Just a couple of days into the Toronto International Film Festival this year, a curious commonality was noticeable in a number of the documentaries that I screened - re-enactments. While I only managed to see just under half of the nearly 50 documentary features in the TIFF line-up, it was surprising to see the storytelling approach — where significant past events are recreated via actors and, sometimes, animation — relatively widely employed. While some notable non-fiction films have made effective use of the practice — such as The Imposter or The Thin Blue Line — re-enactments more often feel in line with television productions of the Unsolved Mysteries variety. They remain a controversial element of documentary making, potentially challenging a film's authenticity by introducing an outside, fictional element.
It's significant that the practice of re-enactment is the singular focus of one of the festival's most-discussed docs, The Act of Killing, making this challenging film an appropriate place to begin. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, together with Christine Cynn and other anonymous co-directors, turn Indonesian gangsters into would-be Hollywood stars. The former death-squad leaders, responsible for the massacre of more than a million undesirables in 1965-1966, gleefully go along with Oppenheimer's unusual plan, re-enacting the techniques they used to torture and murder suspected Communists, from off-the-cuff demonstrations of the cleanest way to strangle a victim to more elaborate set pieces involving interrogations and the destruction of a village.
Verisimilitude is not the intent here. Although these over-the-top re-enactments push the limits of documentary ethics, they also shed light on the outsized personalities of the main subjects and reveal their histories and character. This conflation of a horrific reality with stylized fantasy also challenges the viewer and the perpetrators and becomes an unexpected form of therapy for the latter group.
More literal examples of re-enactments are present in Alex Gibney's Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, the prolific Oscar-winner's exploration of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Focused around a Milwaukee priest who abused countless boys at the deaf school he ran, the film features the American Sign Language testimony of a number of men, spoken aloud by the likes of Ethan Hawke and John Slattery, but not distractingly so.
Despite the forcefulness of the now-grown victims' anger, expressed via their demonstrative signing and reinforced by the actors' delivery (itself a form of re-enactment), Gibney decides to go one step further, recreating key sequences from their stories: silent scenes in which the priest prowls through the dorms ready to pounce on a sleeping young boy, or abuses the sanctity of the confessional booth. These sequences lack in subtlety and while they don't undermine the strength of the film as a whole, they seem entirely superfluous. [Editor's Note: Gibney talks about his reasons for using these re-enactment sequences in an upcoming Movieline interview.]
Even more conventional is the use of re-enactments in Janet Tobias' No Place On Earth, the story of Ukrainian Jews who spent nearly a year and half living, literally, in caves to avoid capture during World War II. The majority of the film consists of actors portraying the circumstances of their flight from persecution and the conditions of their underground existence. Still-living survivors offer commentary in intermittent talking-head sequences, but the intended weight of the film is in the re-enactments which at times break from simply illustrating the story to feature actual scripted sequences. In the process, No Place on Earth ventures a step too far into docudrama. Given that the film is a production of the History Channel, it will likely connect with TV viewers, but, personally, scenes with the survivors re-visiting their cave sanctuary late in the film carried far more emotional resonance than the recreations.
An unusual employment of re-enactment comes in Oscar-nominee Liz Garbus' latest film, Love, Marilyn, based on the contents of Marilyn Monroe's recently-discovered diaries and letters. Garbus turned to well-known actors, including Marisa Tomei and Glenn Close, to bring a new archive of the late actress' personal writings and other documents about her to life. Thankfully, Marilyn's contemporaries don't attempt to embody the bombshell. Furthermore, the actors are depicted in a very stylized, deliberate manner. While the result can sometimes be a bit bizarre — a dramatic reading of Marilyn's turkey recipe, for example — the approach in no way calls into question the authenticity of the source material. Instead, it helps to illuminate otherwise non-visual written work.
Increasingly, documentary filmmakers have used animation to solve some of the problems posed by re-enactments, notably, for instance, in the Oscar-nominated Waltz with Bashir. Clearly exaggerated, animation can supplement storytelling without being charged with inauthenticity. At TIFF, Marc Wiese's Camp 14: Total Control Zone, about a North Korean man who spent the first 20 years of his life in a labor camp; and Paul Saltzman's The Last White Knight, a profile of a KKK member who once assaulted the director in 1965, make significant use of animation to add visual depth to largely interview-driven projects. Weise is able to recreate the labor camp, emphasizing its hopelessness through a drab color palette, and providing the audience with a palpable sense of a location that would otherwise be unrepresentable. Animation in Saltzman's film is used more sparingly, bringing to life telling episodes of danger faced by civil rights organizers in the segregated South.
In other cases, TIFF docs made use of re-enactments in smaller ways. Shola Lynch's Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, an in-depth look at Angela Davis' time as an accused terrorist, is blessed with a remarkable treasure trove of powerful archival footage due to the worldwide attention that her case generated.For this reason, it's a head-scratcher why Lynch decided to include the few brief scenes of re-enactments that appear in the film. One, in particular, represents an amorous tryst between Davis and one of the Soledad Brothers, Black Panther George Jackson. It's not even appropriate to call it gratuitous, as it's presented in a fractured, non-prurient manner, but it adds virtually nothing to the film.
Jamie Kastner's The Secret Disco Revolution, a potentially interesting look at disco's role in the liberation of blacks, gays and women frequently cuts from archival footage to present animated vignettes of an imagined conspiracy of masterminds who were responsible for disco's rise to prominence. It's an initially cute idea that loses more and more steam each time it's trotted out.
Basil Tsiokos is a documentary features programming associate for Sundance, a programmer for DOC NYC, and a consultant to documentary filmmakers and festivals. He writes on docs daily at his blog what (not) to doc.
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