TOPIC 3: RE-ENACTMENT IN CONTEMPORARY DOCUMENTARY
Professor Stella Bruzzi
Masaryk University Brno, April 27—May 1, 2015 visit

Brian Winston
•‘The problem of “sincerity” aside, “reconstruction” is anyway no straightforward threat to
documentary value … From the point of view of authenticity and ethics not all reconstruction can be
considered suspect. It sits in a continuum from complete non-interventionist surveillance through
to totally fictional set ups. (Winston The Documentary Film Book (BFI 2013, p. 8)
•

Touching the Void (Kevin MacDonald, 2004)
•


Errol Morris
•‘Truth isn’t guaranteed by style or expression. Truth isn’t guaranteed by anything’.


Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2006)



Paul Arthur ‘The Horror’, Artforum International 46:8, (2008), p. 112.
•‘ [Standard Operating Procedure] belongs to a film genre that provides titillation through horror.
To employ this rhetoric in a documentary about actual horror is obscene, yielding familiar
aesthetic thrills as a substitute for specificity of meaning’

Errol Morris
•Re-enactment is not so much a visual activity, as it a conscious activity. It is the process
through which we imagine and re-imagine the world around us. The important thing to remember is
that everything we consciously experience is a re-enactment. Consciousness, itself, is a
re-enactment of reality inside our heads (‘Play it Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part Two)’, Morris,
2008b).

The Act of Killing (2011)



Nick Fraser
•‘Of course murderers, flattered in their impunity, will behave vilely. Of course they will
reliably supply enlightened folk with a degraded vision of humanity. But sorry, I don’t think we
want to be doing this. It feels wrong and it certainly looks wrong to me’ • ‘The Act of Killing:
Don’t Give an Oscar to this Snuff Movie’, The Guardian, 23 February 2014.

The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010)



Alecky Blythe
• ‘… once actors have memorised their lines, they stop listening to how they were actually spoken
in the first place … it’s an actor’s instinct to perform: to heighten, to try and make their lines
more “interesting” (Blythe 2008: 81)

Dreams of a Life (Carol Morley, 20110