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In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema delineates a new performative genre based on replay and self-awareness. The book argues that in-person reenactment, an actual person reenacting her past on camera, departs radically from other modes of mimetic reconstruction. In Person theorizes this figure's protean temporality and revisionist capabilities and it considers its import in terms of social representativity and exemplarity. Close readings of select, historicized examples define an alternate, confessional-performative vein to understand the self-reflexive nature of postwar and post-holocaust testimonial cinemas. The book contextualizes Zavattini's proposal that in neorealism everyone should act his own story in a sort of anti-individualist, public display (Love in the City and We the Women). It checks the convergence between verit� experiments, a heightened self-critique in France and the reception of psychodrama in France (Chronicle of a summer and The Human Pyramid) in the late fifties. And, through Bazin, it reflects on the quandaries of celebrity biopics: how the circularity of the star's iconography is checked by her corporeal limits (Sophia her Own Story and the docudrama Torero ). In Person traces a shift from the exemplary and transformative ethos of fifties reenactment towards the un-redemptive stance of contemporary reenactment films such as Lanzmann's Shoah, Zhang Yuan's Sons, Andrea Tonacci's Hills of Chaos. It defines continuities between verite testimony (Chronicle, and Moi un Noir) and later para-juridical films such as the Karski Report and Rithy Panh's S21, the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine suggesting the power of co-presence and in person actualization for an ethics of viewership.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction- Estrangement and Exemplarity: In Person Reenactment
- Exemplarity
- Stages of Actualization
- In Person the book
- Chapter 1 Casting Relatives: The Spectrum of Substitution
- Orson Welles' Four Men in a Raft (It's All True)
- Endurance : Kinship and the Exceptional Body
- Reenacting Heredity: Sons
- Chapter 2 Neorealist Reenactment as postwar Pedagogy
- Zavattini's "Last Judgment" Cinema
- The Story of Caterina
- Footprints: Streetwalkers and Maggiorani's Back
- Attempted Suicides: Antonioni's Singularities
- Star Anonymous: Donatella Marrosu, Anna Magnani
- Chapter 3 Celebrity Reenactment, Biopic and the Mortal Body
- Her Own Story
- Bazin's Cinemythographies
- Cinema's Existential Arena
- Torero Replicants
- Mexican ciné-verdad, Carlos Velo, Hugo Butler, Zavattini
- Chapter 4 A Sort of Psychodrama: Verité Moments 58-61
- Role-play: the Real in Balance
- Provisional Closure: Reflexivity and Death in The Human Pyramid
- Chronicle of a summer (1960-1) as Autocritique (1958)
- A "Nascent" register: Group Dynamics and the Worker
- Chapter 5 Ascetic Stages: Reenactment in post-holocaust cinema
- Pedovision: ritual, wandering words
- Marceline Loridan, Testimony with (out) an "I"
- Splitting: Oumarou Ganda's Solo
- Karski's Report of a report
- Filming and Re-filming: Phatic reenactment
- Ascetic Stages, next
- Chapter 6 Trial Stages: Rithy Panh's Para-juridical theatre
- Solo Routines: the Critical valence of Alienation
- Paintings, desks, files and faces: Reflexive Platforms
- S21's Judicial context
- An Internal Chorus: Files and Faces
- Para-juridical Scenarios and the confessional imperative
- Chapter 7 Reenactment and A-filiation in Serras da Desordem
- When is Carapiru?
- Twenty Years Later: Brazilian films on "first" and on recurrent contact
- Leading to Serras
- The Actor as Agent: Carapiru, Pereio, Tonacci
- A-Filiation
- Disrupted Transmission
- Conclusion- Senseless Mimesis
- Select Bibliography
About the author
Ivone Margulies is Professor in the Department of Film & Media at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
Summary
In Person looks at the ways that documentary film is affected when people are cast to reenact their own stories on screen.
Additional text
Margulies book makes a timely and original argument for the Humanities by offering a new assessment of the powers and responsibilities of the arts. It will be essential reading in many fields of inquiry beyond its obvious relevance to film studies: Holocaust studies, genre studies, theater, anthropology, and each of the many national cinema traditions and individual filmmakers considered.
