The truth of reenactments: reliving, reconstructing, and contesting history in documentaries on genocide

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to renegotiate the relationship between reenactment, truth, history, and the archive in documentaries on genocide. It moves away from the common binaries surrounding the supposed creativity and fictionality of reenactments as opposed to the evidentiary and static archive, and instead reads reenactments as facilitating access to truth. Through four case studies of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Laurence Rees’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005), Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013), and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), it contends that reenactments in documentaries on genocide problematize the associations of an image’s supposed indexical link to a past event with truth. Instead, reenactments confront us with the constructed nature of historical narrative and enable us to see affective, factual, and ethical truths of the past unavailable through the archive.

KEYWORDS:

• Reenactment
• documentary
• truth
• archive
• genocide
• historical narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a highly instructive discussion of the use of reenactments in very early films (including war films) which is distinct from the more recent use of reenactments discussed here, not least because the former were dominantly considered fakes by contemporaries, see (Slugan 2019, 87–139, esp. 105–114).

2 The influence of Lanzmann on Panh is discussed by Cazenave and acknowledged by Panh himself (Cazenave 2018, 54; Panh and Bataille 2011, 76). Oppenheimer also discusses Lanzmann (Lusztig and Oppenheimer 2013).

3 The reenacted scenes, however, are not clearly labeled or visually distinct from the non-reenacted ones. Thus, one might arguably also speak of fakes, although the circumstances that are reenacted can hardly be considered historically untruthful.

4 There is, however, footage believed to be of early gas chamber experiments (with exhaust gas) on Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, which is shown in Auschwitz.

5 One somewhat uncalled for dramatic device at the end of the third episode of Auschwitz is the introduction of Josef Mengele to Höß (and the audience) in Bond-like fashion: ‘Mengele, Josef Mengele’.

6 Storeide erroneously believes the reenactments are black and white and therefore hard to distinguish from archival footage (2012). For a contrary opinion, apart from my own, see Kerner (2011, 183).

7 There is a small exception after the interview with the perpetrator Hans Friedrich, when we see actors representing perpetrators lining up for a mass execution, followed by a close-up of a bolt-action rifle being loaded, and then a camera-shot and dampened sound of cartridges falling down. Yet, neither the act of shooting nor even the sound of a shot is reenacted.

8 Thus, I do not fully agree with Barnes that the juxtaposition between Panh’s reenactments and state propaganda ‘effectively subvert[s] the relationship between the authentic and the fabricated, claiming a genuineness for the clay figurines and clips of feature films from the 1960s that is denied the Khmer Rouge,’ insofar as there is little that is ‘authentic’ about the propaganda to begin with (2016, 203).

9 My paraphrase of the spoken French in the film: ‘on comprends les Khmers rouges en observant leurs images,’ ‘Pol Pot forges une réalité conformant à son désir,’ ‘elle [la révolution] existe que comme image.’

10 Yael Hersonski’s documentary A Film Unfinished achieves very similar effects as Panh without the use of reenactments by having survivors watch and testify against the stagings of Nazi propaganda footage of the Warsaw ghetto for which Nazis had forced Jews to perform supposed scenes from daily life in the ghetto (Hersonski 2010).

11 It should be noted that the Indonesian co-director and crew members chose to remain anonymous over fears of negative repercussions in Indonesia for their involvement in a film that undermines official government narratives.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme: [Grant Number 101025897].

Notes on contributors

Julian Johannes Immanuel Koch

Julian Johannes Immanuel Koch is a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies. His project examines the representation of perpetration and perpetrators in documentaries on genocide. His previous research focused on the poetics of the image in the twentieth-century German-Jewish poet Paul Celan and French-Jewish poet André du Bouchet. He has also published on philosophies of the imagination and the image.