In Person

Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema

Ivone Margulies

Speaks to the activist nature of reenactment documentary filmmaking
Looks at decades of film history, from postwar to contemporary cinema
Relates neorealism and cinema verité to this type of documentary film

In Person

Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema

Ivone Margulies

Description

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 verité 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.

In Person

Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema

Ivone Margulies

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
Para-juridical Scenarios and the confessional imperative
An Internal Chorus: Files and Faces

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

In Person

Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema

Ivone Margulies

Author Information

Ivone Margulies is a Professor in the Department of Film & Media at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her previous publications include Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday and the edited volume Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema.

In Person

Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema

Ivone Margulies

Reviews and Awards

"This book is a stunning accomplishment." -- W.W. Dixon, CHOICE

"As the first full-length treatment of in-person reenactment as a cinematic genre, In Person, with its astonishing scope and robust yet focused bibliography, will serve as an indispensable resource for scholars wishing to take up its spark." -- Katie Kirkland, The Drama Review

"The book is a remarkable feat; it maintains exceptional rigor, precision, and theoretical astuteness while also leaving room for the central concept to adapt to varying sociohistorical contexts. Like the works that it examines, wrestles with, and unlocks, In Person demands careful attention; it should not be rushed through." -- Katie Model, Hunter College, Film Quarterly

"a crucial addition to the field ... Deftly argued and intricately constructed" -- Leo Goldsmith, Cineaste

"Inventive, incisive, subtle. An essential book for understanding what is at stake when a person replays her own past on camera. At that fertile place where aesthetics and history meet, Margulies offers us an exceptionally relevant analysis of post-Holocaust cinema." --Sylvie Lindeperg, Professor, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

"Margulies demonstrates just how complex this question is with richly interdisciplinary research, an amazing range of examples, and an astounding number of insights. This book is destined to be a classic." --Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary, 3rd edition

"This most necessary book will serve as the foundation for any future study of the cinematic mode of reenactment. Margulies moves artfully among the discourses of realist cinema and documentary, theater and performance studies, genre theory, contemporary philosophy and therapeutic practice with a globe-spanning analysis of the existential quandaries to which this fascinating style of filmmaking gives rise." --Jonathan Kahana, author of Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary and editor of The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism

"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." --Lynn Higgins, Dartmouth College