Documentary Cinema and the Return of What Was

Abstract

In the long tradition of documentary cinema, it can be stated that the resources available to documentarians of historical memory are archival images, interviews with witnesses, and reenactments. A complex, contradictory, deceptive field: to explore memory in cinema is to come in constant contact with dangers that include the temptation to try to resee the past just as it was, the risk of considering the archive to be exhaustive evidence of the past, or the tendency to confuse memory with recollection (Niney, 2002: 250). In this article, I propose to discuss the process of reenactment in documentary films as a practice, and as a way to bring tension to the present and historical images. A method that, in film, brings a sense of engagement and immersion that documents, history books, and images alone do not permit. The repetition of situations, gestures, places, and bodies appears as a procedure capable of demonstrating the idea that the sense given to an event does not simply depend on recognizing the event, but also on strategies of representation or the way in which these strategies are directed at the viewer; that is, the way in which the subject is approached by the film.

During my visit to Phnom Penh and the Cambodian interior for Libération, I could catch a glimpse what genocide looks like, even self-genocide, which leaves no image and is almost without a trace. The proof that film is no longer intimately tied to the history of man, not even its inhuman side: in an ironic contrast to the Nazi torturers who filmed their victims, the Khmer Rouge had only left their photographs and the common graves.

—Serge Daney