, it deals with politics and the abuse of power, but its deepest sympathies lie with the humble folk so easily made into cannon fodder during the ideological and turf struggles of their masters. Those currently fighting on both sides in Iraq and Afghanistan would understand its message perfectly.

The Docudrama

There is a yet more imaginative—some would say fanciful—use of the real, known as docudrama or dramadoc, a hybrid straddling two genres that is most common in Britain. Two notable examples must suffice; one successful and one not. Jeremy Sandford’s Cathy Come Home (1966, United Kingdom) dramatized the plight of Britain’s homelessness at a time when it was new and shocking. Working from case histories, Sandford and his wife, Nell Dunne, constructed a “typical” blue-collar couple that overspend, encounter bad luck, and plunge down the social scale until the welfare state dismembers the family “for the good of the children.”

Coming on the heels of the seductive Conservative reelection slogan, “You never had it so good,” the British public was appalled to discover that the drama was true to life in all its particulars. Cathy’s effectiveness lay in its superb acting and documentary presentation; the furor it aroused effected a change in the law—rare for a film of any kind.

Anthony Thomas’ Death of a Princess (1980, United Kingdom) set out to show how a Saudi princess had been publicly humiliated and executed for a sexual offense. It raised a storm of critical reaction on all sides, though less for using actors and reconstruction than for taking liberties. One was with the truth, which was insufficiently determinable. Another was with the portrayal of Islamic culture and assumptions, both plainly outside the producers’ realm of sympathy or expertise. Linking the film’s inquiry, and further undercutting it, was a romanticized journalist figure serving as a proxy for its director and his journey of investigation. Though Thomas had undoubtedly researched among weird and dubious characters, transmuting his own role into that of a suave, James Bond-ish investigator gave the film an irritatingly self-involved central character and left Death of a Princess seeming contrived. Apparently more concerned with entertainment values, it was docudrama having too much drama and not enough doc.

Subjective Reconstruction

Someone recounting how he found an unexploded bomb in a plowed field as a boy might return as an elderly man to reenact, in the same place, how he found it. You could half bury a bomb casing for him to find and shoot his actions as he remembers them, laying his voice over the actions. The audience would be in no doubt that the sequence represents memory, not actuality. Alternatively, he could talk to the camera as he relives the actions of finding the bomb. There are fertile possibilities for these techniques, especially when memory is unclear and a person has to run through several possibilities to find the most likely. Plainly you are exploring not only what happened but also the instability of human memory itself, as Alain Resnais did on a massive scale in his baroque fiction Last Year in Marienbad (1961, France).

Documentary may be the better tool for investigating the psychology of memory. Lars Johansson’s Traveller’s Tale (1994, Denmark) accomplishes this masterfully: An old man during the middle of the twenty-first century looks back on the material he shot when the walls of Communism fell in Central Europe and outsiders could visit. The film is a meditation on the past showing the virtually medieval world that Johansson himself had captured on such a journey, guided by three different women he encountered along the way.

Occasionally a complete reconstruction is notable for persuading us to accept the authenticity of its central subject. A lovely BBC biographical documentary is Chris Durlacher’s George Orwell: A Life in Pictures (2003, United Kingdom). It happens that no voice recordings or archive footage exist of Orwell, so the producers used an actor, Chris Langham, to create a facsimile. Looking like Orwell, he speaks words culled from Orwell’s letters, diaries, novels, and essays. Drawing plentifully on period archive footage, the film intercuts “interviews” in which Langham plays Orwell with interviews by people who knew him. The effect is eerily authentic, for it gives you the feeling that you are traveling on a rigorous personal retrospective with the great anti-authoritarian author. Mixed in, and not at all intrusive, is a library of home movie footage created in authentic places—again with Langham. The effect is a sustained, imaginative portrait that one trusts throughout, even though strictly speaking much of its material is faked.

The authority on docudrama, and tireless champion of its merits, is the distinguished political filmmaker and documentary historian Alan Rosenthal. His Why Docudrama? Fact – Fiction on Film and TV (1999, Southern Illinois Press) is a comprehensive survey of docudrama’s history and possibilities.

Fake Documentaries or Mockumentaries

Mitchell Block’s renowned short film about a female rape victim, No Lies (1973, United States; Figure 20-2), shows how dangerous documentary can become in amoral hands. The pressure we see the director apply to the victim is disturbing, yet we go along because the revelations he pries from his subject are fascinating. Then the film turns on its heel to confront the audience with the fact that both are actors, and the exploitative relationship a calculated performance. The film was made, apparently, to “cinematically… demonstrate and commit rape—and it does so in such a way as to make the experience of being the unwary, unprepared victim of an aggressive assault on one’s person, on one’s pride, and on one’s expectations of and security in familiar activity in familiar surroundings a very real experience accessible to anyone of either sex who views the film.” ² The film rubs our noses in the way we voyeuristically enjoyed the fruit of exploitation.

FIGURE 20-2 The documentary process as violation in No Lies. (Photo courtesy of Mitchell Block.)

Ken Featherstone’s Babakiueria (1987, Australia) works differently. It reports how Aboriginal colonists discovered Australia back when the country was thinly peopled by primitive whites ritually cooking flesh in places called barbecue areas (hence, the film’s title). A nervously compliant white family tries to cooperate with the black colonizers’ social workers who have decided to split the family up for their own good. By inverting Australian racial values and farcically inverting white treatment of blacks, the film pushes home what it must feel like to have liberal paternalism forced on you by another race.

In Larry Charles’ Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006, United States), the inimitable Sacha Baron Cohen travels around America making people think he is an outrageously crass Kazakh journalist. Made from improvised situations based on a journey framework, this Candid Camera offshoot rejoices in springing practical jokes on the unwary. Borat’s aim is to be murderously funny—and this it is, in scenes that sometimes defy belief. It’s not a documentary, but it uses documentary methods to capture many spontaneous encounters catalyzed by a highly skilled comedian. If it levels any critique, it is that some Americans are alarmingly credulous. As a caveat, see Wikipedia® on resulting lawsuits.

Some Questions to Ask

When considering the reconstruction of an action or scene:

• What are you really trying to get across to the audience?
• Is there any way you can avoid reconstruction—say, by making your point through narration?
• What makes a reconstruction valid or invalid from the audience’s point of view?
• Are you implying that what you show is typical or that it is particular and pivotal? (Typical is probably okay, but reconstructing a pivotal moment could backfire.)
• Are you using the original participants or actors playing them? How will the audience know?
• What do the participants feel about reenacting something bygone?
• How should you cover the scene to avoid injecting histrionics?

When considering docudrama:

• What is the film’s premise and why does it need to be a docudrama?
• Why not make a fiction film avowedly based on real events?
• How will you justify “faking it” to the audience?
• What additional values will you put in play to justify taking so much control?

When considering mockumentary:

• Is the target of your satire (if that’s what it is) some practice, custom, event, etc., or is it documentary itself?
• If you are lampooning documentary (which can always use some house cleaning), are you sure you have enough knowledge, ideas, and material to work with?
• How can your piece develop? (Many ideas for this form are one liners and not adequate for an extended piece.)
• What is your purpose, if you mean to deceive your audience and then undeceive them? If your audience perceives your underlying purpose as constructive, it will probably applaud. But, if you mean to mock their trust, then you are attacking the very foundations of audience participation and had better have a compelling reason to do so.