Ascetic Stages

This chapter investigates the relationship between the spare, concentrated theatricality aesthetics favored by post-Holocaust cinema and the imperatives of modern and contemporary testimonial reenactment in posttraumatic situations. It examines the convergence between cinema, the courtroom, and in-person reenactment in Rouch, Morin, and Lanzmann’s cinema, discussing how the viewer is implicated in these post-verité reenactments (Williams, Nichols). The chapter looks in particular to the monologue reenactment as a privileged form of testimonial in situations evoking atrocities (Ganda’s monologue in Moi un Noir, Marceline’s in Chronicle of a Summer, and Karski’s in The Karski’s Report). It relates these films’ conflation of past and present to other revisitations of empty sites in Night and Fog and testimony films such as Time of the Ghetto (Rossif, 1961) as well as Loridan Iven’s La petite prairie aux bouleaux. And it discusses the repetitive movements of Lanzmann’s touching camera as a form of phatic reenactment.