One More Time: Reenactment in Contemporary Latin American Documentary Cinema

Abstract

Originally elaborated within the discipline of performance studies, reenactment has recently been adopted by filmmakers as a documentary and aesthetic strategy for tracing genealogies of conflict. Suspending documentary’s commitment to the indexical image, reenactments introduce a performative element by re-staging past events for the camera. By abandoning the document in favour of embodied memory, reenactments engage the relation between performance and history. This article addresses a series of theoretical and historiographic questions posed by the increasing popularity of reenactment: just what are reenactments? When and why do filmmakers draw on performance rather than archival documents or indexical images, what might account for the resurgence of reenactment in recent years, and how has it affected the tensions between documentary subjectivity and collectivity that have marked Latin American documentary in the twenty-first century?