Estrangement and Exemplarity

This introductory chapter starts with a brief analysis of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990) and the way in which reenactment serves as an ethical instrument for adjudicating motives and agency. It defines the import of in-person reenactment as a confessional-performative cinema genre distinct from other forms of dramatic reconstruction and historical or biographical illustration using actors or social actors. The notion of in-person reenactment, a mode of making public one’s past on camera so as to provide an exemplary narrative on film, is introduced as a motor of self-revision in cinema, a mode that parallels major cinematic movements of postwar realism.